these bones are the whole house of Israel:  behold, they say, Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost:  we are cut off for our parts. 12.  Therefore prophesy and say unto them, Thus saith the Lord God; Behold, O My people, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel. 13.  And ye shall know that I am the Lord, when I have opened your graves, O My people, and brought you up out of your graves. 14.  And shall put My spirit in you, and ye shall live, and I shall place you in your own land:  then shall ye know 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.’