now
that I the Lord have spoken it, and performed it, saith the
Lord.'--EZEKIEL xxxvii. 1-14.

This great vision apparently took its form from a despairing saying,
which had become a proverb among the exiles, 'Our bones are dried up,
and our hope is lost: we are clean cut off' (v. 11). Ezekiel lays hold
of the metaphor, which had been taken to express the hopeless
destruction of Israel's national existence, and even from it wrings a
message of hope. Faith has the prerogative of seeing possibilities of
life in what looks to sense hopeless death. We may look at the vision
from three points of view, considering its bearing on Israel, on the
world, and on the resurrection of the body.

I. The saying, already referred to, puts the hopelessness of the mass of
the exiles in a forcible fashion. The only sense in which living men
could say that their bones were dried up, and they cut off, is a
figurative one, and obviously it is the national existence which they
regarded as irretrievably ended. The saying gives us a glimpse into the
despair which had settled down on the exiles, and against which Ezekiel
had to contend, as he had also to contend against its apparently
opposite and yet kindred feeling of presumptuous, misplaced hope. We
observe that he begins by accepting fully the facts which bred despair,
and even accentuating them. The true prophet never makes light of the
miseries of which he knows the cure, and does not try to comfort by
minimising the gravity of the evil. The bones _are_ very many, and they
_are_ very dry. As far as outward resources are concerned, despair was
rational, and hope as absurd as it would have been to expect that men,
dead so long that their bones had been bleached by years of exposure to
the weather, should live again.

But while Ezekiel saw the facts of Israel's powerlessness as plainly as
the most despondent, he did not therefore despair. The question which
rose in his mind was God's question, and the very raising it let a gleam
of hope in. So he answered with that noble utterance of faith and
submission, 'O Lord God, Thou knowest.' 'With God all things are
possible.' Presumption would have said 'Yes'; Unbelief would have said
'No'; Faith says, 'Thou knowest.'

The grand description of the process of resurrection follows the analogy
of the order in the creation of man, giving, first, the shaping of the
body, and afterwards the breathing into it of the breath which is life.
Both