Amen. Amen. Let us turn then to the reading of God's Holy Word, Ezekiel chapter 37. Page 918 in most of the blue ESV Bibles. The Valley of Dry Bones, which may be a familiar half of this chapter. And then we'll be reading and looking at the whole chapter. We did have a sermon on the Valley of Dry Bones not too long ago. for a catechism sermon, but there is much going on there, so we will have one point on that first half of the chapter, but then we'll also be looking at the less familiar second half of Ezekiel chapter 37. So let us read 28 verses of this chapter. Let us hear the word of God. The hand of the Lord was upon me, and He brought me out in the Spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of the valley. It was full of bones. And He led me around among them, and behold, there were very many on the surface of the valley, and behold, they were very dry. And He said to me, Son of Man, can these bones live And I answered, O Lord God, you know. Then he said to me, prophesy over these bones and say to them, O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God to these bones, Behold, I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live, and I will lay sinews upon you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live, and you shall know that I am the Lord. So I prophesied as I was commanded, and as I prophesied there was a sound, and behold, a rattling, And the bones came together, bone to its bone. And I looked, and behold, there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them, but there was no breath in them. Then he said to me, Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, son of man, and say to the breath, Thus says the Lord God, Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe on these slain, that they may live. So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived and stood on their feet an exceedingly great army. Then he said to me, Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel. Behold, they say, our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost. We are indeed cut off. Therefore prophesy and say to them, Thus says the Lord God, Behold, I will open your graves and raise you from your graves, O My people, and I will bring you into the land of Israel, and you shall know that I am the Lord when I open your graves and raise you from your graves, O My people, and I will put My Spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you in your own land. Then you shall know that I am the Lord. I have spoken and I will do it, declares the Lord. The word of the Lord came to me. Son of man, take a stick and write on it, For Judah and the people of Israel associated with him. Then take another stick and write on it, For Joseph, the stick of Ephraim, and all the house of Israel associated with him. And join them one to another into one stick, that they may become one in your hand. And when the people say to you, will you not tell us what you mean by these? Say to them, thus says the Lord God, behold, I am about to take the stick of Joseph, that is in the hand of Ephraim, and the tribes of Israel associated with him, and I will join with it the stick of Judah and make them one stick that they may be one in my hand. When the sticks on which you write are in your hand before their eyes, then say to them, Thus says the Lord God, Behold, I will take the people of Israel from the nations among which they have gone, and will gather them from all around and bring them to their own land. And I will make them one nation in the land on the mountains of Israel, and one king shall be king over them all. And they shall be no longer two nations, and no longer divided into two kingdoms. They shall not defile themselves any more with their idols and their detestable things, or with any of their transgressions. But I will save them from all the backslidings in which they have sinned, and will cleanse them. And they shall be my people, and I will be their God. My servant David shall be king over them. and they shall all have one shepherd. They shall walk in My rules and be careful to obey My statutes. They shall dwell in the land that I gave to My servant Jacob, where your fathers lived. They and their children and their children's children shall dwell there forever. And David, My servant, shall be their prince forever. I will make a covenant of peace with them. It shall be an everlasting covenant with them. and I will set them in their land and multiply them and will set My sanctuary in their midst forevermore. My dwelling place shall be with them, and I will be their God and they shall be My people. Then the nations will know that I am the Lord who sanctifies Israel when My sanctuary is in their midst forevermore." So far the reading. of the Holy Word of God. Dear congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ, there are some people who work underwater. One of the underwater jobs in the world is the job of a sponge diver. The job description of a sponge diver is to dive underwater and find and collect natural sponges. That is their full-time job. Well, there is one sponge diver from Turkey. I hope I say this right. His name is Mehmet Kekir. And he was going about his work about 40 years ago. This is 1982. And there was one day he went into his dive and he found something much bigger than a natural sponge. He found a shipwreck that was more than 3,000 years old, older than the days of the prophet Ezekiel. Well, this was a rather large shipwreck, and as wood can be preserved when it's underwater for a long time, it was studied in detail. More than 20,000 dives were sent down into the waters to look at this discovery. It is the discovery of the, once again, I'm probably not going to say this right, the Oloboron shipwreck. Now among the many discoveries of that shipwreck, there is one thing that connects directly to our text tonight. Among the discoveries of this shipwreck was an ancient wooden writing board. Now these ancient wooden writing boards were common and many different nations used them for millennia, but They are obsolete. They have been old and obsolete technology for a long time. And since wood usually rots rather quickly, it certainly doesn't last a few thousand years. We don't have very many of them around anymore. It is almost certain, it is, we can say nearly certain, that it is these ancient writing boards which have been called the earliest form of the modern book that Ezekiel's talking about in the last half of this chapter. So some have translated instead of the ESV word stick, they've used the word boards, which is permissible translation of the Hebrew word there. Now, we're going to get to these boards in our second point. But whether it is the image of bones or the prophetic use of boards, there is a theme that unites this whole chapter. It's the theme of one great truth, that God is the God of restoration. And from bones to boards, we're going to look at this theme, Our Covenant Lord God Restores His People. Our Covenant Lord God Restores His People. So we're going to begin with the bones and the valley of dry bones in the first 14 verses. Now, again, we're going to talk more about these boards when we get to our second point. But that image, it's kind of strange and unusual to us because it's ancient technology and because we don't use writing boards like that anymore. You know, the Valley of Dry Bones, one of the reasons why this chapter is well known to many is because the image of bones does not need an explanation from one generation to another. From one generation to another, we all know what death is. We all know what bones are. We all know that a valley of dry bones does not come to life. We all know that it is a picture of death. And so the first picture of Ezekiel, the first half of Ezekiel 37 is obvious to us as it would have been immediately obvious to Ezekiel's first hearers and to Ezekiel himself. But Ezekiel is wise because Ezekiel knows that this vision is from God. And so when God asks what's really, in many ways, we just call it what? An obvious question in verse 3. Son of man, can these bones live? Ezekiel gives a wise answer. And since he knows that he's speaking to God, Ezekiel doesn't say, no, bones can't live. No, there's nothing that can come to any life here. Ezekiel just says, O Lord God, you know." The prophet is wise in his answer to the Lord God, who has all power. And indeed, in the following verses, God is going to speak to Ezekiel about how God is going to bring these bones to life. And just as for those who were here last week, it is clear that the Holy Spirit of God is the one who is at work when in chapter 36 verse 27, God spoke of my spirit. So it is that at the end of the vision of the valley of dry bones, God again in verse 14 of chapter 37 makes reference to my spirit. And so once again, it is abundantly clear that we're not just speaking about any kind of wind, any kind of breath, but we're speaking especially about the work of God's Spirit, the Holy Spirit. And so this valley of dry bones comes to life through the commanded, prophesying, forth-telling, preaching of God's Servant, and through the work of God's Holy Spirit, working through that preaching. So Ezekiel prophesies, foretells, preaches as God commands him to. And the dry bones come to have flesh. by the preaching of the prophets. They have gone from, in verse eight, from dry bones to cadavers. And that is shocking enough, but it is not yet an image of life. They do not yet have breath. And so God commands Ezekiel to continue to prophesy, to continue to preach in verse nine. And what happens then? The cadavers are given the very breath of life. And again, verse 14. God says this is the work of My Spirit. Through the preaching, through the power of the Holy Spirit, dead and dry bones not only come to be put together as a full skeleton, not only come to have sinews and to be a cadaver, but are given the very breath of life. There are people in the world who can take a bunch of bones and turn it into a full skeleton. It's not the easiest job, but it's not impossible. There are some who, if they don't have to start from the bones, if they have the cadaver to begin with, can preserve a cadaver with sinews and muscles, etc. But there is no one who can breathe life. There's certainly no one who can take a valley of dry bones and turn it into cadavers and then breathe life into those bodies. This is the work that God alone can do. So again, as Ezekiel said in verse three, O Lord God, you know. And because this is clearly a chapter where God is speaking about the work of my spirit, God's Holy Spirit, we're talking especially about spiritual realities here. We're talking about what Jesus told Nicodemus was the need to be born again by the Holy Spirit. It is another one of those chapters which, along with chapter 36 of Ezekiel, the teachers in Israel should have known. spiritual life is worked by God through the preaching of his prophets by the power of his Holy Spirit. And so all of the fears of the people, all of the objections of the people are answered. Look at verses 11 and 12 with me, brothers and sisters. In verse 11, God speaks about the threefold lament of the people. And then in verse 12, God answers those three fears with a three-fold promise. The people say, our bones are dried up. God says, I will open your graves. The people say, our hope is lost. And God says, I will raise you up from your graves, O my people. The people say, we are indeed cut off. But God says, and I will bring you into the land of Israel. God works salvation. God takes dead sinners and makes alive. And just as you cannot enter again into your mother's womb to be born again, so also you are not the one who works your salvation. But God's power can do it. You, O Lord, know. And you, O Lord, work. and you, O Lord, do. God is the one who restores. God is the one who gives salvation through the preaching of his servants by the power of his Holy Spirit. Now, brothers and sisters, let's go from bones to boards and from the promise that God restores life to the promise that God restores unity. Because God does not just give us salvation. God has given us many promises as his saved people. And so starting in verse 16, we have the word stick repeatedly in the ESV. It is in the Hebrew. It's a very vanilla word. The New Living Translation is actually pretty good. Here they just say piece of wood, piece of wood. And what is this piece of wood? Well, it is almost certain that it's a reference to one of these ancient writing boards. It has been called, as we said in the introduction, the earliest form of the modern book. And what it was is you'd have a board, a piece of wood made pretty flat, and then there'd be a part of it that would be kind of hollowed out and indented. Then you'd put a mixture of beeswax with some other kind of pigment and or oil and you could write into that beeswax mixture. And then you could take two of these boards and you could bind them together and different cultures did that in some different ways. Now, it wasn't the easiest thing to make, and so not everybody had one of these, and there's probably only four references to them in all of the Old Testament. But that's what we have here. This is the picture. And so with that context, the picture, which is difficult because that's ancient technology. You know, we don't use that anymore. Etch-a-Sketches and Magna-Doodles have made this far inferior. because you could kind of heat up that beeswax mix and then it would kind of flatten and then you could write on it again. So it was a book, it was a writing tablet. It had a number of uses in the ancient world and it was used for a long time. It's just totally old and useless and inferior technology today. Well, with that context, now we can go into the picture and the picture is really quite simple. Ezekiel is to take one of these boards, looking at the first part of verse 16, and he's to write on it, for Judah and the people of Israel associated with him. Now, later we have the language of the kingdoms made explicit in, for example, verse 22. So what is this first board? It's the southern kingdom. southern kingdom which had two tribes, the tribe of Judah and the tribe of Benjamin. But Judah so dominated it that the whole kingdom was really just called the kingdom of Judah. So this is Judah and those associated with him. And then what do you write on the second board? Look at the last part of verse 16. For Joseph, the board of Ephraim, and for all the house of Israel associated with him, So what does this board stand for? Well, the northern kingdom, after the dividing of the kingdom, after the days of Solomon, well, that was ten tribes that went to be their own kingdom, and the prominent tribe of those ten was the half-tribe of Joseph. It was the tribe of Ephraim. And so sometimes in the Old Testament, Ephraim stands for the whole northern kingdom, as it does here. Alright, so we've got one board, page, one leaf, and it says this is the kingdom of Judah. We have another one and it's the northern kingdom. Now you bind those together and you make it one book. If you ever have board books and sometimes children like to read board books over and over and over again and then eventually they break. Maybe you have to kind of bind them and tape them back together. This is what Ezekiel is doing. He has two pages of the most ancient board book and he's binding them together. It's not a complicated image. In some ways it takes us all the way back to the beginning of Ezekiel. God used really a very simple image, once we just work through a little bit of the context, He gave the people in exile a very simple image about the coming destruction of Jerusalem. And they needed a simple image because that was not a truth that the people were ready for. Well now, the city of Jerusalem has been destroyed and years later these same exiles get a very simple picture of restoration. And it's again something that the people are not ready for. God needs to give it. to the exiles in a very simple illustration, picture, living illustration because this is going to be a difficult truth to believe. The two kingdoms that have been divided for 400 years are going to be united together again. and they're going to be united together under one king. My servant David shall be king over them, verse 24. The same servant David, king, who is both God and man, the one separate, who we talked about in chapter 34 for those who were here a couple weeks ago. This is a promise which is very difficult to grasp. So where is this fulfilled? Let's turn to three New Testament passages to see how this is fulfilled. Please turn with me first to Matthew chapter 4. Matthew chapter 4 verses 12 to 17. How are these two kingdoms restored? Literally, this did not happen. Literally, the twelve tribes did not come back into Jerusalem under one king. What does Jesus Christ do in His ministry? Matthew 4, beginning at verse 12. Now when He heard that John had been arrested, He withdrew into Galilee, and leaving Nazareth, He, that is Jesus, went and lived in Capernaum by the sea, in the territory of Zebulun and Naphtali. So that what was spoken by the prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled, the land of Zebulun, the land of Naphtali, by the way of the sea, beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles, the people dwelling in darkness have seen a great light. And for those dwelling in the region in shadow of death, on them a light has dawned. And from that time Jesus began to preach, saying, Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Now Matthew quotes from what we might call a more sustained prophecy in the book of Isaiah, but Ezekiel 37 is prophesying the same thing. The kingdoms are going to be restored. The tribes are going to be restored. The significance that Jesus begins His ministry in the territory of Zebulun and Naphtali is that those were the first two tribes destroyed, even a generation before the other northern tribes were destroyed. The very place where the destruction of God's covenant people began is where Jesus Christ goes to begin His ministry. Where is there restoration? the ministry of Jesus Christ restores. But then God doesn't just work in the regions of all the twelve tribes. God brings a whole new flock to Himself. This is a prophecy which is making us to think of a big united kingdom which the exiles cannot imagine. Which, as has been said, would have been as difficult for them to believe as the valley of dry bones rattling and coming together and coming to life. But God's work is going to go beyond what his Old Testament people were comprehending or imagining or thinking. And so in John chapter 10, which is that Good Shepherd passage where Jesus is is going back to the image of Ezekiel 34, repeated in Ezekiel 37 about this one Davidic shepherd. And Jesus is saying, I am that one shepherd. And what does Jesus say about his kingdom, his flock as the one shepherd over people? He says, Verse 14 of John 10, I am the good shepherd. I know my own, and my own know me, just as the Father knows me, and I know the Father, and I lay down my life for the sheep, and I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice, so there will be one flock, one shepherd. Ezekiel 37 is not exactly, literally fulfilled. The 12 tribes do not come together under one king, but Ezekiel 37 is fulfilled in Jesus Christ, beyond the 12 tribes. God begins his work in the region where the first tribes were destroyed. That's where his ministry and preaching repentance begins. And God does not only restore the twelve tribes under his one kingship, God also brings in a whole other flock. See, Ezekiel 37 was too much for the exiles to comprehend, but it wasn't even enough to describe the restoration that Jesus brings. Now, the third verse is Revelation 21-12. And without reading it, we'll just say there's reference there to the twelve tribes being represented as part of the whole people of God in the new heavens and the new earth. And surely, that is where, if there is a literal fulfillment of God's people all being brought together into one kingdom, it is there. It's in the new heavens and the new earth. Brothers and sisters, we have a image from bones to boards. We have an image which is not the easiest because of the ancient technology that's passed away, no longer used. We have a fulfillment of it which is not literal one for one fulfillment in the way that many of the prophecies are fulfilled. And so this is one of those times where we step back and we say, what is the application for me? Why do I need pictures of God's restoring work among his fractured people. Why do I need that? I think there is a portion of a book recently written by the wife of an RPCNA minister which helps us think about the fractures among God's people and why we need pictures of restored unity. Glorious pictures of restored unity. I mean, the board's coming together. Once we get past the contextual issue, it's a beautiful picture of restored unity for God's fractured people. Why do we need that? Well, Rosaria Butterfield, wrote a widely read book called, The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert. And more recently, she wrote a book called, The Gospel Comes with a House Key. And as the title suggests, it's a book focused on hospitality. There is one chapter which still talks about that, but it has a little bit different flavor. Chapter six of that book is titled, Judas in the Church, the Borderland of Hospitality. And Mrs. Butterfield records How at First Presbyterian Church of Durham, which is, you know, a reformed Napark church, a little bit smaller than our own, how they went through a season where their unity was tested to the max. There were two incredibly painful public discipline cases. And after years, one of these cases resulted in an elder not only being removed from office, which happened immediately, but also after no evidence of repentance, eventually being removed from the church. As these cases were ongoing, this small church saw three young families leave. Ms. Aria Butterfield describes that departure in this way, quote, they sought greener pastures They did not want to be in a church that had to bear the grief of church discipline with all of its unanswered questions and with the slow and faltering process of pleading and praying for repentance. They wanted more for their children, more fun, more joy in the Lord, more church growth, more proof that we Christians are on the winning team, more children to have fun with, Who could blame them? Nothing like unrepentant sin in response to church discipline reveals the pitiful reality that truly we are mere men. And our dire situation pointed to this. We stand in the risen Christ alone or we do not stand at all. In the next few pages, Mrs. Butterfield describes a Sunday school program which at one point looked a lot like ours that turned into one large K-12 group. She describes evening services with less than 20 people. By God's grace, She described many blessings which came to the First Presbyterian Church of Durham in the following years. One of those two very public cases ended in restoration. Slowly, God gave growth, even numerically, back to this small Reformed church. All 12 tribes were God's covenant people. They're fractured, they're broken. Sometimes they fought side by side against enemies, but sometimes they took up swords against each other and clashed on the battlefield. Do we need pictures of the restoration that Christ alone gives to his fractured covenant people? on this earth. God's kingdom nation divided against itself was never literally restored. Sometimes fractured churches are literally restored. Sometimes one individual flock is not literally restored. My brothers and sisters, God not only gives us spiritual life and striking pictures of the rattling bones, God also gives us pictures of restored unity and broken kingdoms fractured covenant people brought together. All of it is God's work. It is God's Spirit. It is God's One Servant. My Servant David shall be King. We saw this in more detail for those who are here in chapter 34, but there is no doubt this is Great David's greater Son, the only perfect Shepherd, Jesus Christ. When God's covenant people are fractured, it shows us more than anything else our need for the one Shepherd Jesus Christ. But may that need be ever before us for our own spiritual deadness in sins to be dead bones brought to life. May the picture of God's restoration and God's peace and God's unity which comes through his Son be ever before us as we walk through this fractured, broken world where the church itself is included in the brokenness. From bones to boards, God speaks to us of His restoration power through His one Shepherd. And the one sanctuary that, Lord willing, we'll look at soon as we get to chapters 40 and 48. But as we end our sermon, we look at verse 25, David my servant. And we're speaking about the David who is divine, the David who is God, the David who is the one shepherd, Jesus who says, I am the good shepherd. David, my servant, shall be their prince.