These Bones Shall Live: Good News of Bad Times
March 18, 2018
Dr. Tom Pace
Ezekiel 24:2-5, 10-11

This is the last of the real downer Scriptures that we’re going to deal with. I don’t know how else to say that. This passage is about the siege of Jerusalem and the fall of Jerusalem and it uses this image of a boiling pot as what happens to Jerusalem as a result of their unfaithfulness. I want you to listen as the Scripture is read and then we’ll talk about how this might apply to our lives. Listen with both your ears but open your heart as well.
Mortal, write down the name of this day, this very day. The king of Babylon has laid siege to Jerusalem this very day. And utter an allegory to the rebellious house and say to them, Thus says the Lord: Set on the pot, set it on, pour in water also; put in it the pieces, all the good pieces, the thigh and the shoulder; fill it with choice bones. Take the choicest one of the flock, pile the logs under it; boil its pieces, see the also its bones in it. Ezekiel 24:2-5
Heap up the logs, kindle the fire; boil the meat well, mix in the spices, let the bones be burned. Stand it empty upon the coals, so that it may become hot, its copper glow, its filth melt in it, its rust be consumed. Ezekiel 24:10-11
We’ve been in some good times. Oil’s down a little bit, well, maybe more than a little bit. But still good times.
The problem with prosperity is that you don’t learn a lot from prosperity. What it can do is breed in you a kind of smug arrogance that you’re making all the right decisions and you’re doing all the right things. So you really have it together.
But that’s not always true. You don’t always have it together.
You remember 2007, don’t you? That year housing boomed, people were buying houses all over the place. People were buying houses they couldn’t afford. People lending money to people when they couldn’t afford to. And when they would buy the houses, the lenders didn’t have any intention of keeping the mortgage. They wanted to bundle it together and sell it to somebody else. Then those people would bundle it together and sell it to someone else. And those people would bundle it together and sell it to someone else. And ultimately this whole house of cards has to fall down, and it did.
Did you ever see the Broadway play “Paint Your Wagon?” I love this illustration and I’ve used it before because I think it’s perfect. Lee Marvin was in the movie. They head out to the far west during this gold rush, and this little town springs up and they call it No Name City. Lee Marvin thinks that if he builds all these tunnels under all of the structures, under the houses and the saloons in town, he thinks he can collect the gold dust that falls through the floorboards. The problem is that all these tunnels do what tunnels do. They take away the foundation and then one day the whole town caves in. Just all comes crashing in.
I think what sometimes happens is in the midst of our prosperity, when things seem like they were going well, what’s really happening is that we’re building these tunnels underneath that one day will lead to a collapse. That’s the story of Ezekiel. No one in Jerusalem listened to him. They thought everything was fine. Some of them got carried off to Babylon.
This passage takes place about the year 589 B.C. And that year Nebuchadnezzar and his armies come from Babylon and they put the city of Jerusalem under siege for two years. Nothing coming in and nothing going out. The people starved to death. Those who are left in 587, the armies of Babylon break through the walls and come into the city and destroy the city completely. They burn anything that can be burned. They destroy any building that can be destroyed. They destroy Solomon’s great temple in the middle of the city. They kill everybody. Everybody. Women, children, anybody that’s left that they can’t take away to Babylon as slaves.
Once they leave, the people around, the other enemies that surround Israel, the Edomites, the Moabites, the Philistines, the Phoenicians, all of these folks come in to Israel and take whatever’s left.
He uses the image of a pot boiling, of a fire that’s been set that’s going to destroy the city. And even all the good parts are going to be destroyed, too.
So what in the world can we learn from this? I love this image of a fire because I think it has lots of pictures for us. There are three things I really want us to see.
The first is the bad news of bad news, that sometimes a fire that’s set can’t be stopped. So if I’m in high school and I decide that I don’t want to study for a test and I don’t study for it, and then the morning of the test I think, “This test is really important. I think I’d better study.” But it’s the morning of the test. It’s too late! You can wish all you want that it’s going to be great, “I’m going to do fine, and I’m really going to put myself into this. It really matters, so please, God, I promise I’ll do anything if you can just help me pass the test.” But it’s too late.
Let me give you perhaps a more painful illustration. A man is unfaithful to his wife and she discovers it and forgives him and they reconcile. But there’s no real change in behavior in their marriage, no real intimacy is built again. So he’s unfaithful again and again and she discovers it. He calls his pastor and says, “What can I do to fix this? I’ll do anything, I’ll go to counseling, I’ll do anything to try to put it right again.”
There’s nothing you can do to fix it. The fire was set and you can’t put it out sometimes. You have to bear the consequences of the actions you’ve taken. It doesn’t mean you’ll never be happy again, it doesn’t mean there’s no redemption, but it means that the consequences of the actions you’ve taken you have to face them.
Now sometimes the bad things that happen to us are not our fault. Bad things happen – you don’t order grits, grits “just comes.” You order breakfast and you don’t order grits and “grits just comes” – bad stuff just comes in life. It’s right there. I know, I’m disparaging grits, I’m sorry. It’s just a picture.
Bad things happen in our lives and they’re not our responsibility and we still can learn from them. But let’s face facts, and the truth that sometimes, often in fact, the challenges we face are consequences of decisions we made. Sometimes decisions we’ve made a long time ago.
Author Robert Fulghum has a sentence – four words – where he says, “Always true, always true.” “Whatever, there are consequences.” Whatever it is there will be consequences. They may be good consequences or bad consequences but every decision we make, every step we take, every action we take will have some sort of consequences.
That phrase, “Whatever, there are consequences” comes from his book and I love the title. It’s from a story in the book, It Was on Fire When I Lay Down on It. They rescue a man from a burning house and discover that the fire started on a burning bed and they asked him how did the fire get started on the bed. He said, “I don’t know, it was on fire when I lay down on it.”
It may be that he’s lying and he really started the fire, which is probably true. We do dumb things, don’t we? We make decisions, we do things and we just somehow hope that magically the consequences won’t catch up with us. But they do.
And the fire’s been set. In Jerusalem Ezekiel is saying, “The fire’s been set. You’ve been unfaithful to God. You haven’t taken care of the poor. You’ve pursued foreign gods. The fire’s been set and this is what’s going to happen.”
Here’s what we need to understand. We seldom learn from good times but we sure can learn from the bad ones. So the good news of bad times. Two things I want you to see in this – the good news of bad times.
First is that though fire can’t be stopped, it burns off the dross. We sang it in a hymn a few minutes ago. That God doesn’t want to hurt us, he only seeks to remove the dross of our life. Where does that come from? The idea is that when you refine metal and you heat it to a certain temperature, the impurities in that metal come to the top and they’re either skimmed off manually or they’re burned off, so that what’s left is pure.
Listen to what the Scripture says, “Heap up the logs, kindle the fire;boil the meat well, mix in the spices, let the bones be burned. Stand it empty upon the coals, so that it may become hot, its copper glow, its filth melt in it, its rust be consumed.”
The impurities in our lives, when the heat comes, when the fire comes, all of a sudden those things are taken away. They don’t matter to us anymore.
Here’s another image. Suzi Pitts is on our staff and she loves to cook. She told me that when you boil things for a long, long time – hours and hours – they reduce to a sauce, a reduction sauce, sometimes called a demi-glace. Clearly I don’t know what I’m talking about here, but it hasn’t stopped me before. I’ll just charge ahead. Boil it down to this essence, the best stuff that’s left.
I talked to a woman who’d gone through Hurricane Harvey and we’d been in contact with her and helping her. She was telling me about when the crew came to muck out her house and she watched them carry all of her furniture, all the things she’d spent her life collecting, the beautiful antiques. All these things had been collecting and they hauled it out to the curb and dumped it there. Her father’s grandfather clock. They just took all of it out and dumped it on the curb.
She said, “My heart was broken and I grieved that so much. But as the days went on I felt a certain sense of release. I realized, I don’t need that stuff. That’s not what really matters in my life. I spent so much energy chasing that stuff, and that’s not what matters.” It boils our life down to the priorities, the things that really matter.
I ran across a book called Upside by Jim Rendon. Here’s the whole title – Upside, the Science of Post Traumatic Growth. In the book he gives lots of statistics about how after people experience great trauma a certain percentage of them find that their lives are better instead of worse. One of them is a man named Sgt. Jeffrey Beltran who received a brain injury in an IED explosion in Afghanistan in 2005. There were some really bad symptoms right after – symptoms of PTSD. Let me read to you from the book: “Slowly though, Beltran began noticing surprising changes. Before the blast he drifted. He spent a lot of his free time playing video games. Like many soldiers he was more concerned with figuring out how to cope from one deployment to the next than with finding a direction in life. He is different now. The bombing and the challenges he faced changed him. And he thinks he’s changed for the better. To quote him, ‘The whole experience has helped me to be more open, more flexible. I am branching out to activities that I was once uncomfortable with.’
“Beltran has taken rigorous tests in pursuit of promotion; he’s taking online courses toward a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice. He discovered a sense of spiritualty. He’s reconnected with his parents.”
This traumatic event in his life shook him up. He said, “I’m just wasting my life. I’m goofing around. I want to be about something. I want to put my priorities in order. I want to do the right thing.”
That’s what happens. We find ourselves sort of driven to our knees and we say, “This experience, whether it’s my fault or whether it’s just grits, just happens, it forces me to learn, and to refocus my priorities.”
I had an amazing opportunity to watch on a video cast a conversation between Liberian pastors. These Liberian pastors escaped Liberia in the middle of the civil war and some of them came to the United States. Others of them stayed in Ghana, and now they’re going back to Liberia. This happened about three years ago and they’re returning to Liberia. The conversation they had was about whether it was more difficult to be a pastor in Liberia or in the United States. The Liberian pastors say that in some ways it was more difficult to be a pastor in Liberia because you are always in fear for your life. I thought, yes, that makes it more difficult – that seemed pretty obvious.
But then they said this: “On the other hand American pastors’ jobs are harder because Americans don’t think they have a great need for hope in Christ.” That there’s no sense in which the world has driven us to our knees. We keep thinking we’re okay.
Now, friends, I’m a pastor and I know that’s not true for most of you. Just because you’re in a prosperous country doesn’t mean that life isn’t hard. But what those hard things do is remind us of our need for Christ. They put our priorities in the right place. They skim off the impurities and they reduce life to its real essence, the stuff that really matters.
Now here’s the final thing: The good news of bad times is they force change.
John Ortberg is one of the pastors I listen to every week and he has this great sentence. He said, “People rarely change when they see the light. Real change comes when they feel the heat.” I thought, man, is that right!
What happens is that we see the light. We say, “I need to do this. Here’s what I need to do – I need to live differently. I’m going to live differently.” Then nothing changes, until something happens that forces it upon us. Then we think, “Man, I’m going to have to change.”
I’ll give you a business illustration. IBM was the business school study how they adapted. They were the leading manufacturers of PCs, typewriters – you remember the IBM Selectric - I used that to type my term papers on. They did all that stuff. Then clone PCs came along and pushed them out of the market, and in 2008 IBM suffered an $8 billion loss. They felt the heat.
So they finally made a difficult decision and put aside their core business model of making PCs and went into the IT services business and began to make enterprise servers for large businesses. In 2013 they were the worldwide leading manufacturer of enterprise servers. They wouldn’t have done that unless they felt the heat. Doesn’t that make sense to you?
I have a friend who’s in the physical therapy business and he has a bunch of PT shops all over the state. “How did you go into the physical therapy business?” I asked him. He said, “Well, my tire business went bankrupt. I got forced into it. I felt the heat. I had to do something. So I guess this is what I’m going to do.”
Let me give you a more significant example. Many of you know I really like reading about Abraham Lincoln and his leadership. The second inaugural address I think is one of the most amazing speeches I’ve ever seen. It’s very short; it’s on the wall of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. It’s really a sermon, by the way. He quotes Scripture in it a couple of times. But his point is that they’re nearing the end of the Civil War. It has become clear now that the Union is going to win, and he reflects on the Civil War as what had to happen. It was the fire, in a sense, the destruction that had to happen so that slavery would be gone.
Here’s what he said: “Fervently do we pray that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled up by the bondsman’s 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword. As it was said 3000 years ago still it must be said, “The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in. To bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and all the nations.”
The fire that burned both North and South as a nation is what led to the change.
Let me give you maybe some more personal examples. Let’s say you’re married, and you say, “My marriage is fine. I have a good marriage. My marriage is fine. Good marriage – it’s all fine.” And as time goes on, then at some point someone steps into your life and you find something flashes inside you. Maybe you talk intimately in ways that you should speak only to your spouse. You think to yourself, “Oh, my goodness where did that come from? What’s going on in my life?” And the ache is there and you think, “I’d better change. My marriage isn’t fine. I’d better do something to make it fine.” But until that came to pass in your heart and life you would think, “I’ll just charge on ahead, I’m fine.”
You’re told by your doctor that you really need to exercise and eat right. And you say, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know I need to do that.” Then one day you’re walking along and you feel this tightness here and all of a sudden the pain is overwhelming. They rush you to the hospital and they save your life. You say, “I need to eat right and I need to exercise.”
You see, you don’t change when you see the light. You knew you needed to exercise and eat right, but you’re not going to change till you feel the heat.
You say, “I need to spend more time with my family. I really do.” You see, the inertia of our life is so strong. You say, “I need to spend more time with my family. My kids are going to grow up and they’re going to be gone, so I need to spend more time with my family.” But every morning at 5 o’clock the alarm goes off and you get up and you’re off to work before the kids get up. Then you come home maybe just in time to see them and put them to bed at night. You do that over and over and then Saturday you say, “I really need to go to the office.” So you do that over and over. Then one day you realize that one of your children has gone awry. You think, “What happened?” Well, you’ve now felt the heat. Maybe it’s time for a change.
See, over and over the same pattern comes to pass. We don’t learn a lot from great times. We learn a lot from the bad times, the difficult times. It may be that we’ve been responsible for them and it may be we haven’t. But in the midst of those God reminds us of what really matters and challenges us to change.
Here’s the point of this sermon during the season. It may be that you can look at your life and see the dross; the impurities that you need to get rid of. It may be that you can look at your life and say, “My priorities are a mess.” It may be that you have seen the light in some areas of your life and you know you need to change but you haven’t yet felt the heat.
The season of Lent is a time of repentance, a time to turn, a time to change. I just want to invite you to think about how you might make the change, about how the difficulties that may come your way might lead you to make those difficult times. Ask yourself, “Am I just digging tunnels under my life that one day are going to give way?”
This is the season to think about that.
Let’s pray. Gracious God, some times are good and we thank you for that. They’re wonderful. We celebrate the good things in our lives that are amazing. What a gift, God, thank you so much. It’s harder for us to appreciate the hard times, the bad times. It’s harder for us to claim the appropriate responsibility for the consequences of our actions. It’s harder for us to recognize your presence even in the midst of difficult things that aren’t our responsibility. But, God, help us to make the changes we need to make. Show us the truth that we might repent and change. In the name of Christ our Lord we pray. Amen.