One of the most repeated words in the New Testament – Love One Another, Part 1

Editor’s Note: This week we welcome David Hundert as guest blogger!

The television show, Ted Lasso, is about an American football coach attempting to coach an English soccer team. Lasso often brings his unique style to the locker room, and in one episode it seems he borrowed from a famous Allen Iverson press conference that happened in real life. As you watch the clip, Iverson and Lasso seem to be hung up on a word. See if you can figure it out.

Have you ever had a conversation with someone and they keep repeating a word or a phrase? Why do they do that? Have you ever heard or even used the expression, “If I told you once, I told you a thousand times…” Why do we repeat ourselves like that? It’s because there was something to say that was important and we want the person we’re talking to, to remember it. As pastors and teachers, we may repeat the point of a sermon or a lesson because it’s important, and we want to drive that point home.

The same goes for Scripture. When you’re reading a passage, and you see that a point is repeated, or there is a word that is used multiple times in the passage, you have to ask yourself, “Why is that? What is the point that the Lord is trying to make here?”

In this week’s five-part blog series, there is a word that I want to focus on. This word or one of it’s iterations are used 100 times in the New Testament alone, and it’s used in 94 verses! Do you think that the Lord might be trying to tell us something? It is the Greek word allelon, and it is pronounced “Ah Lay Lon.” In the Greek, it is only one word, but in English, it is predominately translated into two words, “One Another.”

Are you a statistic-loving, numbers person? You might appreciate the stats on this word. This is by no means an authoritative list, but it is just my attempt to categorize how the New Testament writers use this word. After reviewing all 94 verses and 100 uses of allelon, 27 of them referred to conversations people had with, “one another.” 40 of them dealt with how we need to relate to “one another.” 12 of them really didn’t fit in one category or another. For instance, 2 were mentioned in John’s book of Revelation, so they were in the middle of a prophecy, but there was one usage of the phrase that stuck out to me. There was one use that could have been put in the category of how to relate to one another, but 21 times Scripture tells us to treat each other the same way: “love one another.”

In those 21 verses, fourteen times that Scripture uses the word “love,” it means to “cherish; have affection for.” Five times, it refers to “esteem; affection; or regard for.” Twice it refers to the love of a brother and sister.

“Cherish, have affection for, esteem, regard for, have the love of a brother for a sister…,” how does one accomplish such a monumental task? Especially in consideration of all the stuff we read in the news today. There are kids robbing and killing adults. There are kids walking into stores and walking out with thousands of dollars worth of merchandise that they haven’t paid for. There are parents killing their own children. There are people spewing hate for others based on their race, on their religion, their birthplace, the color of their skin or their politics. What in the world has gone wrong? What is going on today? Most importantly, how do we fix it?

Those that grew up in earlier generations probably have heard that the three things that you don’t discuss around the dinner table were politics, money and religion. However if you look around at the majority of violence in the world today, it comes back to money, religion and politics! What our parents didn’t teach us was how to have a difficult discussion about difficult topics!

So, what do we, as the Church of Christ do with this? We’ll talk about that in the next post.

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How to grow your relationship with the Holy Spirit – Ezekiel 37:1-14, Part 5

How can we be filled with the Spirit like the Christians in the early church, which we studied in the previous post. In those days, what was happening was precisely what the Apostle Paul described in 1 Corinthians chapters 3 and 6, “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God?” 

This is very much in line with what Paul would later write in Ephesians 5:18, “Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit.” What this verse suggests is that just as alcohol in the bloodstream can lead to a person losing control of their faculties, and therefore we should not get drunk, we should, however, allow ourselves to be filled with, and be under the control of, the Holy Spirit. 

Paul explains this further in Galatians 5, a passage that I refer to very frequently, the fruit of the Spirit.  Verses 16-25 are where Paul gives a mini-teaching on what a disciple of Jesus will look like when they are filled with the Spirit.  In Galatians 5, he calls the filling by a number of other actions: live by the Spirit, be led by the Spirit, have the fruit of the Spirit, and keep in step with the Spirit.

Romans chapter 8 is another excellent place to study the work of the Spirit.  Consider just a few verses. Paul writes, “You, however, are controlled not by the sinful nature but by the Spirit, if the Spirit of God lives in you. And if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Christ. But if Christ is in you, your body is dead because of sin, yet your spirit is alive because of righteousness.  And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit, who lives in you.”  When the Spirit is in us, filling us, it shows by our behavior.  The good things of the Spirit cannot help but flow out of our lives.

All of these passages, and there are many more, help us understand that when become true disciples of Jesus, our dry bones come to life, and God’s Spirit lives in us, and he changes us to think, speak and live in line with the way of Jesus.

What this means is that Christians are people in whom God the Spirit has made his home.  In this theology, frankly, the charismatic and Pentecostal streams of the church can teach us much.  I am from the Word stream of the church, and by that I mean that I focus on the Bible and on Jesus.  Not bad things to focus on.  The Bible is vastly important to study.  There is also nothing wrong, in my view, with praying to God the Father, and believing that we have a close friendship with Jesus.  But clearly, because God the Spirit lives with us and has made his home with us, it is of vast importance that we deepen our relationship with the Spirit.  

With that in mind, consider this amazing prayer in Ephesians 3:16-19.  “I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.” 

In that prayer all three persons of the Trinity are mentioned, Father, Son and Spirit; all three depicted as making their home within us, empowering us to so deeply know the love of God that we are filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.  Do you see yourself that way?  You should.  That is what it means to be filled with the Spirit.  That doesn’t mean we need to speak in tongues, or ever will.  Some might, and that’s okay.  Paul wrote a very specific guide for speaking in tongues in 1 Corinthians 14.  It seems instead that there is something much more important at stake here, the critically important dynamic of the Holy Spirit living in us and empowering us to live like God wants us to live.

As Paul insinuates, and as the early church experienced, the filling of the Spirit is not permanent.  We, by our choices and actions, our thoughts and words, can experience a significantly reduced relationship with the Spirit.  In Ephesians 4:30 Paul talked about grieving the Spirit right in the middle of a section about unity and about how we talk and interact with people.  Paul says in verse 29, “Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen,” and the very next thing he says is, “Do not grieve the Spirit.”  The implication is clear, if you have a pattern of being negative, critical, and discouraging, you are grieving the Spirit.  Instead you should be focusing on building the other up.  Likewise in 1 Thessalonians 5:19, he wrote, “Do not put out the Spirit’s fire.” 

So if you look at your life and think, “I don’t know that I feel the Spirit living in me,” I recommend that you do a thorough and deep examination of your life.  If you look at your life, and you do not see much of the Fruit of the Spirit flowing from you, it is highly likely that you have made choices to grieve the Spirit, to put out the Spirit’s fire, by rebellion, by being divisive, discouraging, and by many other sins.  This is precisely what Israel was dealing with in Ezekiel’s day.  Of course they were like dry bones, people without God’s Spirit, because they were so rebellious. 

What will you do, then, to grow your relationship with the Spirit?  First, do what Peter said in his sermon in Acts 2, repent and be baptized, and receive the Spirit anew.  Do what the Apostles did in Acts 4, pray a bold prayer requiring God to work.  Make time to get to know the Spirit, listen for the Spirit’s leading and voice.

The valley of dry bones is an amazing vision of the hope that we have in God’s love, grace and forgiveness.  That, though we can struggle with sin, with feeling dead inside and disconnected with God, there is hope.  God wants to us experience that hope through the deep inner life of his Spirit.   

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The filling of the Spirit – Ezekiel 37:1-14, Part 4

Nearly 600 years after the time of Ezekiel, Jesus taught his disciples about the soon-coming Spirit of God.  In John 14, after telling his disciples that he was going to leave them, he promised that God would send another counselor to be with them, the Spirit of truth.  Jesus said in John 14:17 that though the world would not accept, see, or know the Spirit, the disciples would know the Spirit because the Spirit lives with them and will be in them.  The Spirit would remind the disciples of Jesus’ teachings.  Jesus went so far as to say that it was better for the disciples that he left them.  To that I think, “No way Jesus.  I wish you were still here.”  But upon further examination, Jesus’ is right.  Because Jesus left, the Spirit will come, and that is better because it means that the Spirit would live with all Christians.  The Spirit would make it possible for God to live in every person who gives their heart and life to him, which is just what Ezekiel prophesied through the Vision of the Valley of Dry Bones. 

We know when that outpouring of the Spirit happened. If you read chapter 2 in the book of Acts in the New Testament, the Holy Spirit shows up in a rushing wind, just as Jesus said he would.  The Spirit filled the Christians and empowered them to speak in other languages, a miraculous gift they used to preach the Gospel to the crowds of people in Jerusalem for the Jewish Pentecost feast.

On that day, the Apostle Peter stood up among the people and he invoked the words of another prophet, named Joel, through whom God previously said, “I will pour out my Spirit on all people.”  Peter said that Jesus was the Messiah who was the fulfillment of God’s promises to Israel, to be the savior, and the confirmation of that fulfilled promise is the fact that the Holy Spirit was being poured out right that very day.  Thus, Peter continued, the people should repent and be baptized in the name of Jesus the Messiah, for the forgiveness of their sins, and they too will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.  Three thousand people did so that very day!  The dry bones coming to life that Ezekiel had prophesied about 600 years before was coming true before their eyes. 

There you have it, the famous story of the beginning of the Church.  The Spirit was unleashed and on the move. What we can forget is that the same Spirit of God is still at work bringing the dead to life today.  When we think about that day of Pentecost when the Spirit first arrived, it is not as though the Spirit arrived once and then faded into the background. The Spirit was alive and well and active.  In fact, you don’t have to look much further in the book of Acts to see what I mean.

Turn to Acts chapter 4 verse 23.  We don’t know how much time passed between Acts 2 and Acts 4.  Maybe a couple months.  In Acts 4, Peter and John have been thrown in jail for healing a man and preaching the Gospel.  But they were released by the religious authorities who couldn’t decide what to do with the disciples.  Look at verse 23, and we read that after the disciples are released, they go back to the Christians and report what happened.  There is a spontaneous prayer time in which the Christians, unphased by the persecution Peter and John had just endured, pray one of the most exciting prayers in the Bible in verses 29-30, “Now, Lord, consider their threats and enable your servants to speak your word with great boldness. Stretch out your hand to heal and perform miraculous signs and wonders through the name of your holy servant Jesus.”

And how does God answer that request?  We read in the very next verse, “After they prayed, the place where they were meeting was shaken. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God boldly”!!!  How about that?  The Spirit arrives again!  The Spirit fills them anew for ministry.  And more and more people experienced their own dry bones coming to life.

Has that happened in your life? Check back to the next post as we’ll talk about how to experience the Holy Spirit today.

Photo by Marek Piwnicki on Unsplash

The meaning of the vision of the valley of dry bones – Ezekiel 37:1-14, Part 3

What does Ezekiel’s Vision of the Valley of Dry Bones mean?  God explains it to Ezekiel in Ezekiel 37, verses 11-14.

How about that?  The entire vision is symbolic.  Ezekiel wasn’t at the scene of battle from years earlier.  The vision of the valley of dry bones, God says, symbolizes the people of Israel, who had long since died to God.  Yes, some people of Israel had lost their lives when the Assyrians and Babylonians invaded their land.  But God, through this vision, is addressing the spiritual condition of the people.  He says that the Israelites were at that very moment crying out to God because they were feeling dead inside.  They express their feelings of hopelessness, of being cut off. 

Maybe you know the feeling.  That’s what the prophecy means when it describes dry bones.  People can feel like life is hopeless, like they have no means for changing their situation, and they feel cut off from God.  That’s what the people of Israel felt like, and that’s what so many people feel like today.  Of course, Israel, as we have seen in many chapters in the past, including last week in chapter 36, got into their situation of being cut off from God and feeling dead because of their own choices to rebel against God.  And God has regularly called them out for that. 

But here in chapter 37:1-14, the vision is only about restoration.  God is not avoiding talking about their sin.  Instead he is choosing to focus this vision on renewal.  He says that he will not only give them a new life through the work of his Spirit, but he will bring them back to the land of Israel.  This is an important concept to note because after the Assyrians and Babylonians decimated the land, they also exiled the people.  Like Ezekiel, many of the Israelites had been carted off to and had been living for years in foreign lands.  God now promises to not only deal with their spiritual death, but also to give them once again a physical home. 

Then, he says, they will know that he is the Lord.  There it is, the key phrase of the book of Ezekiel.  God wants to be known by his people.  Please don’t read that phrase and let your eyes glaze over or your mind to get distracted.  I know that we have heard this phrase too many times to count in our study of Ezekiel.  But God repeats it so many times because it is a concept that is very important to him.  He wants to be known. 

Do you really know him?  Do you really have a close relationship with him?  Or do you feel dead inside and disconnected like the people of Israel?   God wants to breathe new life into you! What can you do to experience that new life from God?

First, return again to the amazing promise in verse 14, “I will put my Spirit in you and you will live.” 

What a wonderful message of hope for people who feel broken and in the depths of despair.  God is saying here, “I want to heal you, to be with you.  I want to see you flourish, and I will help you flourish!”  This is a message that speaks of hope, life, and flourishing, specifically because God is actively making it so. 

As we fast forward a bit through the history of the nation of Israel, we can see how this promise comes true when the people return to the land and rebuild, as described in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah.  But that the was physical fulfillment of the promise.  What about the spiritual fulfillment of the dry bones coming to life through the breath?  What about the Spirit of God giving them life?  How does that happen?

From an Old Testament perspective, the idea that God would fill his people with his Spirit is rare.  Only a few people in the entire Old Testament experience the work of the Holy Spirit in their lives.  Leaders like King David.  Some prophets, like Ezekiel.  The Spirit certainly filled people, but it was uncommon.  In Ezekiel 36 & 37, God speaks of a time when his spirit would fill the hearts of all his people.  But when?

In the next post we’ll learn when.

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The power of God’s breath – Ezekiel 37:1-14, Part 2

“Can these bones live?” 

That’s the question God posed to Ezekiel. God had just taken Ezekiel, through a prophetic vision journey, to a valley filled to the brim with human bones.

The obvious answer to the question is, “No!”  Dead things do not come back to life.  When you’re dead, your dead.  It could be that God made the valley full of very dry bones to make sure Ezekiel knows that these are not recently dead people.  There is no amount of CPR that will resuscitate them.  These people have been dead so long that their flesh has rotted away, and it is gone.  The bones are dried out.  You could pick up a bone and easily snap it in two like a dry twig.  Ezekiel can answer, “No, there is no coming back to life here.” 

But Ezekiel doesn’t answer that.  He makes a surprise move, and one that just might reveal to us a bit about Ezekiel’s heart and faith.  He says, “O Sovereign Lord, you alone know.”  Isn’t that a curious answer?  In that answer, Ezekiel could simply be hesitant or nervous.  In this world some people have strong opinions and are not afraid to share them.  Sometimes those people have lots of opinions, and they let you know it.  You also probably know people who have opinions, but they might struggle a bit to share them. Maybe that was Ezekiel. Maybe he was feeling shy or scared.  Or maybe he was demonstrating trust and faith in a God who has the power to make those bones come to life! 

God’s response to Ezekiel in verses 4-8 is that he wants Ezekiel to prophesy to the bones!  From all we’ve read so far, this is a new one for Ezekiel.  God wants him to prophesy to dead people.  Very dead, long dead, people. 

On the surface, this prophecy could seem to be pointless.  Prophesy to inanimate objects that cannot hear, see or think?  As we know from so many of Ezekiel’s other prophecies to objects like mountains, God has a deeper meaning he wants to convey.  What is that meaning?

God says that the whole point of the prophecy is to miraculously make the bones come to life.  He is not thinking of making walking skeletons like the pirates in Pirates of the Caribbean.  God says that the prophecy will result in a miraculous resurrection of the people.  Tendons, flesh and skin will grow on the bones, and most of all, breath will make the people live.

Ezekiel does what he is told; he prophecies to the bones. There is a noise of bones rattling together to form skeletons, and then tendons, flesh and skin grow to cover the bones.  That must have been astounding to witness.  Modern medicine can do some miracles of its own, but nothing like total regeneration of dead skeletons into living bodies.  As Ezekiel is almost certainly watching wide-eyed, the process of making the new bodies stops short of the most important step.  There was no breath in them.  They were not living.  They were just piles of corpses. 

But that is about to change.  Look at verses 9-10.

God asks Ezekiel to prophesy again, to call the four winds to breathe life into the people, and that is exactly what happens. A word is used here that we’ve heard numerous times already in this passage.  Breath.  Wind.  God says that he will make breath enter the corpses.  In verses 9-10 the four winds arrive, through a miracle of God, enter the corpses, and the people come to life.

You might have a text note at verse 5 saying that this word can mean “breath, wind or spirit.”  If you glance back to verse 1, you read that the Spirit of the Lord carried Ezekiel to this valley of dry bones.  Spirit.  Same word as the word used for wind and breath.  Do you see the symbolism here?  God the Spirit is making the dead corpses come to life.

Last week in chapter 36 verses 26-27 (which we discussed here), God said that he would give the people a new heart and a new spirit, and his Spirit would live in them and empower them to follow God’s ways.  Now in chapter 37, God continues that thought, the thought that God wants his people to be filled with his Spirit.  It is the Spirit of God that brings the dead back to life. 

The vision depicts symbolically what God wants to happen in our lives.  The valley of dry bones has become the encampment of a vast army.  The image we get is that of a battlefield, like that of Pickett’s Charge during the Battle of Gettysburg, during which thousands upon thousands of soldiers were cut down, died, left to rot and dry out, leaving nothing but brittle bones.  The remnants of a battle lost long ago.  But in Ezekiel’s vision God steps in miraculously and brings the people back to life, by his Spirit. Why?  What does this mean? 

God explains it to Ezekiel in the next section. Check back to the next post and we’ll see what God has to say.

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Why we need to look at human bones – Ezekiel 37:1-14, Part 1

This past Sunday a woman in my congregation told us her story about struggling with health and feeling dead inside, disconnected from God.  Have you ever experienced something like that? 

This is exactly what Israel was feeling.  Turn to Ezekiel 37, and you’ll see what I mean, as we study verses 1-14 in a five-part blog series this week. 

In verse 1 Ezekiel we read, “The hand of the Lord was on me.”  God doesn’t have hands.  God is a spirit.  That means God doesn’t have any body whatsoever.  What Ezekiel is referring to is the power of God at work in his life in a special way. 

When I think about the power of God, we know that God is always at work in our lives.  But you cannot measure the level of the power of God, like a thermometer measures the temperature.  In fact, when God is at work, most often you might not feel anything.  That it is what we might call the normal work of God.  We believe as act of faith that God is at work.

Sometimes, though, God is at work in an elevated way, and we might feel it, or sense it.  It seems to me that God was at work in Ezekiel’s life very often in that elevated way.   When Ezekiel would receive prophetic words from God, he would say “The word of the Lord came to me.”  That indicates an elevated level of God’s work in Ezekiel’s life.  He heard from God.  We read that phrase “The word of the Lord came to me” a lot in Ezekiel. 

Then there are a few times in Ezekiel, so far five by my count, where the power of God is working at an even higher level.  Ezekiel tells us that the work of God gets extra intense when he says, “The hand of the Lord was on me.”   That’s when things gets wild.  That’s when the visions come.  That’s when Ezekiel gets transported to another time and place, when God’s power is at work in him in a rare and deep way.  Ezekiel 37 is one of those times. 

As we continue in verses 1-2, we read that the power of the Spirit of God brings Ezekiel to a valley full of bones.  We’ll learn later in the passage that these are human bones.  How often have you seen or touched human bones?  In ancient times, it was likely that people saw human bones more often than we do.  We’re used to seeing depictions of human bones as skeletons at Halloween, or maybe in the movies or on TV.  But our personal contact with human bones is usually quite rare.  In school maybe you took an anatomy class, and you got to touch some bones. Maybe if you are in the medical profession or an archaeologist, you’ve handled human bones.  Beyond that, very unlikely. 

Human bones can be very freaky, right?  At the Holocaust Museum in Washington, there are numerous pictures and displays with bones of people who were killed in the death camps.  When I was in Cambodia with Michelle, we visited Tol Slang prison, which was part of the Khmer Rouge genocide, and there, too, we saw displays of bones of people that were killed in that very spot.  In the Killing Fields, where the Khmer Rouge dug shallow mass graves, there are bones sticking up out of the ground.  It is hard to look at.

Some people might think that allowing human remains to stick out of the ground is disgusting or inappropriate.  I respect Cambodia for choosing to leave them.  Sometimes we need to be disgusted, to be appalled.  The Khmer Rouge genocide was certainly one of those times.  When one group of people slaughters millions of other people, we should be appalled, and we need to see it, look at it, to know, with horror, what we humans are capable of. 

I think something like that is happening when God brings Ezekiel to this valley of dry bones.  It looked to Ezekiel like a mass grave, with bones as far as the eye could see. 

That must have been a ghastly sight.  Can you imagine being surrounded by a sea of human bones?  I wonder if Ezekiel was thinking he was having a nightmare.  You can imagine him pinching his arm and saying urgently, “Wake up! Wake up!  This isn’t real.  You’re just dreaming.”

But he wasn’t just dreaming.  He was surrounded by mounds of human bones.  Also, they were very dry bones.  These people had been dead a long time.  Here’s the thing, though; this valley of dry bones wasn’t real. It wasn’t a dream either.  It was a vision in which it seems Ezekiel felt as though he was in a real place.  But God’s purpose wasn’t to give Ezekiel a nightmare, walking him through the bones, grossing him out.  Instead God has a question for Ezekiel, which we read in verse 3.  “Can these bones live?”

Check back to the next post, and we’ll learn about Ezekiel’s curious answer to God’s question.

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My nephews and the skeleton – Ezekiel 37:1-14, Preview

A couple years ago my extended family went on vacation together to celebrate my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. My immediate family arrived a day after the rest. After getting settled in, I was playing wiffleball with my nephews in the yard when a foul ball meandered its way through an opening under a porch.

We all turned and looked toward the porch where the ball disappeared. No one moved. My nephews began to argue amongst themselves about who was responsible to get the ball. The fielders were convinced the hitter should go. Of course the hitter thought it was the fielders’ job.

As the accusations flew, I wondered if they were scared of getting a bit dirty or more likely of the darkness in the belly of the porch. So I encouraged the nephew nearest the porch to crawl under and get the ball. He refused and said, “I’m not getting it. There’s a skeleton under there.”

I scrunched my face into a disbelieving scowl thinking my nephew was attempting to play me for a fool, hoping I would take pity on him and get the ball. Even after my further prodding, he would not budge. So I got down on my hands and knees, turned on my phone light, and peeked under the porch. Sure enough, there was a skeleton. A human skeleton.

My nephews knew about it because they had arrived the day before, explored around like kids do when they get to a new place, and they discovered the skeleton. I will admit it sent shivers down my neck and shoulders when I first saw it. Especially there in the dim light under the porch, it was freaky. What was a full human skeleton doing under the porch of this vacation home? Weird, right?

Upon closer inspection, it looked like a Halloween decoration that the owner was storing under his porch for October when he would display it to freak out trick-or-treaters. I still didn’t want to crawl near it, so I used a bat to reach the ball and slide it out. Then I scurried backwards into the light as quick as I could!

Why do skeletons scare us? It’s obvious, I suppose. They are the epitome of images of death, and not just any death, but human death. Skeletons force us to deal with the reality of our humanity. Life is not all there is. There’s also death. There is the dark side, the pain, the hurt, the frailty that is part and parcel of the human experience. We are truly bags of bones. From dust we were created, and to dust we shall return.

With that introduction, you might be wondering if next week’s five-part blog series on Ezekiel 37:1-14 is going to be a dark one. Admittedly, it starts that way. Over the course of 36 chapters, we have learned that Ezekiel is a most unusual book of the Bible. When God commissioned Ezekiel to be a prophet to his fellow 10,000 Israelites, with whom he was in exile in Babylon, little did he know what his life would become. The bizarre visions, the prophetic skits, stares, and stories, punctuating long periods of silence. Now in chapter 37, God takes Ezekiel on a vision journey that is perhaps the most famous, enduring story of the entire book of Ezekiel: a journey in a vision to a valley of dry bones.

There God walked Ezekiel among not just one skeleton, but through a valley filled with thousands and thousands and thousands of bones. Why would God take Ezekiel to that place in a vision? What does it mean? While it starts off dark, it turns out to be one of the most exciting and hopeful promises in the entire Bible, one that we need today, especially when we feel inside like the skeleton, dry, dead and without hope. See for yourself by reading Ezekiel 37:1-4 ahead of time, and then check back in to the blog on Monday!

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Why you need God to give you a heart transplant – Ezekiel 35-36, Part 5

I hope you get heart surgery.

No not that kind of heart surgery, such as a transplant or an artificial replace of the organ that pumps your blood. Though we can be thankful that we live in a day and age when it is possible and highly successful, at least for physical heart surgery.

What I am talking about is the new heart that all people need. In this post we conclude our five-part series on Ezekiel chapters 35 and 36. In Ezekiel 36 verses 33-38, God recaps the promise he is making to Israel.  The people and land will be restored and cleansed, and they will flourish.  But this is only possible if they first allow God to give them a heart transplant.

As he has said numerous times throughout chapter 36, he will do it.  They can count on him. He is true to his word. They were the ones that broke the ancient covenant, not him. He is there for them. They simply need to turn from their wicked ways and run into his open arms which are ready to embrace them.

If they do, what God says will happen will be no surprise to readers of this blog who have been following the Ezekiel series for that past six months. When Israel turns to God, and God gives them a new heart and new Spirit, restoring them to the land where they will flourish, then they will know that he is the Lord.  Once again, he reminds them of his desire to be known by them, to be in relationship with them. This is the most repeated phrase in the book of Ezekiel. God wants to be close with his people, and it will require his work of heart transplant in their lives, enlivening them by his Spirit.

I find Ezekiel 36 to be an astounding chapter, and one of the most famous in the book of Ezekiel.  In this chapter we see both God’s work in salvation (which we know was fulfilled in Jesus), and human choice to turn away from sin and live in light of that salvation. 

Thinking about that ultimate fulfillment of the God’s promise in Ezekiel 36, we Christians can praise God that in Christ, and by his Spirit, we do have a new heart. So what does it mean for Christians to have that new heart, to have the Holy Spirit in us, living in light of that? 

Larry Crabb says in his book, Inside Out, which has been a bit of a conversation partner during this five-part series, that we need the Word, the Spirit and the Community of the church. 

In our study of God’s word, we learn what is true.

In our relationship with the Spirit, we receive conviction about how the truth applies to our lives, and we receive empowerment to live in step with the Spirit.

In our relationships in the church community, we receive accountability and encouragement. 

We need all three.  God is at work in all three. The new heart he promises is available to us.  But it is not magic.  It is a process of submitting ourselves honestly to the work of God.

So what will you do? Do you need a spiritual heart transplant? Turn to God, and embrace him in a new way.

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The all-important Step 4 of how God changes us – Ezekiel 35-36, Part 4

We learned so far in this week’s five-part blog series on Ezekiel 35-36 that God says that he will give us a new heart of flesh, and a new spirit.  What Spirit?  That’s the next step in the transformation process.  Learn about steps 1-3 here. Now we learn about the all-important Step Four in verse 27. 

Step Four is that God will give us his Spirit!  Amazing!  The Spirit of God living in us?  Yes!  And for what purpose?  God explains that the Spirit will move us to follow his ways. 

Here we see the direct connection to the teaching of Jesus and his apostles in the New Testament.  Jesus talked about fruit trees in very much the same way that God, through Ezekiel, talks about how a human heart changes.  Jesus taught that you will know a person by their fruit, just like you know a tree by its fruit.  If bad fruit comes from a tree, you know that something isn’t right inside that tree.  But a proper tree produces good fruit. This is why Jesus will go on to say, “Out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks.” 

The heart is the determining factor in how we will live our lives.  The status of our heart will guide our thoughts, our words, our actions. If there are thoughts, words and deeds coming from our lives that are not honoring to God, then we need to examine our hearts.  In his book, Inside Out, Larry Crabb says we will find a demanding heart there.  While it is good to clean the outside of the dish, Jesus says, if we first clean the inside, we’ll clean the outside too.  This is why God performs the ritual bath in verse 25, but what he really wants to get at is that stone cold heart.  

He wants to transplant it not with another human heart, not with an artificial heart, not with pig’s heart (pig’s heart?…we talked about that in the previous post), but with a new heart that is enlivened by his Spirit.  Of course, that’s precisely what happened in the early church in Acts 2 when the Spirit arrived, just as Jesus said he would.  As the Apostle Paul writes, our bodies are temple of the Spirit, and thus we should walk in step with the Spirit so the fruit of the Spirit flows from our lives.  We have the energy and power of God the Holy Spirit working in us to help us become more like Jesus. 

Ezekiel, Jesus and Paul are not describing physical heart surgery.  The kind of heart transplant they envision, the heart transplant that leads to changed lives, is done in the realm of our spirit and our will, and it is most often, but not only, a process of a lifetime.   

As we continue through Ezekiel 36, God says that not only will he give them a new heart of flesh and a new spirit, his Spirit, he will also make their land flourish, which we read in verses 28-30.  Finally in verses 31-32, he gets very honest with them once again.  This beautiful process of God entering their world and lives and doing the work of transformation both inwardly, outwardly and in their land is because they themselves caused it.  This is a critical piece of the situation.  The people need to see their culpability.  Change is not possible unless we first see that we need to change. 

When it comes to change there are generally two kinds of people: those who see that they need to change, but feel powerless to do so.  And those who do not see that they need to change, but they absolutely need to change.  God, in this passage, seems primarily to be addressing the latter group, those who don’t think they need to change, those who look around their world, see the carnage of relationships and brokenness, and then blame others.  Repeatedly in this passage, God is saying to Israel, “I am here for you, I am boldly and powerfully going to act on your behalf, but you need to see and acknowledge the truth of what caused this situation in the first place.  You did!”

It is so difficult to have a truthful perspective of ourselves, especially when we are at fault.  We hate to admit it.  I hate to admit when I am wrong.  Sometimes I think to myself, “I can’t possibly be wrong on this, or I can’t possibly be wrong that many times.”  Could be in my marriage.  Could be in my parenting.  Could be in my role in the church.  All of which matter deeply to me, and thus I want to improve in those areas. Yet, I can hate to be called out on even small ways I might be wrong. Maybe you know the feeling.

But notice God in this passage over and over and over saying to Israel that they need to get to a point where they loathe themselves.  Where they are ashamed and disgraced.  See the strong language God uses in verses 31 and 32.  We might read that and think, “Geesh, God, that’s harsh.  Aren’t you supposed to be loving and kind and gracious?”  God wants us to hate ourselves? Doesn’t that sound wrong?  We’re not supposed to hate ourselves, are we?  

But notice how God uses these strong words.  He is not saying that the people are to hate themselves.  He is saying that they are to have a loathing and shame and disgrace for their sinful conduct.  That is the right view of misconduct of any kind.  A proper mindset is a negative opinion of our sinful conduct.

The problem, therefore, was that Israel did not have that negative view of their own sin.  They blamed others.  They blamed God.  They kept sinning.  They looked at their lives, which were in total shambles at this point, as their city and temple were destroyed and their nation was defeated, and yet even then they still blamed others!  That is the sin of the narcissist, the arrogant, prideful, gas-lighting, manipulator.  That is the heart filled with demands that Larry Crabb talks about in his book Inside Out.

Yet God is saying to Israel, “I am here.  I am ready and willing to help you make the change you need, but you are part of this transformation.”  God even says that he will go first.  He’ll do the work of transplant, but they must participate too, and have a properly place loathing and shame and disgrace for their sin.

How about you? Does that resonate with the situation of your life? If so, God is ready to reach out to you, to change your life! His gracious, loving arms are wide open to welcome you!

Photo by Roger Bradshaw on Unsplash

Steps 1-3 of how God changes people – Ezekiel 35-36, Part 3

How does God describe the process of human transformation, so that we are becoming the kind of people he wants us to be? We find out in Ezekiel 36, verses 24-32.  Go ahead and read those verses and see if you can discern the steps of how God changes the human heart?

Do you see the process of transformation?  There are multiple steps of transformation, and they are flooded with a two-word phrase that is repeated over and over and over.  Did you see it? 

“I will, I will, I will.”  God will do it.  This is a promise from God’s mouth about what he will do.   What will he do?  The work of transforming a rebellious, disobedient people, into the people of God.   Let’s take a look at all the steps God will use.

First, in verse 24, God gathers his scattered people who have been exiled, like Ezekiel, in foreign nations.  This speaks to restoration, which is especially meaningful to people who have been ripped away from their homes and carted off. 

Second, God cleanses the people. In verse 25, we read the imagery of a ritual cleansing bath.  We know that sprinkling a little bit of water on a person doesn’t cleanse them.  For that you need a deep scrubbing.  My dog hates baths. When I open the cabinet where we keep his shampoo, he knows what is coming next, and walks to the far side of the house. I don’t know why he hates it, but perhaps it has something to do with the fact that cleaning him requires a scrubbing, not just a simple sprinkling. To get his dog stink out of that thick fur is no simple task. God, however, is using the imagery of a ritual bath that does not intend to do what a scrubbing will do. What God depicts is a ritual, very much like the cleansing rituals from the Mosaic Law.  The image is powerful, God doing the work of removing the significant amount of impurity from the people.  Their sin, their rebellions, and specifically that of idolatry.  While this is symbolic imagery, and not a literal bath (God is also not talking about the Christian practice of baptism), what this imagery teaches us is that God wants us to be clean, and he wants to help us.  Notice that this cleaning is outward.  Our outward actions matter.  We are to be people who outwardly obey God.  But outward actions flow from an inward place, don’t they?  And that is what God gets to in the third step of transformation.

Step three: in verse 26, God goes to that inward place, the heart and the spirit.  God is using the image of our blood-pumping organ to refer to our innermost being.  Our heart, as it pumps blood, is the physical source of life.  God envisions here a spiritual transplant surgery that seeks to replace the spiritual source of our lives.  In our day and age, we are used to the medical miracle of heart transplants.  It astounds me that such a thing is possible.  You take out a bad heart, and you replace it with the good heart of someone who recently died, but whose heart is still strong.  Then there is artificial heart surgery.  I find that mind-blowing too, that we could make a heart, which is a fancy pump, and it can work in place of a heart of flesh.  Perhaps still more amazing, recently surgeons at the University of Maryland performed the first ever successful transplant of a pig’s heart into a human being.  The pig had to be genetically modified, but the transplant worked.  Of course, long-term effects remain to be seen.  But in Ezekiel 36, God is talking about a very different heart transplant surgery.

He says that their hearts are stone.  Cold.  Hard.  Dead.  The people are still physically alive, so we know that God is speaking symbolically here.  He is talking about their love.  They are lacking in love toward God and others, which was obvious by how poorly they behaved in turning away from him, committing injustices against humanity.  That’s what it means to have hearts of stone.   While your blood-pumper might be working just fine, you can have a heart of stone.  Maybe you’ve felt it.  We call it being cold-hearted.  Dead inside.  You see it in how some people treat other people.  It can happen in Christians too.

My spiritual director advised me to read the book Inside Out by Larry Crabb, and it is excellent.  Crabb suggests that the stone-cold heart is best understood as committing the sin of being demanding.   Demanding of God.  Demanding of other people.  The difficult thing, Crabb says, is that we so rarely see ourselves as demanding.  And yet, the sin of being demanding is extremely widespread.  I urge you to read Crabb’s book to learn more about the sin of being demanding. More than likely, it’s in your heart.

I have to admit that I struggle a bit with what God is saying in Ezekiel’s prophecy.  Remember all the “I will” statements?  God says that he will do all the steps of transformation.  There is no indication in this passage of human choice.  What, then, about free will?  Is God saying that he is going to remove the heart of stone against their will?  I don’t think so.  Consider what we know of God, and we must see this prophecy in line with everything else we know to be true.  God honors human free will, even when those humans make horrible choices, like the choice to keep living with a heart of stone.  So what is God saying with all of these “I will” statements? I believe it is best to view God as on the ready, standing next to his spiritual operating room with all his surgical tools, waiting for the person to say, “Ok, open me up, do the surgery. I’m done living the demanding life, Lord. I trust in you.” 

After God says that he will give us a new heart of flesh, he also says he will give us a new spirit.  What does he mean by “spirit”? Check back in to the next post, as we’ll find out?

Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash