Again, we may learn from the vision the preparation needful for the prophet, who is to be the instrument of imparting divine life to a dead world.  The sorrowful sense of the widespread deadness must enter into a man’s spirit, and be ever present to him, in order to fit him for his work.  A dead world is not to be quickened on easy terms.  We must see mankind in some measure as God sees them if we are to do God’s work among them.  So-called Christian teachers, who do not believe that the race is dead in sin, or who, believing it, do not feel the tragedy of the fact, and the power lodged in their hands to bring the true life, may prophesy to the dry bones for ever, and there will be no shaking among them.

The great work of the gospel is to communicate divine life.  The details of the process in the vision are not applicable in this respect.  As we have pointed out, they are shaped after the pattern of the creation of Adam, but the essential point is that what the world needs is the impartation from God of His Spirit.  We know more than Ezekiel did as to the way by which that Spirit is given to men, and as to the kind of life which it imparts, and as to the connection between that life and holiness.  It is a diviner voice than Ezekiel’s which speaks to us in the name of God, and says to us with deeper meaning than the prophet of the Exile dreamed of, ‘I will put my Spirit in you, and ye shall live.’

But we may note that it is possible to have the outward form of a living body, and yet to have no life.  Churches and individuals may be perfectly organised and perfectly dead.  Creeds may be articulated most correctly, every bone in its place, and yet have no vitality in them.  Forms of worship may be punctiliously proper, and have no breath of life in them.  Religion must have a body, but often the body is not so much the organ as the sepulchre of the spirit.  We have to take heed that the externals do not kill the inward life.

Again, we note that this great act of life-giving is God’s revelation of His name,—­that is, of His character so far as men can know it.  ’Ye shall know that I am the Lord’ (vs. 13, 14).  God makes Himself known in His divinest glory when He quickens dead souls.  The world may learn what He is therefrom, but they who have experienced the change, and have, as it were, been raised from the grave to new life, have personal experience of His power and faithfulness so sure and sweet that henceforward they cannot doubt Him nor forget His grace.

III.  As to the bearing of the vision on the doctrine of the resurrection little need be said.  It does not necessarily presuppose the people’s acquaintance with that doctrine, for it would be quite conceivable that the vision had revealed to the prophet the thought of a resurrection, which had not been in his beliefs before.  The vision is so entirely figurative, that it cannot be employed as evidence that the idea of the resurrection of the dead was part of the Jewish beliefs at this date.  It does, however, seem most natural to suppose that the exiles were familiar with the idea, though the vision cannot be taken as a revelation of a literal resurrection of dead men.  For clear expectations of such a resurrection we must turn to such scriptures as Daniel xii. 2, 13.