[AI translation] The Word that is read has the effect of stirring up very conflicting emotions in the soul of man: it is a Word that both depresses and uplifts, saddens and comforts. And I believe that this is the very nature of Pentecost: it is the feast that shames us most and the feast that gives us the greatest hope. It is here that we see most the sad fact of what we should be and what we are, but also the comforting promise of what we can become through the Holy Spirit! This is what I would like to talk about now, about the Spirit of Pentecost's work of both depressing and uplifting, but let me say this in advance: the Spirit of God only lifts up those who have been depressed, only comforts those who have been afflicted, only encourages with renewed hope those who have been humbled! There is no cheap consolation with God. If anywhere, here it is true that happy are they who weep, for they - they alone - are comforted! Would that we were now receiving the consolation of the Holy Spirit in this way: truly afflicted, very deeply humbled! We have every reason to be sad and humbled.The prophet is confronted with a sad sight. He sees a battlefield with the dried bodies of the fallen lying strewn about. Only the bones were left, not in their former context, but scattered and white in the blazing eastern sun. Not a spark of life anywhere! The silence of death is almost audible. With this sad picture the prophet expresses the condition of the people of Israel in Babylonian captivity. Such was the cast, scattered, withered, sad condition of the people there in the foreign land, far from their homeland. Any hope of renewal, of revival, seemed impossible, unless some miracle happened!
But what have we to do with this old vision? It is that this immobility and hopelessness of death is, alas, not far from us. I myself often see the life of our church, and the life of our congregation, and my own life, and yours, as Ezekiel saw the house of Israel in that sad valley! Sometimes the warning of God's Word speaks very loudly in my soul, "Thy name is called, that thou art alive, and yet thou art dead!" And when I compare our own congregational and individual lives of faith to what Ezekiel saw: do not think that this is an unjust exaggeration, or just a kind of rhetorical phrase, a grand statement! No! I am deadly serious! Because that's how I see it! Let me illustrate with some examples: we see how dead we are when we consider how we ought to be. One of the great miracles of that first Pentecost was that people of all kinds understood each other completely and perfectly. Somehow, the apostles, the followers of Christ, spoke in such a language that people of all ranks and all classes gathered from twelve different countries heard them speak in their own language. The Church became a form in this world where, at last, there was no longer a difference between one people and another, where, at last, the dividing wall between one people and another was broken down, where, at last, one stratum of human society and another were able to meet. The Church had at last become the place on earth where Jews and Greeks, masters and slaves, men and women, could live together as members of a common body, united in love. This was and should be the church.
And oh, how much we need such a church today! But what we really need today is a truly living community of Christ, which would maintain unity between the opposites of a world torn in two and a hundred, whose members would build bridges across bitter racial, class and political divides, reconcile enemies, and in whom the world would see true brotherhood realized. Yes: we need such a church very much, but there is no such church! There is no such church, but only one which itself suffers from division. Not only would it not unite and reconcile the opposing forces of the world, but even within its own body there are such divisions, antagonisms, divisions, and divisions that, for example, the members of one kind of church cannot even accept the broken body of Christ from the hands of the priests of another kind of church! Imagine, then, what power and what credibility the witness of such a divided church can have before the world! Moreover, even within the same denomination, there are so many different directions, so many different views, opinions, aspirations, cliques, and none is able to understand the other.
I heard the other day of someone who refused to take communion because it was being given by a pastor with whom he could not enter into spiritual communion. How many times do Reformed believers get together and are unable to worship together because they are so out of spiritual fellowship with each other. What is it, tell me? Is it not a sign of death? Is it too much to say that fellowship is dead! In the Church, in the congregation, communion is dead! But let me give you another example. We all know what mission is. It is the activity of the Church, by which she proclaims the Gospel of Christ to those outside her, and the result of which is that the Kingdom of God spreads on earth, spreads like a mustard seed, permeates the world like leaven through dough. The early Christian church was a missionary church in the strictest sense of the word, that is, a church that did mission: it proclaimed Christ by its life and word, so that more and more outsiders joined it, and the army of believers grew, multiplied, and grew with more and more converts.
This is how the church should be today. Especially when we consider that all the great religions of the world have awakened to a renewed missionary consciousness. Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam, like giants awakening from their slumber, are stretching out in Asia and Africa and are already preparing themselves in a planned way for a massive missionary activity in Europe and America. And in the Church of Christ, even the old missionary fever is waning. Instead of Christianising the world, it is itself becoming secularised. In the old days, when we heard the word mission, we involuntarily thought of the tropics, the jungles, where a white man worked among blacks in an area threatened by wild animals to free his uneducated fellow men from superstition. And today, our own country, our own place of residence, often our own church and our own family, has become a mission field where we have to start again to sow the seeds of the Gospel, where we often have to start again to call to Christ those closest to us, because there are pagans, baptised pagans, living all around us!
Let us narrow it down specifically to our church: is there a missionary responsibility here? Who among us was the last to witness, much less to be the instrument of that great joy in which even the angels of heaven rejoice: that a sinful man is converted from his erring ways? But we all know the reverse of this, do we not? That of a son of the brethren going astray from the truth, falling away, falling away from the church, falling away from the assembly. Instead of adding more and more disciples, the old disciples also fall back, fall away. Who is hurt that Reformed people live around us who are spiritually like the lost sheep in the parable? And what does he who is hurt do about it? Nothing! Go after him? No! At most he complains about it, or he doesn't do that! The day before yesterday we buried a 58-year-old brother. He died in total abandonment. His neighbours didn't know what religion he was. After much investigation, they found out he was Reformed. We first saw him lying in his coffin. He lived among us and yet so far from here! There are many people like that, where people, brothers and sisters, are buried like that in each other's neighbourhood: is not the mission dead there?! Yes: the mission is dead among us, even if the church is full every Sunday.
But are not we ourselves like the dead? As I know my own individual Christian life, and yours, I see only that it is indeed a stumbling, backsliding, feeble, joyless, weary, tired Christianity, which is no different from the non-Christian life. In work and amusement, in joy and sorrow, it is just like the life of any heathen. It is so beautiful to say, "Let your light so shine before men, that when they see it they may glorify your Father in heaven" (Mt 5,16) - but the reality is that we are so devoid of that light, so devoid of living examples, of evidence of the reality of salvation, that people not only do not glorify our heavenly Father, but simply do not believe that we have such a heavenly Father! If the world looks at our lives, the lives of Christians, they may rightly think that God is not, or if He once was, He is dead! But God is not dead, our Christian life is! The last spark of Christianity has died in us. All that is left of the true, living, victorious, liberated, joyful, redeemed Christian life is the dry, rattling bones of the Christian life. No wonder the world does not like it!
And you know what the saddest sign of death is? That all this lifelessness doesn't really hurt! The fact that in the Church, communion is dead, mission is dead, piety is dead, that our love is hypocrisy, our prayer is rehearsed, our church attendance is a waste of an ancient heritage, our service, if any, is a human desire to please: all this does not even really lead us to repentance! That is the saddest thing! And the fact that those who have already realised the desperate situation of the Church: they have still not joined together in prayer and beg for the miracle of Pentecost! There is no community of prayer in our church that is truly asking for renewal, for revival! The blessing of the life-giving Spirit!
But can there be life out of this death?! This was the prophet's great question. As if God had struck his thought, he asks him, "Son of man, shall these carcasses live?" Yes: that is our big question too. Ezekiel did not dare to say no, because a believer can never be a pessimist, but neither did he dare to say yes, because a believer can never be a gullible optimist, but he gave the only possible answer, "Lord God, You know!" - he entrusts the fate of the dead host to the Lord, trusting in His resuscitating power! And behold, a miracle happens: at the word of the Lord spoken by the mouth of the prophet, there is a rumbling, a rattling, the pieces of bones fit together, the carcasses are joined, sinews are stretched out on them, flesh grows on them, and then the Lord speaks again through the prophet, and the Spirit enters into them and they come to life and stand on their feet, a very great army above them! A whole army ready for battle! Of course, this is only a vision, but this whole vision happened in order to comfort those who are afflicted to this day, to lift up those who are humiliated, to reassure them that even the most hopeless death can still be alive, even the withered corpses can still come to life, even today, even us! Out of the many dead warriors, defeated, dropped by the enemy, by sin, by Satan: there can still be the victorious army of Christ, the living people!
There, in the valley of the valley of the shadow of death, the Lord says to the corpses, "Behold, I send a spirit into you, that you may live" (Ez 37,10). Today too! The death we are in is not helped by getting excited, by organizing, by being clever, by being clever, by spending a lot of money: only one thing helps: the Holy Spirit! There, on the first Pentecost, it was not a power that came from the human spirit or the human mind, not a flame that came from the hearts of the disciples, not a fire of human enthusiasm that took the Twelve, but a power from above. They were possessed by a power which they did not possess, but which possessed them. In the Holy Spirit, the Lord Jesus himself comes to us on this earth, into our lives! How then can the most hopeless death not become life?! It can, yes! But whether it will be here, for us, is conditional! How did it happen here, in this prophetic vision? "The Lord said to Ezekiel, "Prophesy concerning these dead bodies, and say to them..." And the prophet said as the Lord willed. And the bones moved towards each other. Then the prophet prayed, "From the four winds come forth the spirit and breathe into these slain." And in answer to the prayer, the Spirit moved, and so the dead came to life! So I would say that it was through the Word and prayer that the Spirit appeared! God communicates His Holy Spirit to us in His Word, and we receive the Spirit of God in prayer! Many times in the Bible we read that the Word and prayer and the Holy Spirit go together! Wherever the Word of God is listened to in prayer, the Holy Spirit can be expected! But He will not come where He is not asked. The Spirit will not come to a church that does not wait for Him and prepare itself to receive Him by fervent prayer.
Asking is an expression of longing and waiting, a painful admission that without the Holy Spirit we are dead! But it is also a confession of hope that through the Holy Spirit we can become what we ought to be! Only if this feast of Pentecost is not in vain, if - even in some of us - we become so aware of the need for the reviving Holy Spirit that we create a special regular prayer group in our church, where we wait and ask the Lord to share the gift of the Pentecost miracle with us!
Come again now:
Let us pray to the Holy Spirit of God,
Let us pray the Lord our God, from heaven on high,
Take away all the darkness of our hearts,
That we may understand the will of our God in all things.
(Canto 372, verse 1)
Amen
Date: 25 May 1958 Pentecost.
Lesson
ApCsel 2,1-4