Miscellaneous

Dry Bones Revivified

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels, and Sermons

Lesson: 1-1

Genre: Talk

Track: 1

Dictation Name: Dry Bones Revivified 00984

Location/Venue:

Year:

[Audience Leader] Now we have our last speaker, Dr. Rushdoony. Rousas, we receive you. (applause)

[Rushdoony] Before I begin I want to express my appreciation for what John Lofton had to say. Several of our staff besides John have been confronted with this issue of operation rescue. It is sad to realize that so many people in the church do not see the difference between revolution and regeneration. They do not stop to think about the fact that in New Testament times, you had the most radical laws in all history with regard to birth and abortion. The absolute assertion of the state’s rights to say who should be born and who should die. The closest approximation to that that we have ever had is in Red China today. And yet, nowhere, nowhere in the New Testament, are believers told that they should stage sit-ins and demonstrations against this, but rather to go forth with the message: “Ye must be born again,” and: “If ye love me, keep my commandments.”

This is the only way we are going to change the world. We are not the Marxists, we don’t believe in revolution and revolutionary tactics, we are Christians, and we believe in the sovereign grace of God unto salvation; we believe that only His regenerating power can transform society. And what hope is there for the world, as John pointed out, if Christians begin to borrow the methodology of the world? When you borrow methodology, you also borrow the philosophy, the false faith.

Our subject in this session is Dry Bones Revivified. We have in Ezekiel 37 a remarkable vision of dry bones; Ezekiel tells us: “Lo, they were very dry.” God then spoke to Ezekiel saying: “3 And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord God, thou knowest. 4 Again he said unto me, Prophesy upon these bones, and say unto them, O ye dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.”

That is a preachers task, that is an evangelists task, that is a Christians. We are very often speaking to dry bones, but we rely on the Spirit of God, not demonstrations. “5 Thus saith the Lord God unto these bones; Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live.” As Ezekiel spoke the bones came together by the power of God and they stood up, we are told, an exceeding great army. Even so, God declared to Ezekiel, the whole house of Israel would in time be revivified and would again possess the land.

This vision has rightly been seen as a type of God’s power and will to take a dead people in any age, and make them alive. Modern man began with the renaissance and then the Enlightenment his departure from God. In time an open rejection was clearly affirmed, and man was now supposedly freed for his happy self affirmation, the gospel according to yourself.

It became apparent in time that to reject God means finally to reject everything. Because all things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made, the rejection of God means ultimately the rejection of all things, including life itself. (?) clearly rejected man. It’s routine premises in much of the work of the painters especially in our age has been deformation and dehumanization.

In the works of Picasso for example, the human form and image are broken up and stripped of life and personality. Incidentally, the only time Picasso ever painted a woman to look like a woman and to be attractive was when he first fell in love with her. When he wanted her to leave he began to paint her a ’la Picasso; and one girl knew when her time was over and she was being discarded for another mistress, when the Picasso style came in. Deformation and dehumanization.

In novels, the mind of man is now commonly supplanted by his genital organs, so that a radical dehumanization is routine. The protagonists of Shakespeare’s plays and Dostoyevsky’s novels have been replaced by Portnoy and his sensual itch. In the name of artistic realism, we have seen the triumph of de-realization. As Harry’s noted, and I quote: “A first and key determination of such art is its negativity. It is ‘anti,’ anti religion, anti morality, anti nature, and in the end even anti art.” One modern poet produced a volume of poems called ‘anti poetry.’

The world of art is the world of dry bones; so is the world of modern education, the world of dry bones. It sees man’s salvation in education. The problems in man’s life and being we are told are due to ignorance, not sin; and so it is a valley of dry bones. Our modern politics is Messianic, it sees salvation by humanistic legislation, salvation by statist works; so that this realm too is the realm of the dead, of dry bones.

In the church, modernism and antinomianism and other evils prevail, and too often emotionalism becomes a substitute for faith. The dry bones are in evidence in pulpit and in pew. I visited in a city not too long ago, where a couple was church-dropping, visiting one church after another in order to find a church where ‘things were happening.’ They wanted to be spectators, not part of the action.

Jacque (Marten?) said a few years ago and I quote: “Sin postulates a world of its own, deprived of God as it is of itself.” Sin always leads to death. To the death of men and nations, to a dead world, and the only alternative is the sovereign grace of God. We cannot approach God as a smorgasbord table, as a resource filled asset whereby men can pick up and choose what they need. As I have repeatedly pointed out to one group after another, Jesus Christ is not our super fire and life insurance agent. He is our Lord, our Sovereign, our Creator, our Redeemer. No half God is real, and Jesus cannot be our savior if we will not have Him as our Lord.

Either God claims us totally, commands us absolutely, and is to be believed and obeyed in His every word, or He is not our God. Man cannot live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God. The alternative to that is not to live, to be a part of the world of dry bones. If we pick and choose what we shall believe and practice in His law word, we make ourselves God over God; we sit in judgement over Him and His commandments. We try to remake the Lord in our own image, and this was the great temptation of Satan to our Lord. “Make yourself over in the image that the people want! Turn these stones into bread. Don’t you know that there are poor people in the world? How can you expect them to believe in you when they are hungry?”

The devil was the first liberation theologian. “Meet their economic needs, and then you can talk to them about faith. Cast Thyself down from the highest pinnacle of the temple; let the angels pick you up before your feet hit the ground, then they will believe. Make faith unnecessary! When they have economic problems, when you ask them to believe things they cannot see, you are being very unfair. My way is a better way; give them cradle to grave security.” (or as the English say, womb to tomb security) “Enable them to walk by sight, and finally, bow down and worship me. Recognize the rightness of my plan of saving man.” Too often that becomes the gospel of the church, not the gospel of scripture.

But it is a glorious thing to be called and commanded by God, rather than asking God to serve us. But it is not always an easy thing. Saul of Tarsus was a wealthy man; Rabbi (Cloustner?) pointed out in his study of Saul, pointed out that from the evidence he came from a millionaire family, one of the wealthiest of the Jewish aristocracy; Paul tells us he was a citizen by birth. In those days, citizenship was restricted to a small handful of people. But this Saul of Tarsus became Paul the apostle, a poor and persecuted man, for the Lord; but also man’s power was set aside, man’s wealth was set aside by Paul, for the power of God, the grace of God, and the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Jacque (Mardain?) gave a vivid description of what happens when God’s grace comes to man. He said, and I quote: “The Lord is generous; His grace bursts like a hand grenade, and with one burst makes many victims.” You are never the same again. Your life is shattered, because it has to be remade by the Lord. To be the object of God’s grace and mercy does not allow us to go on living out lives in independence from God. Grace places us under God’s mandate to serve Him with all our heart, mind, and being, and our neighbor as ourselves.

Our Lord declares: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment, and the second is like unto it: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

These are among the most misused and misread words of the whole Bible; because as people repeat these endlessly, they act as though our Lord said: “The law is finished it doesn’t mean anything, all you have to do is to love your neighbor, and love is a feeling.” So you can say: “I love you Lord, I love you dear friend and neighbor.” It is like men and women I’ve had to counsel who were involved in adultery, and who when I spoke to them were ready to cry. How easily they get emotional, and how hard I always get when they do. Because I know emotionalism is one of the great evils, subterfuges, used in our time. And when they say: “But I love my wife” or “I love my husband” I say: “No you don’t. Because love is the fulfilling, putting into force of the law. Your adultery reveals contempt for your spouse, not love. So don’t give me that kind of garbage.”

So when our Lord says the sum of the law is the love of God and the love of our neighbor, He is saying: “This is what it means to keep the law. If you love me, keep my commandments. If you love your neighbor, keep my commandments with respect to them.” It is not the substitution of a feeling of love for the law of God, but rather to obey God’s law reveals our love for the Lord and our love for our neighbor. Love is the fulfilling, that is the putting into force, of God’s law.

James, the brother of our Lord, tells us: “What does it profit my brethren, though a man say he hath faith, and hath not works; can faith save him? If a brother or sister be naked and destitute of daily food, and one of you say unto him: “Depart in peace, be warmed and filled.” Not withstanding you give them not those things which are needful to the body, what doth it profit? Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead; being alone.”

Scripture is clear that our faith must reorder every area of life and thought: the arts and the sciences, business, the family, all vocations, education, politics, economics, the church and all things else; every sphere of life is either under God or against God, there is no neutrality. There is no good word that exists out there outside of Christ. One of the great errors, sins, of our time is to believe that the world is good and politics is good, and everything is good; and all it needs is a little thing extra, Jesus. We have a man who has been preaching up and down the west coast saying that: “I do not want a Christian America, I want a free America.” As though that were possible. Does not our Lord say that if we are in Him , only then are we made free indeed? Otherwise we are the slaves of sin, and the slaves of men.

Without Christ, man is a sinner and at war with God, man, and himself. It is a serious delusion and sin to believe that men and nations need only the addition of faith in Christ to be perfected, and that a natural goodness can exist without Christ.

The artist Eugene Delacroix, while not a believer, was wiser when in his journal on May 1st 1850, he observed and I quote: “It is evident that nature cares very little whether man has a mind or nor. The real man is the savage, he is in accord with nature as she is. As soon as man sharpens his intelligence, increases his ideas and the way of expressing them, and acquires needs, nature runs counter to him in everything. He hath to do violence to her continually.”

Now Delacroix was to a degree a child of Rousseau in that he believed in the natural man as the only man that existed; but he didn’t see a ‘la Rousseau the natural man as good, but as a savage. So all you had in the world was what we would term a doctrine of fallen man, and worse, animal man.

Some years ago, Jose Ortega y Gasset described the new barbarian in his book The Revolt of the Masses as one who believes, and I quote: “That civilization is there, in just the same way as the earth’s crust and the forest primeval.” And he warned that because men were forgetting- this was about 1929 or 30- he warned that because men were forgetting their debt to 19 centuries of Christianity, and were taking a Christian morality for granted like the air they breathed, they were really the new barbarians, and they were going to destroy civilization.

But too many churchmen hold to this same view. I cited earlier the theologian who has lectured widely saying: “I do not want a Christian America, I want a free America.” He is not alone. Delacroix knew better.

Obviously the church is full of dry bones. The grace of God brings life to dry bones; and the law word of God gives marching orders to the reborn man. (C.K. Campbell?) said and I quote: “It is grace which provides the law; it is sin that perverts it and turns it into a system of bondage to legalism.”

We live now in a valley of dry bones; but some remarkable things are taking place. We have a marvelous God, a miracle working God. Our God is in the resurrection business. Isn’t that wonderful? Some years ago, Ellison called attention to an important aspect of Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones. It refers to the whole house of Israel, and Paul tells us: “They are not all Israel which are of Israel.” And Ellison continued to say and I quote: “There is no suggestion that the dry bones in the valley are Israelite bones. The second half of verse 11 precludes the first half from being understood in any other sense then that the bones represent the whole house of Israel. Ezekiel sees in reality or in vision, who will dogmatize where he is concerned that the skeleton of an army ambushed and overwhelmed in the desert is being revivified; just as John the Baptist had to say that God could raise up from the stones around him children unto Abraham, so the new Israel, though Israel, yet in one sense would have no living link with the past; it would be God’s miraculous creation.”

Ellison was right. That was the whole point of the vision, that in the days to come, in the life of the world as well as in the life of Israel, in Messianic times again and again, there would be a miracle born people, dry bones to whom God would come, and whom He would revivify. All things are possible with God, and He has already performed a most amazing miracle, He has taken each of us who were stinky sinners- because sinners are stinky, they want their own way, we are by nature determined to have our own way at the expense of others, no matter how much we disguise that fact- He has taken us, and made us a new creation in Christ. That is remarkable. If a spiritual photograph could be taken of us before and after, it would reveal to us the extent of His miracle; He has taken more than dry bones, and has made us His people. We are God’s miraculous creation, a miracle born people, reborn by God’s sovereign grace.

John tells us and sets forth the supernatural character of our life in Christ in John 1:12-13 “12 But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: 13 Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.”

That is so amazing a statement, that none of us would dare to say anything like that, if God had not already said it through the mouth of John. (?) what does he do? What is he comparing our regeneration to? Why, to the virgin birth of our Lord. Because it was Jesus Christ who was born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. And John says we were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.

Did you know that that is so amazing a statement that some textual scholars have insisted it has to be wrong? It should have read: ‘Which was born’ and should have been a reference to Jesus Christ, it is so audacious a statement. But that is the way the text reads. And it tells us that we are a miracle-born people. We who were dry bones and worse ,have been made in Christ a new creation to be an exceeding great army. We were not made alive to be indulged in our own will and way, but for God’s kingdom, and for nothing else. We were not born again to go back to living our lives, only now, ‘well, we don’t cheat on our wives and we don’t rob the till, and we do go to church; but apart from that we go on living for ourselves.’ No. As (?)

…he does for us is small by comparison. How shall He not with Him also freely give us all things? Who shall lay anything to the charge of God’s elect? It is God that justifieth. Who is he that condemneth? It is Christ that died, yea, rather that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God; who also maketh intercession for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation or distress or persecution, or famine or nakedness or peril or sword? As it is written: “We are for Thy sake killed all the day long. We are accounted as sheep for the slaughter. Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors, through Him that loved us.”

And John sums up the future of the miracle-born army in these words: “For whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world. And this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith.” For us to assume that we are anything less than a miracle born people, called to victory, is to sin against our God. We are every one of us who are born again an evidence of the miracle working power of God. How dare we deny that He who began so great a work in us and through us, has not a glorious purpose for the whole of His creation? Thank you. (applause)

[Audience Leader] Thank you Rousas. I would like to invite John and Gary to come back up here to the front- Colonel I believe has already left. He said he was going to Tallahassee. Okay, we have till 5 O’clock here tonight, and in our remaining 15 minutes we would like to give you an opportunity… [Recording ends]