Dry Bones

Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Bryan Broome, and we are talking today about Ezekiel 37, the valley of the dry bones.

Dem bones.

I feel a song coming on.

Moses Hogan descends from the ceiling.

Yeah, out of nowhere.

Everyone knows this chapter, if you’re at all familiar with black spirituals. I will not sing it, but it’s something about “Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones, oh hear the word of the Lord.” It’s really in the Bible and it sounds exactly like what you would think. There are these bones and they’re in a valley and the bones are very dry.

Not just kinda dry, like bones sometimes are.

These are really dry bones, so that makes them all the more difficult to speak life into, right?

Right, because moist bones are easier to bring to life.

Moist bones come back to life so much more easily. God does have a sense of humor and of irony, and sometimes he does put in things like this just to grab your attention. Let me read a little bit of it and then we can talk about it. This is Ezekiel 17 –

The hand of the LORD was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the LORD, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones and caused me to pass by them round about: and, behold, there were very many in the open valley, and, lo, they were very dry. 3And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord GOD, thou knowest.

Always a safe answer when you’re talking to God.

Again he said unto me, Prophesy upon these bones and say unto them, O ye dry bones, hear the word of the LORD.

We can stop there for a moment because most of what we need to talk about is wrapped up there.

I doubt that any of us has gone out into a cemetery and tried to have a conversation with all the dead people buried there. Sometimes you’ll see people kneeling at a grave, and if you draw close you’ll hear them talking to their dear beloved Great Aunt Tessie or whatever, but I think they think that somehow the gravesite is sort of a cell phone to heaven because Great Aunt Tessie of course is not physically in the ground. She’s gone on to heaven, to glory or whatever.

So question. Whenever you talk about a departed loved one it’s always Great Aunt Tessie. Is that a conscious choice?

Yes, it is, because I don’t know anyone who has a Great Aunt Tessie. It’s just safer that way.

Today I wanted to use a random girl’s name as an example in my class, and it took me a long time to find a girl’s name that was not represented in my class. I think I ended up with Cindy. I do know some Cindys, but not in my class. I use Ned now for guys’ names because I don’t know any Neds. I think I tried Ed and Ted but then, “My dad is named that.” I can’t use that anymore.

So you’re talking to Great Aunt Tessie, but I don’t think any of those people actually think that the grave is going to open and Great Aunt Tessie is going to step up, either as a skeleton, a zombie, a living corpse, or a resurrected person. It’s just this thing we do because sentimentally it makes us feel better. I think we all understand that when you put the body in the tomb, it’s dead and it’s not coming back anytime soon, that it would in fact take an act of God in the most literal sense to bring that person back to life in any form whatever.

That’s represented in the phrase “It’s dead and buried.” It is well and truly put to rest.

Or as my girls would say, “It’s dead – d-e-d dead.”

D-r-t – Dead Right There.

This is the image that God uses in this case to represent Israel in her spiritual depravity, her spiritual covenantal death, and one that the whole Bible uses. We can think of Paul in Ephesians 2 – “And you hath he quickened who were dead in trespasses and sins…”

Perhaps we’ll come back to some such phrases later, but it’s a common enough idea. Sin is death. Salvation is life. To pass from death to life is to be born again, to be regenerated, to be saved in that specific sense of the word.

So God chose these bones and asks can these bones that represent Israel live? The proper answer where things divine are concerned probably is, “Well, Lord, it depends, doesn’t it? Not normally. Not in the normal flow of your providence they don’t. It’s dead and buried. It’s not coming back, but Lord, you’re God and you can do anything. They could live if you wanted them to.” So the Lord said, “Prophesy to the bones.”

So there’s Ezekiel on not exactly a graveyard because the bones aren’t buried, but perhaps a mass battlefield, someplace where there’s an awful lot – many many – unburied very dry bones, and Ezekiel gets to prophesy and preach to them.

I suppose for people of great faith or people who have seen lots of miracles this might not seem like much of a challenge. “Well, God said it. What’s the big deal?” God tells his servants to do lots of things. Marry a prostitute, walk around naked, eat dung, or actually eat food baked over dung, but we confuse that sometimes.

Still gross.

Yeah, it’s still gross. Sometimes they seem gross. Sometimes they just seem foolish. “Okay, I’m here in the middle of all these bones and I am preaching to them.” We’re not told all that he might have said, but he at least says, “Hear the word of the Lord,” and there’s a little bit more.

Thus saith the Lord GOD unto these bones; Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live. And I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live; and ye shall know that I am the LORD.

Assuming that’s it, that’s a pretty short sermon. And Ezekiel said, “So I prophesied as I was commanded.” This was not God’s advice. It was not a suggestion. It was not a good thought for the day. It was not, “Well, you’re killing time. How about this?” Ezekiel was commanded to do this thing, to preach to stuff that’s dead, to preach where there’s no one because the souls have fled. There’s no life. There’s no chemical spark. There’s nothing except dry rotting calcium, magnesium, carbon and whatever else goes into these things, and yet he prophesies. And as he prophesies, something happened.

Perhaps this is a good time to define prophesy. To prophesy is to speak the word of the Lord by inspiration. In that respect it does not differ significantly from preaching, as long as the preaching takes up the word of God and uses it, except it is absolutely inspired and therefore infallible, whereas preachers can make mistakes. But both are taking up the word of the Lord and presenting it to God’s people.

“But these people are dead.”

Yeah, well, you know what? Oftentimes preachers are preaching to dead people too, and that’s kind of the point here. Not everyone to whom we bring the gospel is spiritually alive. A lot are spiritually dead. A lot have stone hearts and deaf ears and are incapable of hearing, and so with these bones. And yet when he prophesied he said –

And as I prophesied there was a noise, and behold a shaking, and the bones came together, bone to his bone. And when I beheld, lo, the sinews and the flesh came up upon them, and the skin covered them above, but there was no breath in them.

That would make a good science-fiction effect for some movie sometime.

Great. Now they’re intact corpses, still dead.

Still dead, but we’re so much closer, aren’t we?

Right, just like the moist bones were better than the dry bones.

Isn’t that it? “We’re almost there.” No, we’re not almost there. The gulf is still infinite. There is no human device that can turn these dead corpses into living people – not science, not magic, not eloquence, not entertainment, not information, not better clothes and better environment, not a better education or more nutrition or more vitamins in their food.

Not improved society.

Yeah, improved society isn’t going to do it. There is actually literally nothing that anybody can do unless God intervenes, so God says something else to him. Ezekiel notes, “There’s no breath in these bodies,” and God said –

Prophesy unto the wind..

Now, it is the wind he’s talking to, but the word for wind, spirit, and breath are the same in Hebrew, as they are the same in Greek, so there’s a constant play and pun on these words throughout scripture. The Holy Spirit is the breath of God. He’s the Spirit of God like unto the soul of a man.

For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? Even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God.

And so we go back and forth. Here we’re talking about wind, and yet it’s more than wind because wind can’t do what this wind is about to do.

Prophesy unto the wind, prophesy, son of man, and say to the wind, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live. So I prophesied as he commanded me…

We’re not told exactly what he said to the wind. “Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.” We have very short sermons here. I think that’s something we should note and probably note again later. It’s not the length of the sermon. It’s not how many words. It’s not how he says it. It’s not how he holds his mouth or his countenance or what clothes he has on or how the spotlights are hitting him or what music is in the background. The words are short. They’re to the point. They mean what they say. They’re just impossible.

In the normal ordering of things as we are used to God’s providence, you can talk to dead bodies and you can talk to the wind all day and nothing’s happening, until God commands you to do something and intends to use you. So he says –

I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them and they lived and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army. Then he said unto me, Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel…

Then he goes on to compare the rescue or salvation of his people not only out of captivity, but out of captivity to sin and darkness and unbelief, to what Ezekiel has experienced. We who are dead in sins need resurrection, and the method that God will use is two-fold. There are words. There is prophecy. There is preaching. And there is the work of the breath of God, the Spirit of God. There is the sovereign supernatural work of the Spirit, of which we can see the effects, as Jesus tells us. You can’t see the wind, whither it cometh or whither it goeth, but you can see its effects, and here we see the effects. These dead people are alive.

You probably know because 1) they’re breathing, and 2) they probably start moving around and start looking at each other and start feeling themselves. “Wait, wasn’t I dead a minute ago? Bob, hey! What are you doing here? Weren’t you dead? I was dead, I think,” and they start talking and rustling around, moving their feet, all those things that living people do, because they’re alive.

If Ezekiel had gone out there at the point where they were dead bodies, he could have picked them up and moved them, and grabbed their arms and made their arms go wide and wave, and made the mouth move and do a little ventriloquism – “Hi Bob, how are you today?” It’s not working.

This is the supernatural act of God because that’s what’s needed, and nothing else can accomplish it. Only God can bring life out of death. Only God can bring life out of non-life.

We’re talking here about a doctrine that is as old as the gospel, as old in fact as the world, which received renewed attention with Augustine in his writings against Pelagius, and was highlighted most certainly by the Reformation. The doctrine is called total depravity or total inability, and it simply means this – although men who walk around and breathe and talk and smile and bat their eyes are physically alive, outside of Christ they are spiritually and covenantally dead.

They do not love God. They have no faith in God. They do not fear God. They do not seek God. There is none that seeketh after God. They’re all gone another way. They have together become unprofitable. There is none that doeth good, no not one. Their throat is an open sepulcher and so on, Paul tells us in Romans 3. We’re dead in trespasses and sins. We walk according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that works in the children of disobedience.

There is nothing in there. There’s nothing to grab onto. There’s nothing to appeal to. There’s nothing to improve. We have in our whole array of human experience and human accomplishments nothing that will bring people out of this spiritual death into spiritual life.

We’ve already talked about some practical things that people have tried – entertainment, love and compassion, a cup of Starbucks, smoking lights, social programs, a better environment, education, apologetics based in rational reasoning. “If we just argue with the corpse, maybe the corpse will come alive.”

Surely the corpse will see the truth and see that it is better to be alive.

Yes, and will thus choose. There’s the problem. There are two problems here. First, the corpse is not perceiving anything, being dead and all, so you can present your arguments and the corpse will not and cannot come to the realization that it is in fact dead, not by itself. You can argue that and you may get some kind of formal nod of, “Yeah, I understand what you’re saying,” but dead things don’t make spiritual evaluations that are at all reliable.

Even if they could and did, that still leaves you infinity away from having that corpse will itself into life. “Oh, I perceive that I am dead. I will now by an act of my will, an act of my emotions, my conscience, my efforts or something will make myself alive. Thank you for telling me I’m dead. Now I will choose and make myself alive.” Choice has got to go in there. It may be more than choice, but it at least has to be a choice. “I will now choose life over death.”

Corpses don’t do that. When Lazarus was in the grave, nobody went in and argued with him about how undesirable the state of death was. Ezekiel did not argue with these folks. It would have done no good.

Of course, the ironic thing perhaps from an unbeliever’s point of view, and sort of from a Christian point of view, is that in theory preaching to dead bones shouldn’t work either, because why?

They can’t hear you.

They can’t hear you. They don’t listen. They don’t believe. They can’t receive the Spirit. “But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God for they are foolishness unto him; neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.”

So the very thing that this man needs to come back to life, which is the work of the Spirit of God, comes through the preaching of the gospel, which he refuses to hear because he cannot hear because he’s dead in sins. This is the paradox of the gospel and in part why Paul calls it the foolishness of preaching (1 Corinthians 1). God chose by the foolishness of preaching to save those who are believing.

God picked something that should not, from our point of view, in itself accomplish anything, but when we speak the truth about his Son crucified and risen, God delights to use those words in ways we cannot understand to bypass the whole “Hey, he’s dead” thing and to produce life. What he requires of us is to speak those words faithfully.

It would be nice if we spoke them well. It would be nice if we spoke them with humility and love and compassion. It wouldn’t hurt if we were a little bit entertaining and civil when we spoke, and you can make good arguments in your homiletics class for being real and being human and treating the person you’re talking to like a real person. That’s all great and fine and part of recognizing the image of God in the person you’re talking to, and yet all of that stuff in and of itself does not accomplish anything, nor does it actually add to the power of the simple act of preaching. God may honor it, but it’s not in itself something that ignites life.

It is the preached message which is about Jesus crucified, risen, reigning, coming again – that Jesus, the eternal Son of God, become man. That message has the power to impart supernatural covenantal resurrection life.

Let’s dig into this idea of covenant life and death a little more, because as you were saying earlier, throughout scripture we have the image of sin is death and salvation is life, and sometimes that comes across as a metaphor in the wrong direction, where with salvation you feel alive because to us life and death is of utmost seriousness. We have that phrase, “This is a matter of life and death,” but to us physical death seems too ultimate, and physical life seems taken for granted. So how can we better understand life and death as covenantal states?

If we go back to my favorite chapter in the Bible…

Genesis 1?

Chapter 3. Eve before the tree is being bombarded with intellectual arguments to push her out of her state of innocence into a state of would-be autonomy. “You stand on neutral ground. Fall back on your own neutral reason and make a choice about God.”

Sometimes I think without thinking about it – I’m not being terribly critical, but I think we just need to say, “Wait. Think what you’re saying here,” – we think, “Oh, so man died when he ate of the forbidden tree.” It depends on what you mean. We say, “Well, he died spiritually.” He did not die physically. In fact, that didn’t happen then and it didn’t happen for another 900+ years.

But I think we need to be careful there because Eve, and then Adam later, when they turned their backs on God, when they said, “Oh yes, there’s this neutral state where God’s not sovereign and God’s not Lord and I don’t actually have to God. I don’t have to presuppose his every revelation. I can begin for myself and make my own decisions. I can be a big girl and not listen to authority or be bossed around by this person who claims to be sovereign,” that’s when she spiritually died.

Boss babe.

Yeah. That’s where she cut her ties to the life that’s in God. Then what? Some people are surprised when I point out, “You know, she sinned before she ate the fruit.”

“But no, eating the fruit was the first sin.”

“No, eating the fruit broke the covenant. There’s a difference.”

It was the first outward visible sin, yes, but sin begins in the heart. It wasn’t that her hand randomly reached up, grabbed this piece of fruit and shoved it in her mouth and suddenly she said, “Whoa, how did that happen? Oh look, I’m sinning.” She actually thought about this. She made a decision out of her own heart, which she had already alienated from God. She was already in sin. She was already in rebellion, playing out this would-be autonomy, but once she was, what she did was inevitable.

Without the grace of God to restrain her, without the Holy Spirit rebuking that and somehow turning it back – a thing that wasn’t in place yet – she could do exactly what she did do. Without the life of God animating her, guiding her, moving her, she was on her own resources and those were insufficient, so she did what she at that point would inevitably do. She broke the covenant by taking the sacrament and defiling it.

There are many things you can say about sacraments, but one thing about sacraments is they sum up the whole covenant. If you receive the sacrament you are receiving the covenant, at least formally, and if you reject the sacrament you are breaking the covenant. When God ordained circumcision he said, “If the baby is not circumcised on the 8th day he has broken my covenant. He’s not to be reckoned among the covenant people.”

The same thing can apply to baptism in the new covenant, or the Lord’s Supper. If you purposely abstain from the supper week after week, month after month, even year after year, you’ve cut yourself off from the covenant. That is, all of God’s people can look at you and say, “Sorry friend, you’re not a Christian because that’s not what the Holy Spirit works in Christians. The Holy Spirit works in Christians submission to the outward forms, particularly these outward forms.”

It’s not that the bread and wine are magic, keeping you in the covenant.

No, any more than that original piece of fruit was magic, but it was a dividing line. You step over this line by this one action, that side is disobedience. Here’s the door out of the covenant. It wasn’t that the fruit was bad. The fruit was a chance to grow.

You can look at that and say, “I won’t touch that until God gives it to me,” and thus by denying self grow in your walk with God. Instead, Adam and Eve broke the covenant law, but they broke it because the sin was already there in their hearts, so they died spiritually and then they died covenantally. God bans them from the Tree of Life, curses the planet and universe for their sake, curses them to death, but then comes the promise of salvation in the midst of all that.

What does that covenantal thing and the spiritual thing mean? Spiritual death means that God has abandoned you to your sins. He has become your enemy. He makes no promises or commitments besides those general ones that he makes in the gospel; that is, you can’t complain, “But God loves everybody and therefore he’s going to save me.” No, that’s kind of what you just threw away.

You just threw away your relationship with God, any kind of good friendly profitable relationship. You’ve made yourself your enemy. You’re now at war with God. The carnal mind is enmity against God and is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. You can’t keep God’s law. You can’t choose Christ. You can’t do anything pleasing to God. Your whole heart and life are dominated by contempt for God, alienation from God, and God in your life and in history will work that out, since that’s what you’ve chosen.

Ultimately it ends not only in physical death, but probably far more seriously it ends in eternal death in this place called the lake of fire or hell, where God is still there pouring out wrath on you. You are not out of God’s presence, you’re just out of his blessing. It’s not a happy thing. It’s not something to joke about. It is a very, very serious thing. Christians have often been mocked for speaking of hell, but the Bible does and Jesus spoke about hell more than anyone else in the Bible. It is the final outpouring of God’s wrath and judgement against those who hate him and who will not live in his covenant.

We see this worked out in our lives. We are not under the authority of the pastors and elders God has put here. We’re not under the preaching of the word. We have no access to the sacraments. We have no claim upon the love and services of the church, although the church may be very gracious to us and give them anyway, depending. More to the point, the world knows we’re not Christians. We’re not believers, and the church is not entitled to treat us as such.

Jesus said, “Of such let him be unto thee as the Gentile and a publican.” Paul said, “Deliver such one to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, with the hope that the soul may be saved in the day of Jesus Christ,” but that’s on God’s terms and God’s time.

So when we’re talking about death, these are the things we’re talking about, and they’re very serious, and the only way out is the word and Spirit of God, which we can sum up with the one word ‘gospel.’ This is why we need to be really, really, really clear on what the gospel is, and not try to adorn it, pollute it, substitute something else for it, add to it.

Or help it out.

Exactly, help it out. “But see, people don’t like the gospel so I’m going to ….” No, you’re not going to make it better, you’re going to make it worse.

There’s an old line from King of the Hill. I’ve never watched more than one episode of this, but essentially he goes to a Christian rock and roll show and he goes, “You don’t understand. You’re not making Christianity better, you’re just making rock and roll worse!”

And that’s exactly it.

I will reserve my good opinion of certain Christian rock and roll outfits.

Of course, yes, exceptions that prove the rule always.

Then perhaps you two can come up with some examples. I’ll give you two. Now, I am a full supporter of the creationist movement, the young earth movement, all of that. Some of these ministries, especially I believe Ken Ham’s, do a great deal of good, but Ken Ham is a presuppositionalist too. If you look at his materials and say, “Can creation science and the evidences from it ever lead a man to Christ?” he’ll say, “Absolutely not. Don’t waste your time even trying that. These are things that are helpful for believers and things we can use to silence the opponents, but they don’t bring anybody to Christ.”

But I have seen, particularly in the original generation, a good deal of, “Well, if we just show them this evidence that the earth is young…” or “If we find Noah’s ark…” or you run through the list of things associated with creation science and say, “This is what we need to get our church excited about.” Again, I’m not saying there’s not some good stuff to learn, and some of it is very useful and important to know about, but that’s not the gospel.

The other example – and this was a movement that I, against my will, was involved with because I had to work for a gentleman who was a leader in the movement – I won’t name it, but it amounted to an idolization of America’s founding fathers. The people who initiated the movement went back and read some of the writings of the founding fathers and found in there basic principles of life and government and said, “Oh wow, this is what made America great. Let’s go and see if we can find them in the Bible.” And having to their satisfaction found them in the Bible, they began to teach these principles and America’s Christian history as a way of reforming the church.

What they weren’t doing was actually preaching the gospel – not to say that none of them ever did, but that was certainly not the thrust of the movement. I know, I was associated with some of these people for a number of years.

I have a feeling I know which group this is, and I’ll ask you afterwards.

Okay. The gentleman I worked with was a complete gentleman and I don’t want to say anything bad about him, but there was one lady I remember who said – and this went on a video they made – “Oh, I didn’t even know Christ until I studied America’s Christian history, and then I became a Christian.”

I was thinking, “That doesn’t sound good. I’m not sure what happened there, but that’s suspicious at the very least. Which of the founding fathers preached the gospel to you?”

We need to talk about what you mean by “became a Christian,” what you mean by Christian and Christ.

Yes. The video they had produced was to popularize this movement and I saw the finished product and it was well-done enough – that is, in technical and artistic terms – but as I watched it there were only two people in it who explicitly mentioned Christ and the gospel. They were the sons of this gentleman I worked for and they were also two of my students, and they actually spoke of Jesus and the cross. The others talked about Christian principles and character and God’s providence in America’s history, none of which is the gospel.

Some of you may know what I’m talking about. If you do, run. I don’t think it’s ever going to become a major movement. I suspect with time it will die out. Did they do some good things here and there? Yes, I suppose, but other people had already been doing much of the same thing in a better context.

I remember one lady wanted to put her son in our school and it was good. She came and asked me what I taught. Very few parents have done that, so I commend her greatly for that. But what she did was sit down and say, “Well now, do you teach the providential view of history?” She’s talking to a Calvinist from a Reformed denomination that goes back to Germany and the Reformation, and who’s been a Bible teacher and done pulpit supply in said denomination for quite a while. I tried not to smile, and I assured her that I did. The problem was that her definition of providence was not biblical.

The Heidelberg Catechism speaks of God’s providence as “his almighty and ever present power, whereby, as with his hand, he still upholds heaven and earth and all creatures, and so governs them that…” and then gives a list of all the various things that happen, and then sums it up, “Indeed all things come to us not by chance but by his fatherly hand.” In other words, providence is God’s constant ordering of every single thing in the universe, from the smallest subatomic particle to the movement of galaxies, from life to death.

That’s not what these people understood by providence. They understood that sometimes God poofs into history and does really nifty things, then poofs out again. I know this again because I asked the sons of my boss and they said that’s how they describe providence. If their father is a leader, they should be good sources on how this is being communicated.

It’s tricky because a lot of these examples that we can come up with about mistaking what the gospel is or trying to help out the gospel can be really good things on their own.

In their proper context.

Right – quality rhetoric, quality music in a worship service, quality light shows. I don’t necessarily think those belong in a worship service…

Quality air conditioning and heating.

Oh, those do belong in a worship service. I can think also of classical schools. I think as far as an education goes, some of the classical schools are doing a really good job. Are they giving you a Christian education? Are they giving you the gospel in all areas of life? That’s a different question.

That’s a very different question, one we’ll pursue at another time, lest we lose a lot of listeners.

Oh, we will, guaranteed, either way.

Emily has brought those up. Bryan, does anything come to your mind of places where you’ve seen people trying to bring in converts by things that were not, strictly speaking, the gospel?

Oh, sure. I grew up Pentecostal so there’s any number of examples from that – health, healing, wealth, prosperity from any number of supposed root causes – but outside of that I’d also say that a lot more recently I’ve seen where it’s like, “We really need to focus on making Christianity masculine again to get men involved in church.” It’s really not about worshiping the Christ that we see in scripture. It’s about, “Christ was manly. He did tough guy things. He was like John Wayne, but in Palestine.” That’s not the ticket.

Being truthful about who Jesus is is good.

Culture war things on both sides, where it’s basically, “Jesus is really the catalyst for this social program that I want to do. Jesus would have supported it, so you should support it, too,” and the list goes on. There’s just any number of things in that same vein.

You can think of the worship wars, too. Some people will die on the hill of singing hymns in church. It’s like, “On what basis? How are you judging your hymns? Why are you throwing out the modern hymns just because they’ve been written more recently? Why are you implying that it’s sinful to use a guitar rather than a piano?” and that sort of thing.

Merely implying? Good.

I was putting it gently. Is our worship acceptable to God because we have used the right instruments and we’ve dressed correctly and our sermon is the right length? Or is it by the blood of Christ that we are worshiping?

I come back even to the ideas of love and compassion. Francis Schaeffer, following Christ’s farewell sermon, speaks of love as our final apology. You know the song, “They will know we are Christians by our love.” Jesus actually says something like that, but he does not say that they will come to faith because of that.

There’s a passage in Deuteronomy, I think in the song of Moses, “For their rock is not as our Rock, even our enemies themselves being judges.”

Unbelievers can look at us and say, “You guys are weird. There’s something different about you. It may even be something we kind of like and kind of is pleasant.” That’s a far cry from repenting of their sins and trusting in Jesus. It’s a real thing and God may use it as a springboard for more real things. It may get us a hearing, but when that hearing comes we better be not talking about, “Come to us because we’ll always love you and accept you.” That’s not the gospel either.

As though our love and acceptance is so great a thing. Jesus’ love and acceptance is a lot bigger of a deal.

And it comes on his terms, which involves this cross thing.

And even more so it comes with his power to meet his standard.

Yes. I think we should not leave this without mentioning something else that’s not the gospel, or at least often is not presented in a way that you could call it the gospel, and that’s the so-called five points of Calvinism. “So you are totally depraved, incapable of believing. God may or may not have predestined you to eternal life. Jesus may or may not have died for you, but if he did he will be sending you the Holy Spirit to convict you of your sins, and once you come to Christ he will never let go of you.”

Whether you like it or not.

Yeah. It’s possible that someone could find the gospel in there if God is gracious, but it’s a stretch.

It’s more a description of the mechanics of the gospel.

Yes, that’s exactly what it is.

It’s the difference between “My car went from El Paso to Austin TX,” and “Here’s how fuel is converted into energy.”

Yeah. Walking up to people and saying, “Let me tell you about Jesus” is still what God would have us do. You can do it from the pulpit if you’re ordained to the office. You should do it in truth. You should do it reverently, because the way you’re saying it and the context you’re saying it in should be influenced by what you’re saying or you’ll get kind of an odd disconnect.

And yet in the end it is the truth the words represent, that the eternal Son of God became man and died in the place of sinners, a substitutionary atonement, and that by his resurrection life we can be forgiven, we can have new lives, we can be born again, we can go to heaven and be with Jesus forever. We will be raised from the dead and enjoy a new heaven and new earth.

It doesn’t take that long, and yet sometimes we hesitate, especially those of us who are Calvinists. We hesitate because, “Well, there’s so much theology that needs to go into this. There’s so much worldview.”

You know, that’s for discipling. At the moment, when you have three minutes and the bus is coming, that’s not the time to despair and say, “Well, I obviously can’t say anything because…” This is where Inigo Montoya would say, “There is too much. Let me sum up,” and you can sum up pretty much the way I just did.

Paul said, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved and thy house.” He did a quick summary and then spent another hour or two later on, but it was enough to start the process. When Peter’s audience said, “Men and brethren, what shall we do?” he said, “ Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost. For the promise is unto you, and to your children, and to all that are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call.”

Now true, that audience already knew a good deal about the gospel, about biblical theology and historical theology, and yet what Peter had to say, even his sermon is not that long. It didn’t take a couple hours. He could get to his point pretty fast, and so can we. What we need is boldness, love for the lost, concern for the soul made in the image of God who made be bound for hell if we don’t say something.

Too often I think Calvinists of all various stripes have fallen back. We’ve been accused of this and we say, “No, no, no, no,” and yet, “Well, they’re predestined if God’s going to save them. He doesn’t need me. It will happen.”

“You don’t do that with anything else in life.”

“Well, if I’m going to eat, God will provide. It’s predestined, right? I don’t need a job. I don’t need money.”

He predestined that you would go to the grocery store and cook the food. Put the chicken in the crockpot.

In a sense that brings us back to the dry bones in Ezekiel, which is that God has ordained means for how the dry bones put on flesh and are filled with breath. It’s the preaching of the word of the Lord, which is the work of Christ.

Yeah, preaching Jesus.

That’s all the time we have, so let’s do some recommendations and run off.

I’m going to recommend putting a whole chicken in a crockpot. I was afraid to. David and I have been on this kick of, “Let’s eat as many whole pieces of food as we can figure out,” so I bought a whole chicken and I was like, “I’ve never cooked a whole chicken before. I don’t know how this works,” so I did the magic Googling and just put the chicken in the crockpot on top of some potatoes, and it was great.

That’s awesome. We’ve been doing similar. We have an Instant Pot, so it’s like an afternoon deal for her. She’ll cook the whole chicken in the Instant Pot, debone it, put the bones in with some vegetable scraps and stuff and make broth in the same thing. It takes like two hours.

We’re going to do that. We saved the bones.

It’s a game changer for real. We make so much soup with it. It’s great. She also borrowed her mom’s Nesco, which if you’re not from the Midwest is like a crockpot on steroids. It’s like a little convection oven that goes on your countertop. She put a whole 23-lb turkey in there. She didn’t put salt or pepper or anything on it, and it came out perfectly delicious. Cooking whole birds is the way that it should be done, I’m convinced at this point.

I guess this is the recommendation from all of us. I’m going to go for an older-fashioned way of cooking whole birds and that’s in the oven. You kind of slit the skin and slide some pats of butter underneath it. Of course, first of all you’ve pulled out all the things that aren’t supposed to stay in there. Sometimes they actually come in little packages in the bird.

The giblets and stuff?

Yeah, all the giblets. Get that out. Some people don’t know it has to come out. Then you cut up mushrooms, onions, celery, garlic, and you can use bread crumbs, and you shove it all inside that cavity.

That was the weirdest part. I’m going to be real about handling the former bird. It’s not just meat from the grocery store anymore. It’s like this was a living bird, and there were its ribs. It’s a little weird, I’m not gonna lie.

It’s a little disconcerting at first.

People have looked at me and said, “What is that?”

If it helps, you do get more used to it the more you do it. It’s just exposure therapy, basically.

I’m hoping so.

I have to say, we did a duck last Christmas and it had all of its guts inside, and we were like, “Oh wow, that’s just disgusting.”

And then you put it in your big roasting dish, salt and pepper all over the place, and then you pour – and this is a great place to use your chicken broth that you were talking about, if you already have some saved, or you can buy it canned – you pour that around. And also whatever vegetables didn’t go in the bird go around the bird, along with some potatoes, and again more salt and pepper on everything. Then you just cook it.

Every now and then you reach in and kind of pull the tray out, and take some of all of that wonderful juices that are all around, and you just kind of baste it all over…

With the bulb-y thing.

Yeah, the bulb-y thing. If you have a bulb-y thing that’s great. I just generally use a spoon or a ladle actually, because our bulb-y things keep getting broken. And you just let it cook, and it takes a while but it’s wonderful. People come and say, “You made this?”

“Yeah, it’s not that hard, actually,” but boy does it taste good, and it will last a few days, depending on how many people there are in your family. The cooking of one big thing – there’s much to be said for this. You can make side dishes if you want.

There’s a reason that A Christmas Carol ends with buying the big bird.

“There never was such a goose!”

“Twice the size of Tiny Tim.”

“A delightful boy. I love to talk to him.”

Okay, I think those are our recommendations.

Thank you guys so much for this conversation. Excellent recommendations all ‘round. Thank you also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. Thank you to our financial supporters. We appreciate you keeping the show rolling. If you’d like to join their number you can visit our website, anchor.fm/haltingtowardzion or our Patreon, patreon.com/haltingtowardzion.

If you’d like to get in touch with us for any reason you can send us an email at [email protected]. We’d love to hear from you, and we hope you’ll join us again next week. Thanks for listening.