Heart of Stone and Flesh, and a Valley of Dry Bones

Heart of Stone and Flesh, and a Valley of Dry Bones

Jun 10, 2023 | Theology

I can’t be reading through the Bible and just pass Ezekiel 36 and 37 without comment. It has to be among my favorite passages in Scripture because it so wonderfully captures the monergistic nature of God’s working in us as I understand our salvation from sin. The word comes from a Greek compound meaning “one” and “energy.” Applied to our salvation it simply means it is God’s work alone from beginning to end (1 Cor. 1:30, Jesus is our righteousness and our sanctification). It’s contrast is synergism which means combined or together energy, and it indicates salvation is a cooperative work between man and God. It’s hard to argue for synergism when you read these passages. I know most Christians are synergists, but that doesn’t make it true. Deep down all Christians are monergists because they know they didn’t and can’t save themselves. It is obvious that somehow our decision making and will are involved, but the degree to which those determine what ultimately happens is the issue.

These are deep and ultimately mysterious questions, so being too dogmatic gets us into trouble. I Corinthians 8:2 is a good verse to commit to memory when discussing or thinking about these things. None of us can come close to understanding the being or ways of an infinite God. It’s unwise to think we can. How does God’s sovereignty and man’s freedom work so God can decree and cause or allow something to happen (a distinction without a difference because he’s responsible for it either way)? Nobody has the faintest idea. We just know from the plain witness of Scripture both are true. People will often bring up the concept of “free will,” but such a thing doesn’t exist. I was once explaining Calvinist soteriology (the nature of salvation from sin) to someone who didn’t accept it, and she said, what about free will? I responded, there is nothing in the Bible about free will, not a single thing. It’s not a biblical concept. She was taken aback at first, but eventually had to agree with me. As I was thinking about this I decided I would write a separate post about that, so I won’t explain my thinking about it here.

The reason the Calvinist position is so powerful in these passages is because of the images God uses to reveal the nature of salvation through Ezekiel. The context is historical Israel and God’s judgement against their wickedness driving them out of the promised land, then bringing them back and transforming them in the process. It is important to understand in reading the prophetic testimony of Scripture that God is always weaving historical and eschatological realities into the text, and it’s often a challenge deciphering which is which. Much of the time it’s both, as in these passages. To say something only applies to historical Israel or only to those saved from their Sin by the risen Jesus leads to distorting the meaning of the text.

The first image from chapter 36 is one most Christians are familiar with, and the words and phrases God uses speak powerfully to the Isaiah 53 nature of our salvation from sin.

24 “‘For I will take you out of the nations; I will gather you from all the countries and bring you back into your own land. 25 I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols. 26 I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. 27 And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.

The contrast between stone and flesh could not be any greater, one inert, hard, lifeless, the other the center of beating life itself. God replaces the former with the latter, and does not ask our permission to do it. Once it’s done, we choose him, not before. Stone does not choose. A comparable image is death. As Paul says, “the wages of is death” (Rom. 6:23), a la God’s declaration to Adam if he eats of the tree he “will surely die.” Also, prior to Christ, we were “dead in trespasses and sins” (Eph. 2:1), and he “made us alive even when we were dead in transgressions” (Eph. 2:5). Dead people, hearts of stone, don’t make choices to raise themselves, hearts of flesh. Verse 31 confirms the nature of this change:

31 Then you will remember your evil ways and wicked deeds, and you will loathe yourselves for your sins and detestable practices.

It is only the Holy Spirit transforming the heart with the conviction of sin and the need of a Savior that confirms the transformation is real. God changes our affections from self and sin to Him and holiness, thus we loathe because we now know, and accept, how infinitely we fall short of the holiness of God required for a relationship to him. Because Jesus fully absorbed God’s wrath for our sins we are clean from all our impurities (I John 1:9).

The second image from chapter 37 is of a valley of dry, very dry bones God brings back to life. It’s a thrilling passage as you contemplate the almighty power of God, a God who raises the dead, including our dead spiritual selves, a God who does the impossible. As the Lord is leading Ezekiel back and forth in this valley he sees massive numbers of these very dry bones. He asks him a question with a seemingly obvious answer: “Son of man, can these bones live?” Of course not, they’re dead! Ezekiel gives the right answer, “O you Lord God know.”

4 Then he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones and say to them, ‘Dry bones, hear the word of the Lord! 5 This is what the Lord God says to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life. 6 I will attach tendons to you and make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you, and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the Lord.’”

Notice the power of our God who can simply decree what to us is an impossible thing, I will, I will, I will, and it happens! Notice also the echo of the you will the same perfectly biblical three times—when God wills, we will! Our Almighty God never tries. We see this same almighty power in Genesis 1 where our Creator God is revealed to us as the one who simply says, and it is.

Then Ezekiel describes how this bringing life out of death happens, watching as the bones make a rattling sound and come together, bone to bone, tendons and flesh magically appearing as skin covers them. He watches as the Lord sends a wind that breathes life into them “that they may live.” That is our God! He makes the dead alive, in his first advent spiritually, and when he returns he will raise all His people physically and bodily at the resurrection of the dead (I Cor. 15).

The Lord tells Ezekiel, “these bones are the people of Israel,” God’s people, us! I reference Matthew 1:21 here all the time because our God is a God who actually saves, not a God who tries to save or makes salvation possible. Jesus is given his name “because he will save his people from their sins.” There it is again, he will! Then to Ezekiel, the Lord says twice the exact same words, a promise to His People, that he will “open your graves and bring you up from them.” His will to raise us physically, bodily, as he raised Jesus from the dead is our forever hope. We can take that to the eternal bank!

 

 

 

Uninvented: To Whom the Rule of the Nations Rightfully Belongs

Uninvented: To Whom the Rule of the Nations Rightfully Belongs

Jun 3, 2023 | Uninvented

As I stated in my last post, in light of redemptive history, the theological argument for uninvented is powerful because of the coherence of the biblical message from Genesis to Revelation. In light of Jesus revealing to us it is all about him in Luke 24, we can see him everywhere. It is impossible apart from the doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture by the Holy Spirit for the writers to have had any idea of the ultimate meaning of their words, and thus to have made them up. And I don’t use the word impossible lightly. For much of my Christian life I thought, like most Christians, the Bible was most definitely not made up by the men who wrote it, but at some level thought it could have been. That’s what skeptics have been claiming for 300 years, and that message is everywhere in the suffocating secular cultural air we breathe. My deep dive back into apologetics in 2009 eventually leading to writing Uninvented has convinced me beyond a shadow of a doubt, in the vernacular, they just couldn’t make that stuff up!

Another example of this impossibility is from a passage in Ezekiel 21 that ingeniously ties back to a passage in Genesis 49, almost as if it was planned by a divine author! Maybe Ezekiel was so familiar with the book of Genesis that he decided to take the passage there and include the same idea in his writing, but that would make Ezekiel a liar. If you know anything about his very difficult life (being a prophet in Israel was a brutal job), you would know he consistently declares, “Thus saith the Lord,” as he does in this passage. We have a choice, as do all people who come to the text of Scripture, when we read of a prophet who claims the Lord told him to declare something. Either it happened, it is true, and the prophet was a faithful communicator of the Lord’s words, or he was a liar. The skeptic can’t say they had dreams or mystical visions, and so just thought the Lord was telling them these things when it was all in their head. That’s not an option over 400 years of the prophetic witness in Israel. Only what I call in the book, a question-begging anti-supernatural bias would prompt someone to think such a thing. If someone comes to the text without the hermeneutics of suspicion, the text reads real, as I also say in the book, with verisimilitude.

Now to the passage. Ezekiel has been speaking to the rulers and leaders of Israel:

25 You profane and wicked prince of Israel, whose day has come, whose time of punishment has reached its climax, 26 this is what the Lord God says: Take off the turban, remove the crown. It will not be as it was: The lowly will be exalted and the exalted will be brought low. 27 A ruin! A ruin! I will make it a ruin! The crown will not be restored until he to whom it rightfully belongs shall come; to him I will give it.

The obvious question is who is this one or will be this one to whom the crown of Israel, God’s people, rightfully belongs. We have to go back over a thousand years (God is never in a hurry, as I say ad nauseum) to find a clue from Genesis 49. The scene is after Jacob and his family has been saved from the famine in Egypt because of Joseph, and at the end of his life he is telling his sons what will happen to them “in the days to come” (v. 1). That phrase in Hebrew is literally “in the last days,” which if it sounds familiar it is because it is an eschatological Messianic reference as we read in Hebrews 1:2, “in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom also he made the universe.” This passage to Judah is about Jesus, the lion of the tribe of Judah (Rev. 5:5):

8 “Judah, your brothers will praise you;
    your hand will be on the neck of your enemies;
    your father’s sons will bow down to you.
9 You are a lion’s cub, Judah;
    you return from the prey, my son.
Like a lion he crouches and lies down,
    like a lioness—who dares to rouse him?
10 The scepter will not depart from Judah,
    nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet,
until he to whom it belongs shall come
    and the obedience of the nations shall be his.
11 He will tether his donkey to a vine,
    his colt to the choicest branch;
he will wash his garments in wine,
    his robes in the blood of grapes.

As we can see, this one will not only be ruler of Israel, God’s people, per Ezekiel, but also a ruler of the nations. This prophecy is what began the idea of a Messiah, simply an anointed one as were all kings and rulers in the history of Israel. From the time Jacob spoke these words to the time of Ezekiel’s similar words was approximately 1,400 years! That’s a theme with some staying power, and why it had such a hold on Jewish imagination at the time of Jesus. Not to mention why it would be very difficult, I believe impossible, to be a product of man, mere human fiction. 

Which raises the question of who this Messiah would be and what he would be like. While there were many differing ideas about it in the intertestamental period (Malachi to John the Baptist), most Jews agreed he would be a Davidic like king who would rule in Israel from Jerusalem and lead them in victory over their oppressors. Even Jesus’ disciples after he was raised from the dead and prior to his ascension (Acts 1), not understanding it all yet asked him, “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” They like all Jews of the time missed the spiritual part of the equation, that the Messiah’s reign over the nations would be through the transformation of the hearts of his people. Which brings us to the eschatological and how we’re to understand Jacob’s prophecy that the Messiah’s rule would include the “obedience of the nations.”

In the Jewish conception of the first century, Messiah’s rule would be physical and temporal from Israel over the nations in this material world. Once the Messiah led them in military conquest over the Romans, everything would be like it was always supposed to be with the nation of Israel and their king ruling the earth. Unfortunately, they would miss the spiritual significance of the Isaiah 53 Messiah who would redeem his people from their sins. When Jesus rose from the dead, it didn’t take long for them to realize Jesus was in fact the fulfillment of Isaiah 53, as it is worked out in the rest of the New Testament. The question for Christians now would be looking back at these passages, what would the “obedience of the nations” look like going forward.” It’s not an easy question to answer, as we can see from the last two thousand years of Christian history.

Like most Christians, until last year and my conversion to post-millennialism, I saw the answer to that question as purely eschatological, meaning it was for the time after Jesus comes again in judgment and we experience the new heavens and earth of Revelation 21. My tendency was to over spiritualize such passages as if they had no relevance to life in this fallen material world. How could they! Look at how horrible things are. It will only, I thought, take a final, supernatural act of Almighty God in Christ to change things. Otherwise, we’re stuck with things getting worse and worse, or at best staying just the miserable way they are.

Now I am convinced Jacob’s “in the last days” prophecy about this ruler started when Jesus rose from the dead and ascended to heaven to reign “far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked” (Eph. 1). These days started at Pentecost, as Peter says in Acts 2, that “in the last days” God would pour out his Spirit on all flesh. We by the power of the Holy Spirit as Christ’s body in this fallen world get to be part of God advancing his kingdom and building his church in our day until “the obedience of the nations” is his!

 

Uninvented: Jeremiah Doesn’t Make Up the New Covenant

Uninvented: Jeremiah Doesn’t Make Up the New Covenant

May 29, 2023 | Theology

There are so many angles to the uninvented argument, and one of the most important is theological, something I don’t get into much in the book. The Bible looked at in 20/20 Jesus Hindsight is theological genius (see Luke 24), and I would argue impossible to be made up by human beings and mere human imagination. It is stunning when you consider the consistency of Genesis to Revelation written over approximately a 1500-year timespan by 40 or so different authors. Most of the Old Testament was written in Hebrew, with a bit of Aramaic thrown in (the language of the Babylonians similar to Hebrew that became the language of the Jews by Jesus’ time), and the New Testament in Greek. Yet through all that time and with all those differences, the coherence of the message is astonishing. It’s almost as if there was a “conspiracy” of an Almighty all-knowing God who decided to reveal himself and his plans to his creatures this way through the words of men. In fact, it is the only logical and plausible explanation for the Bible. Mere human invention doesn’t read this way, and it’s not even close.

Which brings me to Jeremiah 31. In my reading through this time I was struck by how impossible it would have been for these words to have been made up by Jeremiah or anyone else:

31 “The days are coming,” declares the Lord,
    “when I will make a new covenant
with the people of Israel
    and with the people of Judah.
32 It will not be like the covenant
    I made with their ancestors
when I took them by the hand
    to lead them out of Egypt,
because they broke my covenant,
    though I was a husband to them,”
declares the Lord.
33 “This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel
    after that time,” declares the Lord.
“     and write it on their hearts.
I will be their God,
    and they will be my people.
34 No longer will they teach their neighbor,
    or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’
because they will all know me,
    from the least of them to the greatest,”
declares the Lord.
“For I will forgive their wickedness
    and will remember their sins no more.”

To understand how impossible it would be for a human being to make this up you have to be familiar with redemptive history. It is critical for Christians to know their redemptive history because it is only that context that gives all the details their psychological, emotional, and transforming power in our lives. The main subject of the Old Testament is Israel, or God’s covenant people. Their entire 1500-year history would point forward to the true Israel, Jesus (Matt. 2:13–15). Jesus was also the second or the last Adam (1 Cor. 15:45-49). What these two, Adam and Israel, had in common was that they failed the test, which points to why a Jeremiah 31 type of salvation was necessary, one that would be inner, spiritual, and transformational verses one based on external obedience to the law.

 Man, created as man and woman, was given a dominion mandate to rule over God’s abundant, and good, created order (Gen. 1:26-28). This is also called the cultural mandate, and the purpose whichever term is used, is to bring God’s kingdom rule (thy kingdom come thy will be done (Matt. 6:9-13), to earth. Adam failed miserably in his assignment (it was his fault the serpent was in the garden and able to tempt the woman in the first place), as we read about the fall in Genesis 3. The seed that would crush the serpent’s head was God’s promise of the good news to come in his Son, who would be God himself come to save His people from their sins (Matt. 1:21). First, there would be a period of time leading eventually to God calling Abram from Ur of the Chaldeans, and founding the people of Israel through his offspring.

 After the little blip of 430 years in Egypt (God is never in a hurry), most of that time in slavery, God in the Exodus rescued his people from slavery to bring them into a land of their own and introduce them to His law. They were also introduced to the blessings of obedience and curses of disobedience (Deut. 11) to God’s law. That didn’t turn out well. Starting with the book of Judges, it’s all downhill. But what’s the point of the miserable failings of the Israelites? To show us just what horrible sinners they were? No! They are us! That is the message of Israel, that our own obedience to God’s perfect law is impossible for fallen sinners alienated from God. But God wants to bless His people, so He in the person of Christ obeyed God’s law perfectly in our place, so that we by mere faith, by trust in Jesus, can have Christ’s righteousness, God’s very own righteousness as our righteousness! (Rom. 3)

 Which brings us to Jeremiah 31. The two covenants are fundamentally different, but the same. They are the progressive outworking of one eternal covenant in the Triune God, one promise to Adam and Eve, eventually leading to one legal, covenant agreement between God with Abram in Genesis 12. Since Abram was childless, he asked the Lord God how he could know His promises would come true. He, like all of us, needed some sign, some evidence. So the Lord told him to get some animals and He performed a ceremony with Abram showing He would accomplish both sides of the covenant promise since no human being or group of human beings could attain what was required, which was the perfect righteousness of God. That would require, as we see here in Jeremiah 31, the forgiveness of sins, the reconciliation of a holy God and sinful man. That was accomplished in Christ’s body given for us on a tree. We are told through Isaiah (53) 700 years before it happened how this would be accomplished:

5 But he was pierced for our transgressions,
    he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him,
    and by his wounds we are healed.

 And some 600 years before anyone would have a clue what this meant, God through Jeremiah tells us. God himself in and because of Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit (given to the church, His people at Pentecost, Acts 2) would transform their the hearts and minds, completely changing their inner being from one of hostility to God to love for Him and His law (I John 4:19, we love because he first loved us). The only way this inner transformation could take place is if our sin was paid for, and God’s wrath fully satisfied (propitiation). God would now no longer be hostile toward us because our sin, our offense against him, was wiped away, Christ become our righteousness, sanctification, and redemption (1 Cor. 1:31).

 None of this could have been known or predicted until Jesus rose from the dead. He rebuked the disciples on the road to Emmaus on the first Easter Sunday because they didn’t understand that the entire Old Testament was about Him, and told the rest of the disciples the same thing later as he ate with them (Luke 24). Now we know from Jeremiah that our affections have been completely changed from self to God, from our desires to His law, and we now know Him in Christ our Savior and Lord. And we all want to now go tell it on the mountain, over the hills and far away!