Ezekiel 36:16-17

Moreover, the word of the Lord came unto me, saying, son of man.

The messenger

Having scattered over an open field the bones of the human body, bring an anatomist to the scene. Observe how he fits bone to bone and part to part, till from those disjointed members he constructs a framework, which, apart from our horror at the eyeless sockets and fleshless form, appears perfectly, divinely beautiful. Now, as with these different parts of the human frame, so is it with the doctrines of the Gospel, in so far as they are intelligible to our limited understandings. There is a difference, which even childhood may discern, between the manner in which the doctrines and duties of the Gospel are set forth in the Word of God, and their more formal arrangement in our catechisms and confessions. They are scattered over the face of Scripture much as the plants of nature are distributed upon the surface of our globe. There, for example we meet with nothing that corresponds to the formal order, systematic classification, and rectangular beds of a botanical garden; on the contrary, the creations of the vegetable kingdom lie mingled in what, although beautiful, appears to be wild confusion. On the same moor, on the surface of the same meadow, the naturalist collects grasses of many forms, and finds both enamelled with flowers of every hue. And in those primeval forests which have been planted by the hand of God, and beneath whose silent and solemn shades man still walks in savage freedom, trees of every form and foliage stand side by side like brothers. Now, although over the whole surface of our globe plants of every form and family seem thrown at random, amid this apparent disorder the eye of science discovers a perfect system in the floral kingdom; and just as, though God has planted these forms over the face of nature without apparent arrangement, there is a botanical system, so there is as certainly a theological system, though its doctrines and duties are not classified in the Bible according to dogmatic rules. Does not this circumstance teach us that He intended His Word to be a subject of careful study as well as of devout faith, and that man should find in its saving pages a field for the exercise of his highest faculties?

I. That this portion of scripture, extending onwards from the 16th verse, presents an epitome or outline of the Gospel. Its details, with their minute and varied beauties, are here, so to speak, in shade; but the grand truths of redemption stand boldly up, much as we have seen from sea the summits of a mountain range, or the lofty headlands of a dim and distant coast. In the 17th verse, we have man sinning--“Son of man, when the house of Israel dwelt in their own land, they defiled it by their own way and by their doings.” In the 18th verse, we have man suffering--“Wherefore, I poured My fury upon them.” In the 21st verse, man appears an object of mercy--“But I had pity.” In the 22nd verse, man is an object of free mercy, mercy without merit--“I do not this for your sakes, O house of Israel.” In the 24th verse, man’s salvation is resolved on--“I will bring you into your own land.” In the 25th verse, man is justified--“Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean.” In the 26th and 27th verses, man is renewed and sanctified--“A new heart also will I give you,” etc. In the 28th verse, man is restored to the place and privileges, which he forfeited by his sins--“Ye shall be My people, and I will be your God.” “This land that was desolate, is become like the garden of Eden.” We have our security for these blessings in the assurance of the 36th verse--“I the Lord have spoken it, and I will do it”; and we are directed to the means of obtaining them in the 37th verse--“I will yet for this be inquired of,” etc. Such is the wide and interesting field that lies before us. But before entering upon it, let us consider--

II. Who is commissioned to deliver God’s message. Who and what is the chosen ambassador of heaven? An angel? No; but a man. “Son of man,” says the Lord. By this title Ezekiel is so often addressed that it forces all our attention Lord remarkable fact, that God deals with man through the instrumentality of man, communicating by men His will to men. The rain, in its descent from heaven, falls upon the surface of our earth, percolates through the porous soil, and, flowing along rocky fissures or veins of sand, is conveyed below ground to the fountain whence it springs. Now, although rising out of the earth, that water is not of the earth, earthy. The world’s deepest well owes its treasures to the skies. So was it with the revealed will of God. It flowed along human channels, yet its origin was more than celestial; it was Divine.

1. The kindness of God to man. The God of salvation, the author and finisher of our faith, might have arranged it otherwise. Who shaft limit the Holy One of Israel? The field is the world. And as the husbandman ploughs his fields and sows his seed in spring by the same hands that bind the golden sheaves of autumn, God might have sent those angels to sow the Gospel, who shall descend at the judgment to reap the harvest. But though these blessed and benevolent spirits, who are sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation, take a lively interest in the work; though watching from on high the progress of a Redeemer’s cause, they rejoice in each new jewel that adds lustre to His crown, and in every new province that is won for His kingdom; and though there be more joy even in heaven than on earth when man is saved, a higher joy among these angels over one sinner that repenteth than over ninety and nine just persons, yet theirs is little more than the pleasure of spectators. To man, however, in salvation, it is given to share, not a spectator’s but a Saviour’s joy; with his lips at least he tastes the joys of that cup for which Jesus endured the Cross and despised the shame. If theft parent is happy who has snatched a beloved child from the flood or fire, and the child, saved, and thus twice given hind, becomes doubly dear, what happiness in purity or permanence to be compared with his, who is a; labourer with God in saving souls?

2. The honour conferred on man. Did Moses occupy a noble position when, taking advantage of some rock, he stood aloft amid the dying Israelites, and there, the central figure of the camp, on whom all eyes were turned, raised high that serpent, at which to look was life? Nobler his attitude, much holier his office, who with his foot on a dying world, lifts up the Cross--exalts Jesus Christ and Him crucified--that, whosoever looketh and believeth on Him might not perish, but have everlasting life. What dignity does this world offer, what glittering stars, what jewelled honours flash on her swelling breast, to be for one moment compared with those which they win on earth, and wear in heaven, who have turned souls from darkness to light, from the power of Satan to the living, loving God? Each converted soul a gem in their crown, they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament, and they that turn many to righteousness, as the stars, forever and ever. How has the hope of this touched, as with burning fire, the preacher’s lips, sustained his sinking heart, and held up the weary hands of prayer! It has proved an ample recompense for the scanty rewards which God’s servants have received at the hands of men, for the penury which has embittered their life, and the hardships which have pressed on their lot. You are “a son of man”; and as you bear the prophet’s title, whatever otherwise you may be, let me call you to the prophet’s office. The Master hath need, much need, daily need of you. Take a living, lively, loving interest in souls. Don’t leave them to perish. You are your brother’s keeper. Permanently and formally to instruct may be the duty of others, but to enlist is yours. “This honour have all His saints.”

3. The wisdom of God. However highly gifted he may otherwise be, it is a valid objection to a preacher, that he does not feel what he says; that spoils more than his oratory. Once on a time an obscure man rose up to address the French Convention. At the close of his oration, Mirabeau, the giant genius of the Revolution, turned round to his neighbour, and eagerly asked, Who is that? The other, who had been in no way interested by the address, wondered at Mirabeau’s curiosity. Whereupon the latter said, That man will yet act a great part; and added, on being asked for an explanation, He speaks as one who believes every word he says. Much of pulpit power under God defends on that; admits of that explanation, or of one allied to it. They make others feel who feel themselves. How can he plead for souls who neither knows nor feels the value of his own? How can he recommend a Saviour to others who himself despises and rejects Him? It is true that a man may impart light to others who does not himself see the light. It is true that, like a concave speculum cut from a block of ice, which, by its power of concentrating the rays of the sun, kindles touch wood or explodes gunpowder, a preacher may set others on fire, when his own heart is cold as frost. It is true that he may stand like a lifeless fingerpost, pointing the way on a road where he neither leads nor follows. It is true that God may thus in His sovereign mercy bless others by one who is himself unblessed. Yet commonly it happens that it is what comes from the heart of preachers that penetrates and affects the heart of hearers. Like a ball red hot from the cannon’s mouth, he must burn himself who would set others on fire. We have read the story of a traveller who stood one day beside the cages of some birds, that tuned their plumage on the wires, struggling to be free. A wayworn and sun-browned man, like one returned from foreign lands, he looked wistfully and sadly on these captives, till tears started in his eye. Turning round on their owner, he asked the price of one, paid it in strange gold, and opening the cage set the prisoner free; thus he did with another and another, till every bird had flown away singing to the sides--soaring on the wings of liberty. The crowd stared and stood amazed. They thought him mad, till to the question of their curiosity he replied, I was once a captive; I know the sweets of liberty. And so they who have experience of guilt, who have felt the serpent’s bite, the poison burning in their veins, who on the one hand have felt the sting of conscience, and on the other the peace of faith, the joys of hope, the love, the light, the liberty, the life that are found in Jesus, they, not excepting heaven’s highest angels, are the fittest to preach a Saviour; to plead with man for God, and with God for man. During a heavy storm off the coast of Spain a dismasted merchantman was observed by a British frigate drifting before the gale. Every eye and glass were on her; and a canvas shelter on a deck almost level with the sea suggested the idea that even yet there might be life on board. With all their faults, no men are more alive to humanity than our rough and hardy mariners; so the order instantly sounds to put the ship about; and presently a boat is lowered, and starts with instructions to bear down upon the wreck. Away after that drifting hulk go these gallant men over the mountain swell and roaring sea. They reach it; they shout; and now a strange object rolls from that canvas screen against the lee shroud of a broken mast. It is hauled into the boat. It proves to be the trunk of a man, bent head and knees together, so dried up and shrivelled as to be hardly felt within the ample clothes--so light that a mere boy lifted it on board. It is conveyed to the ship and laid on the deck. In horror and pity the crew gather around it. These feelings suddenly change into astonishment. The miserable object shows signs of life. The seamen draw nearer; it moves; and then mutters--in a deep sepulchral voice mutters--There is another man. Rescued himself, the first use the saved one made of Speech was to try to save another. Oh! learn that blessed lesson. Be daily practising it. (T. Guthrie, D. D.)

They defiled it.--

The defiler

When with slow and lingering steps Adam and Eve came forth weeping from Paradise, and the gate was locked behind them, that was the bitterest home leaving the world has ever seen. Adam belay; the federal head of his family, they come not alone. A longer sad sadder procession follows them than went weeping on the road to Babylon. They are attended by a world in tears. Death has passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.

I. Let us look at man sinning. “Ye have defiled the land.” Sin is presented here as a defilement. Pluck off that painted mask, and turn upon her face the lamp of God’s Word. We start--it reveals a death’s head. I stay not to quote texts descriptive of sin. It is a debt, a burden, a thief, a sickness, a leprosy, a plague, a poison, a serpent, a sting; everything that man hates it is; a load of curses and calamities beneath whose crushing, most intolerable pressure the whole creation groaneth. But leaving what is general let us fix our attention on that view of sin which the text presents. Here it is set forth as a defilement; and what else in the eye of God can deform, and does defile? Yet how strange it is, that some deformity of body shall prove the subject of more parental regrets and personal mortification than this most foul deformity of soul! Your manners may have acquired a courtly polish, your dress may, rival the winter’s snow, unaccustomed to menial offices, and sparkling with Indian gems, your hands may bear no stain, yet they arm not clean; nay, beneath that graceful exterior may lie concealed more foul pollution than is covered by a beggar’s rags. This son of toil, from whose very touch your delicacy shrinks, and who, till Sabbath stops the wheels of business, and with her kind hand wipes the sweat of labour from his brow, never knows the comfort of cleanly attire, may have a heart within, which, compared with yours, is purity itself. Beneath this soiled raiment he wears, all unseen by the world’s dull eye, the “raiment of needlework,” and the “clean linen” of a Redeemer’s righteousness.

II. The nature of this defilement.

1. It is internal. Like snowdrift, when it has levelled the churchyard mounds, and, glistening in the winter sun, lies so pure, and white, and fair, and beautiful, above the dead that fester and rot below, a plausible profession may wear the look of innocence, and conceal from human eyes the foulest heart corruption. The grass grows green on the mountain that hides a volcano in its bowels. Behind the rosy cheek and lustrous eye of beauty, how often does there lurk the deadliest of all diseases! Internal, but all the more dangerous that they are internal, such maladies are reluctantly believed in by their victims. They are the last to be suspected and the hardest to cure. To other than the physician’s skill or a mother’s anxious look, this youthful and graceful form never wears bloom of higher health, nor moves in more fascinating charms, nor wins more admiring eyes, than when fell consumption, like a miner working on in darkness, has penetrated the vital organs, and is quietly sapping the foundations of life. Like these maladies, sin has its seat within. It is a disease of the heart. It is the worst and deadliest of all heart complaints. Needing not food, but medicine, a new nature, a new heart, a new life, this is the prayer that best suits thy lips and meets thy case--Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.

2. This defilement is universal. Our world is inhabited by various races; different specimens, not different species of mankind. The Mongolian, the Negro, the race early cradled among Caucasian mountains, and the Red Indians of the New World; these all differ from each other in the colour of the skin, in the contour of the skull, in the cast and character of their features. But although the hues of the skin differ, and the form of the skull and the features of the face are cast in different moulds, the features, colour, and character of the heart are the same in all men. Be he pale-faced or red, tawny or black, Jew, Greek, Scythian, bond or free, whether he be the lettered and civilised inhabitant of Europe, or roam a painted savage in American woods, or pant beneath the burning line, or wrapt in furs shiver amid Arctic snows, as in all classes of society, so in all these races of men, “the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked”; “the carnal mind is enmity against God.” The pendulum, farther removed from the centre, vibrates more slowly at the equator than at the poles; the farther north we push our way over thick-ribbed ice, the faster the clock goes; but parallels of latitude have no modifying influence on the motions of the heart. It beats the same in all men; nor, till repaired by grace, does it in any man beat true to God. How can it be otherwise? The tree is diseased, not at the top, but at the root; and therefore no one branch of the human family can possibly escape being affected by sin. Man is the child of unholy parents, and how can a clean thing come out of an unclean?

3. This evil is incurable. Hear the word of the Lord, Though thou wash thee with nitre, and take thee much soap, yet thine iniquity is marked before Me, saith the Lord. Again, Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? Then may ye also do good that are accustomed to do evil. Again, Why should ye be stricken any more, ye will revolt more and more? Of these solemn and humbling truths it were difficult to find a more remarkable illustration than that before us. What moral effect had God’s judgments on His ancient people? Were they cured by their afflictions, by trials that extended over long years of suffering? Did these arrest the malady? Had they even the salutary effect of preventing their sinking deeper into sin? By no means. As always happens in incurable diseases, the patient grew worse instead of better. “Seducers wax worse and worse.” As always happens when life is gone, the dead became more and more offensive. The brighter the sun shines, the more the skies rain, the thicker the dews of night, and the hotter the day, the faster the fallen tree rots; because those agents in nature which promote vegetation and develop the forms and beauty of life, the sounding shower, the silent dews, the summer heat, have no other effect on death than to hasten its putridity and decay. And even so--impressive lesson of the impotency of all means that are unaccompanied by the Divine blessing--was it with God’s ancient people. Trust not., therefore, in any unsanctified afflictions. These cannot permanently and really change the condition of your heart. I have seen the characters of the writing remain on paper which the flames had turned into a film of buoyant coal; I have seen the thread that had been passed through the fire, retain, in its cold grey ashes, the twist which it had got in spinning; I have found every shivered splinter of the flint as hard as the unbroken stone: and let trials come, in providence, sharp as the fire and ponderous as the crushing hammer, unless a gracious God send along with these something else, bruised, broken, bleeding, as your heart may be, its nature remains the same. (T. Guthrie, D. D.)

Man sinning

Range the wide fields of nature, travel from the equator to the poles, rise from the worm that wriggles out of its hole to the eagle as she springs from the rock to cleave the clouds, and where shall you find anything that corresponds either to our scenes of suicidal dissipation or the blood-stained fields of war? Suppose that, on his return from Africa, some Park, or Bruce, or Campbell were to tell how he had seen the lions of the desert leave their natural prey, and, meeting face to face in marshalled bands, amid roars that drowned the thunder, engage in deadly battle. Would he find one man so credulous as to believe him? The world would laugh that traveller and his tale to scorn. But should anything so strange and monstrous occur, or, while the air shook with their bellowings, and the ground trembled beneath their hoofs, should we see the cattle rush from their distant pastures, to form two vast, black, solid, opposing columns, and, with heads levelled to the charge, should these herds dash forward to bury their horns in each other’s bodies, we would proclaim a prodigy, asking what madness had seized creation. But is not sin the parent of more awful prodigies? Fiercer than the cannon’s flash, flames of wrath shoot from brothers’ eyes. They draw; they brandish their swords, they sheathe them in each other’s bowels; every stroke makes a widow, every ringing volley scatters a hundred orphans on a homeless world. Covering her eyes, humanity flies shrieking from the scene, and leaves it to rage, revenge, and agony. Sooner would I be an atheist and believe that there was no God at all, than that man appears in this scene as he came from the hand of a benignant Divinity. Man must have fallen.

I. Apart from derived sinfulness we have personal sins to answer for. Come, let us reason together. Do you mean, on the one hand, to affirm that you have never been guilty of doing what you should not have done? or, on the other, that you were never guilty of not doing what you should have done? Could you be carried back to life’s starting post, leant you again an infant against the cradle, stood you again a child at your mother’s knee, sate you again a boy at the old school desk, with companions that are now changed, or scattered, or dead and gone, were you again a youth to begin the battle of life anew, would you run the self-same course; would you live over the self-same life? What! is there no speech that you would unsay? no act that you would undo? no Sabbath that you would spend better? are there none alive, or mouldering in the grave, none now blest in heaven, or with the damned in hell, to whom you would bear yourself otherwise than you have done? Have none gone to their account whose memory stings you, and whose possible fate, whose everlasting state fills you with the most painful anxiety? Did you never share in sins that may have proved their ruin, nor fail in faithfulness that might have saved their souls?

II. The guilt of these actual sins is our own. There are strong pleas which the heathen may advance in extenuation of their guilt; there are excuses which they, Stepping forward with some confidence to the judgment, may urge upon a just and merciful as well as holy God. What value may be given to these pleas, what weight they may carry at a tribunal where much shall be exacted of those who have received much, and little asked where little has been given, it is not for us to say, or even attempt to determine. But this we know, that we have no such excuse to plead, nor any such plea to urge, in extenuation of our offences, of one of a thousand of our offences. Supposing, however, that the plea were accepted, more than enough remains to condemn us, and leave guilt no refuge out of Christ. We talk of a natural bias to sin; but who has not committed sins that he could have avoided, sins which he could have abstained from, and did abstain from, when it served some present purpose to do so? Some years ago, on a great public occasion, a distinguished statesman rose to address his countrymen, and, in reply to certain calumnious and dishonourable charges, held up his hands in the vast assembly, exclaiming, These hands are clean. Now, if you or I or any of our fallen race did entertain a hope that we could act over this scene before a God in judgment, then I could comprehend the calm, the unimpassioned indifference with which men sit in church on successive Sabbaths, idly gazing on the Cross of Calvary, and listening with drowsy ears to the overtures of mercy. But are these, I ask, matters with which you have nothing to do? Beware! Play with no fire; least of all, with fire unquenchable. Play with no edged sword; least of all, with that which Divine justice sheathed in a Saviour’s bosom. Your everlasting destiny may turn upon this hour. Do you feel under condemnation? Are you really anxious to be saved? Be not turned from such a blessed purpose by the laughter of fools and the taunts of the ungodly. (T. Guthrie, D. D.)