God has not forgotten them

I'd like to first of all say thank you for the very beautiful special music. Some of the most amazing special music is a sermon in itself, and that was certainly the case with what we just heard. Because it teaches so much about the character and the nature of the God that we worship. And that will be the subject of the sermon today. A lesson about the nature of the God that we worship. But I want to approach it from a somewhat different way. I want to tell you a story. Her name was...but that was the problem. She no longer had a name. She was now simply a number, and that was deliberate. She, in those with her, no longer had names, only numbers. This was part of a conscious effort to dehumanize them. They were no longer viewed as human beings, only numbers. And as part of this process, she had been stripped of her identity. Her family had been taken away from her, along with every item that she owned. Her clothing, her small necklace, photos of her family, the small ring that she wore, her dress, her socks, her shoes, every possession that she owned had been taken away from her. And in another act of humiliation and efficiency, even the hair had been shaved from her head. The better to prevent life and sickness and disease from spreading and reducing the efficiency of the prisoners. She had just turned 15 a few months before, and that had temporarily spared her life, because those younger than age 15 were considered too young to provide useful work. So they were taken away to be killed. She was a very intelligent young woman, a very gifted writer, but none of that mattered now. She had only one purpose in life, and that was to be part of a machine, a machine built for the twin purposes of power and death, a machine that was very efficient at both. She was one part among hundreds of thousands of parts, a part that was to be worked and worked, and worked until it succumbed to sickness or disease, or was simply worn out and could work no longer. And then that part would be discarded, and another part put in her place, so the machine could continue with its deadly and efficient work and the war effort. Her crime was to have been born Jewish.

And in the summer of 1944, in Nazi-occupied Europe, that was a death sentence. Her name was Annalise Marie.

She would later become famous to history by a shortened version of that name, Anne. Anne Frank. Perhaps many of you have heard of her. Ironically, Anne was German by birth, and her father had even served proudly in the First World War as an officer in the German Army. But none of that mattered now, because they were part of an inferior race that had to be eliminated. Anne's father, Otto Frank, was his name, could see the danger brewing in Europe long before most other people could. The Nazi Party came to power in 1933. He moved his family from Germany to nearby Holland, Amsterdam, and as conditions went from bad to worse, he twice applied for visas for his family to immigrate to the United States to escape the danger. But the United States in those pre-war years had its own share of anti-Semites. And like thousands of other Jewish families, they were refused, not allowed to immigrate into the country. And when Germany overran Holland in 1940, Anne Frank's family was trapped with no way out. They had it better than most, and with the help of friends and with Mr. Frank's business partners, they went into hiding in some secret rooms at the back of a warehouse that Mr. Frank's company had owned there in Amsterdam. And to help cover their tracks, they told others, spread the rumor, that they were fleeing to Switzerland in hopes that no one would come looking for them and they could eventually make a clean getaway. And while they hid there in their hidden complex in the early years of the war, the world around them descended into madness.

Anne Frank was 13 years old when her family went into hiding. Like many teenagers, she had dreams, great dreams. She dreamed of being a writer, and she was quite a gifted writer. And in line with those dreams, she began to pass the time in their prison, their self-imposed prison, began keeping a diary, a very personal diary, a very well-written diary, in which she poured out her hopes, her dreams, her fears, her transition from childhood to becoming a young woman. And much of her diary is intensely personal. She chronicles the strain as her family takes in one other Jewish family of three into their already cramped quarters, then not long after they take in an elderly Jewish man into their hiding place to spare those from the Holocaust that is happening outside. In her diary, she pours out her frustrations, her disagreements with her family in this indescribably stressful time, and her struggles with trying to grow up and live some kind of semblance of a normal life and trying to forge her own identity as a young woman. She describes the tightening noose as conditions grow worse and worse as the food that they have carefully stored away leading up to this moment begins to run out, and it gets harder and harder to find food on the black market. Their clothing wears out after several years, and they can't replace it, because where do you replace it from? There's nowhere to get clothing. She describes the fears of someone—and they're very cramped quarters now with eight people there—her fears of someone getting sick, because getting sick could become a death sentence, because there's no way to get medicine. There's no way to send out for a doctor to come and visit and take care of any sicknesses or anything like that. She talks about and begins to describe her fears, and her nightmares as friends are taken away, never to be seen again. Anne Frank wrote her diary only ten years before I was born. A number of you were alive during that time. Some of you weren't, and for many of our young people, our teenagers, young adults, the horrors of that time may seem like ancient history, so far back that it's unimaginably ancient. But again, it's not that long ago, only ten years before I was born. The 17th century English philosopher, British philosopher Thomas Hobbes has a famous quote. In describing the condition of humanity, he said, The life of man is nasty, brutish, and short. The life of man is nasty, brutish, and short. And our lifespan may be a bit longer today than the 17th century when he wrote that. But for most of human history, that has been the story of mankind. For most, life has been nasty, brutish, and short. To remind us what a world without God is capable of, I'd like to read some excerpts from Anne Frank's diary. If you'd like to read it, it's titled Diary of a Young Girl. It's been made into at least two movies that I know of. Much of the diary is intensely personal, and I won't go into that. But what I'd like to share with you today is her thoughts as she witnessed the most advanced civilization on earth at that time. Literally go insane.

On January 13, 1943, she describes conditions deteriorating around them as they're hiding out in their storerooms, and the secret storeroom is the back of the warehouse in Amsterdam. She writes, Terrible things are happening outside. At any time of night and day, poor, helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. They're allowed to take only a knapsack and a little cash with them, and even then, they're robbed of these possessions on the way. Families are torn apart. Men, women, and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared. Women return from shopping to find their houses sealed. Their family is gone. Everyone is scared. The children in this neighborhood run around in thin shirts and wooden shoes. They have no coats, no caps, no stockings, and no one can help them. Nawing on a carrot to steal their hunger pangs, they walk from their cold houses through cold streets. Things have gotten so bad in Holland that hordes of children stop passers-by in the streets to beg for a piece of bread. I could spend hours telling you about the suffering the war has brought, but I'd only make myself more miserable. All we can do is wait as calmly as possible for it to end. Jews and Christians alike are waiting. The whole world is waiting. And many are waiting for death.

In October 29, 1943, she talks about the atmosphere within their secret hiding place and the constant fear they have of being discovered. And she writes, All the bickering tears and nervous tension have become such a stress and strain that I fall into my bed at night crying. The atmosphere is stifling, sluggish, leaden. Outside you don't hear a single bird, and a deadly, oppressive silence hangs over us and clings to me as if it were going to drag me into the deepest regions of the underworld. I feel like a songbird whose wings have been ripped off, but who keeps hurling itself against the bars of its dark cage.

Let me out where there's fresh air and laughter. A voice within me cries. I don't even bother to reply anymore, but lie down. Sleep makes the silence and the terrible fear go by more quickly. A month later, November 27, 1943, she talks about a nightmare in which she dreamed of a friend of hers who had disappeared and she assumes that the friend had been captured and sent to the concentration camps. She writes in her diary, Last night, just as I was falling asleep, Anneli suddenly appeared before me.

I saw her there, dressed in rags, her face thin and worn. She looked at me with such sadness and reproach in her enormous eyes that I could read the message in them. Oh, Anne, why have you deserted me? Help me! Help me! Rescue me from this hell! And I can't help her. I can only stand by and watch while other people suffer and die. Why have I been chosen to live while she's probably going to die? And then she says to herself, I've got to stop dwelling on this.

It won't get me anywhere. I keep seeing her enormous eyes, and they haunt me. The following spring, May 3, 1944, she reflects on the war with remarkable insight for a fourteen-year-old girl. She writes in her diary, What's the point of war? Why can't people live together peacefully? Why all this destruction? There's a destructive urge in people, the urge to rage, murder, and kill. And until all of humanity, without exception, undergoes a metamorphosis, wars will continue to be waged, and everything that has been carefully built up, cultivated, and grown will be cut down and destroyed, only to start over again. It's remarkable astounding insight for a fourteen-year-old girl who didn't understand the truth.

But she knew, as she wrote here in her diary, that unless, until there is a change in human nature, this cycle of war and suffering and death is going to continue without end. The following months, she and her family, they had a radio there in their secret hideout with them, and they were able to listen to BBC Radio from London.

And they heard of the Allied landing, June 6, 1944, at Norma de France. And that raised her hopes, and she writes of their hope that maybe soon their long nightmare will be over, and they'll somehow be rescued. So she writes in her diary, is this really the beginning of the long-awaited liberation? The liberation we've all talked about so much, which still seems too good, too much of a fairy trail, ever to come true, until this year, bring us victory.

We don't know yet, but where there's hope, there's life. It fills us with fresh courage and makes us strong again. We need to be brave to endure the many fears and hardships and the suffering yet to come. So in her diary, she reflects the hope that they're beginning to feel now, the possibility that there's a light at the end of the tunnel, and perhaps their nightmare will soon end. A month later, July 15, 1944, she describes her hope that things will get better and that she, as a teenage girl, a young woman, will finally be able to realize her dreams.

And she writes, it's difficult in times like these. Ideals, dreams, and cherished hopes rise within us, only to be crushed by grim reality. It's a wonder I haven't abandoned all my ideals. They seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.

And she concludes, It's utterly impossible for me to build my life on a foundation of chaos, suffering, and death. I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness. I hear the approaching thunder that one day will destroy us, too. I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better. That this cruelty, too, shall end. That peace and tranquility will return once more. In the meantime, I must hold on to my ideals. Perhaps the day will come when I'll be able to realize them.

And Frank's diary contains two more entries, and then ends on August 1, 1944. Three days after that, the morning of August 4th, a car pulled up outside the building where they were hiding, and out stepped a German SS sergeant, accompanied by three Dutch secret police. Someone had tipped him off that Jews were hiding in the building, and they arrested the eight people hiding there, and shipped them off to Auschwitz and Poland.

What was life like for Anne and her family in Auschwitz? We don't know, because when they were arrested, her diary was left behind. Her father survived the war, and came back and collected the pages, and eventually published the diary of Anne Frank. So we don't know much about what life was like in the camps, at least not directly from Anne's hand, because if she wrote anything, it did not survive. But just last week, as I was researching this, I came across this photo.

It's a photo taken shortly after the war of a young Polish girl who had spent her childhood in the concentration camps, and somehow managed to survive. The photo was taken in an orphan's home, and the children that particular day were asked to draw a picture of their home on the blackboard.

Most of the children drew the typical pictures of a crooked house, with a crooked door, a crooked window, and a crooked chimney.

But this young girl, the only home she had known was the concentration camps. And this is what she drew. She drew a picture of the pain and the terror that had consumed her childhood. It came so close to choking off her life. This is what terror looks like to a child. Of the eight people who had been hiding here, with the Frank family, only the father, Otto Frank, survived. As I mentioned, he came back and retrieved Anne's writings after the war. All the other members of the family and the other families hiding with him died of disease, or exhaustion, or starvation, or they were gassed, or they were simply worked to death.

Anne Frank and her sister survived longer than most. They were relatively healthy when they entered the camps, and they were eventually healthy enough to be transferred from Auschwitz to a work camp known as Bergen-Belsen as workers. But in the winter of 1944 and 1945, a terrible typhus epidemic swept through the camp, was brought on by the terrible hygienic conditions there, and it killed thousands of prisoners, including Anne's older sister, Margot, first, and a few days later, Anne herself.

Their bodies were dumped in unmarked mass graves, along with thousands of others. The camp was liberated by British troops six weeks later, and Germany surrendered three weeks after that. Sorry, I get choked up thinking about these things. You've probably heard that Europe is much less religious than the United States, and it's very true. If you travel to Europe, you can see churches and cathedrals standing empty, and Europe is much less religious than the rest of the world, because they went through two world wars in the last century.

They saw suffering that most of us can't even begin to imagine or comprehend. Two generations, two entire generations of young European men, went to war. British, French, German, Polish, Italian. Millions of them never came home. Slaughtered in World War I and II. Some 20 million people died in the First World War, and somewhere around 70 million, only a generation later, in World War II. And the European peoples witnessed this firsthand.

They felt the war. They saw the war. They lived the war. And they saw the horrors of those two world wars. They saw genocide. And they wondered, if there is a God, how could he possibly allow this to happen? This kind of suffering, and millions of Europeans abandoned religion because of this very question and became atheists. And even today, one of the major arguments that atheists advance is, if there is a God, how could he allow such things to take place? And it's a good question. It's a very good question. And much of the answer lies in the fact that the world does not understand the meaning of this day. You see, God has never forgotten all of these people.

The 20 million who perished in World War I, or the 70 million who perished in World War II, or the 6 million Jews, like Anne Frank and her family, who perished in the death camps.

God has never forgotten the billions of other human beings who have lived and loved and hoped and died without ever understanding what life was really all about. Without ever knowing the purpose of mankind, without ever knowing why they were born, why they existed, without ever knowing the wonderful and precious truths that we have been here celebrating this last week. Most of mankind has indeed had lives that were nasty, brutish, and short, as Thomas Hobbes described it.

And then they were forgotten. When I was a young man, junior high in high school, I apprenticed with my father. My father made tombstones for a living. And I spent many a day in junior high and high school, after school or during summers, going with him to country cemeteries all over northern Alabama. So I got used to spending a lot of time in cemeteries. And if you visit a cemetery, you can go to just about any one, and the most common inscription you'll see on the tombstones there is, Gone, but not forgotten. Gone, but not forgotten.

It's a nice sentiment, a good sentiment, a well-meaning sentiment. But sadly, it's not all that accurate, because most people are quickly forgotten. Most people die, their children remember them, maybe their grandchildren, perhaps in some cases even great-grandchildren. But beyond that, the memory of people disappears. And people go to the grave, and they are quickly forgotten. There's only one who truly remembers all of those, and that is the God whom we worship. He has never forgotten all of those who have gone before, the billions and billions of people, all who have lived and died and saw their hopes and dreams go to the grave with them.

What does this day mean for those people? What does it mean to them? In short, it means the fulfillment of their hopes and dreams, everything mankind has ever wanted, ever wished for, ever hoped for, ever longed for, but could never find in life, in this world. Dominated by Satan's lies and deceptions, they could never reach those longings and hopes in a world that is blinded by Satan and cut off from God, imprisoned in a world of spiritual blindness and deception. This day is all about their hopes, their dreams, their future, everything that they ever wanted.

Those of you who know me know I've said an awful lot about archaeology, ancient cultures, ancient history, and so on. And one thing that has struck me from every ancient culture, no matter what place in the world, no matter what time period, no matter what ethnic background or whatever, one thing that has struck me is how pervasive there is belief in life after death. Every single culture I've ever looked at has some kind of belief in life after death. It doesn't matter what time period, where in the world, anything like that. It seems that all people everywhere have believed in some form of life after death, of a life beyond the grave. All these people died believing they would live again, have some kind of existence beyond the grave. It's been a universal hope and belief in mankind as far back as you want to go in human history. But why is that? There are few things that just about everybody believes, but throughout human history virtually everyone has believed in some form of life after death. Why is that? I think the answer is found in Ecclesiastes 3, verse 11. I'm just going to read part of a verse here. But speaking of mankind, it says that God has put eternity in their hearts. God has put eternity in their hearts. And that's a fascinating statement there. I'd like to read here a quote here from the Jewish Son Sino commentary. It says about this phrase in Ecclesiastes 3, verse 11. God has endowed man with the sense of a future. He knows he is more than the creature of a day. The creature of a day is referring to something like a fly or a bug that only lives a few days or a few weeks and that is gone. He knows he is more than the creature of a day. And this consciousness is a cause of his dissatisfaction with the transitory experiences which take place within the span of his lifetime. What this is saying, to kind of sum it up, is that man, unlike other creatures, has a sense of the future. We yearn for something more, something greater, something more meaningful than this temporary three score in ten that we are assigned. He might say that God has wired human beings this way. He wired us to have a yearning, an innate feeling that there must be something beyond this life. And again, it is reflected in every ancient culture I have ever come across, that this life is not all there is. And this seems to be fundamental to religious belief. I can't speak for every single religion because I haven't studied all of them. But all of those that I know of have some form of belief in life after death. That there is more to our existence and purpose in life than just this life alone. So God has truly wired us this way, as Ecclesiastes 3, 11 put it. He has put eternity in our hearts. This feeling, this idea, this knowledge that there must be something more than just this life alone.

But how will that become a reality for mankind? How will mankind find that something else that must lie beyond this life, that eternity that he has put in our hearts? How will God make it possible for every human being who has ever lived to finally attain everything he or she has hoped for and longed for and wanted from life? One of the most haunting and truly unforgettable things I've ever seen is the children's memorial at the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, Israel.

It's hard to describe because I've never seen anything like it. I've visited it multiple times. One minute you're outside in the bright sunny daylight of Jerusalem, and the next you walk down this small hallway into a darkened room. And there you see a wall of glass in front of you, and imprinted on the glass are these pictures, black and white pictures, of children of many ages, boys and girls.

And as you walk past the pictures, you enter a dark, slowly curving, unlit hallway. And within a few minutes the outside light is gone, and you're in what seems to be almost total blackness. And the pathway is narrow, so you go through it single file, by yourself, alone.

Because that's the way you're intended to experience this, by yourself, walking alone. And then as your eyes adjust to the darkness, a strange phenomenon takes place. It seems like there are tiny stars floating all around you. Some seem so close you can reach out and touch them. Some seem a few yards away. Some seem infinitely far away, like the faintest stars you can see, twinkling off in the distance there.

And there are thousands of them floating all around you, and it's as if you were walking through a universe of stars, unlike anything I've ever seen. And as you walk along, shuffle along in the dark, this twinkling light changes positions. Some appear, some disappear, and they're constantly changing. And no one is saying a word. And then off in the distance you hear a voice.

It's a woman's voice reading slowly, deliberately, from a list. Rachel Weisman, 13 years old, Austria. David Berger, 8 years old, Netherlands. Esther Korman, 2 years old, Hungary. Isaac Levy, 15 years old, Germany. Maryam Gribbitts, 3 years old, Poland. Benjamin Fisher, 7 years old, France. Dahlia Rebekovich, 10 years old, Russia. And the names just continue, and continue, and continue. And the list goes on, repeating some of the million and a half Jewish children who were murdered in World War II. I didn't realize it at the time, the significance of the lights, the flickering lights all around, but a leader studied about it.

And the Jewish architect of the Children's Memorial, they're in Jerusalem. To him, the lights, and there are actually only five memorial candles. But the way you design this, there are mirrors that reflect the light dozens, hundreds, thousands of times. As though, again, you're walking through a universe of lights. And the Jewish architect, each of those lights represented the soul of one of the Jewish children murdered in the Holocaust there.

And although this is a truly haunting place, and it is, if any of you have seen that, you know what I'm talking about, in a way it's a hopeful place. It seems ironic, but the first time I visited there years ago, after the Feast of Tabernacles there in Israel, and after the eighth day, and with the lessons of the feast and the eighth day fresh on my mind, as I slowly shuffled through there in the dark and saw these lights and heard the names, endlessly repeated, I thought about something else.

To me, the lights represented something else, something very hopeful. A scripture came to mind, Ecclesiastes 12 and verse 7, as I watched these flickering lights. The context in Ecclesiastes 12 and verse 7, Solomon is talking about the inevitability of death. He says that we will grow old and we will die because that's how we were designed. Our physical bodies were never meant to last forever. So he wrote in Ecclesiastes 12-7, then the dust will return to the earth as it was, and the dust that he's talking about is our bodies. Dust we are and dust we will return. He says the spirit will return to God who gave it.

And the bodies of many of those Jewish children commemorated in the children's memorial didn't even get a decent burial. Anne and Margo Frank had their bodies dumped in the mass graves of Bergen-Belsen and millions of other prisoners. Had their bodies burned to ashes and those ashes dumped in swamps or used for landfill. Their bodies returned to the dust from which we were made, as it says here in Ecclesiastes. But the body is not what is important to God.

The body doesn't return to God, the spirit returns to God. God desired our bodies again to be temporary, to last seven or eight decades and then to wear out and break down. Dust we are, to dust we will return. The spirit is what is important to God. We breathe our last and that spirit that is within us, that is the essence of everything that we are, everything that we think, everything that we know, returns back to God who gave it to await the resurrection.

And as I watch those flickering lights, that's what I thought of. The spirit that has returned to God to await the time when it will be reunited with a physical body. And those people will live again to see the fulfillment of this day. And as time has marched on, man has largely forgotten all of those victims. But God has not forgotten them and he never will. And every day brings us closer to the fulfillment of that day when those spirits will be reunited with a physical body to live again and to hear things they've never heard before. And to see things they've never heard before, seen before, and to learn things they've never learned before.

And that is to at last been able to understand God's truth, the wonderful, precious truths that we've been here learning about for the last week. And they will have their opportunity for salvation. My good friend Scott Moss read earlier this morning from Ezekiel 37. Let's go back and review some of that and pick up on some things we might not have heard about before. This is the marvelous vision that Ezekiel has of the Valley of the Dry Bones. And it will become a reality in the fulfillment of this day. We can't really talk about this day without understanding a bit about this incredible vision that Ezekiel sees.

So beginning Ezekiel 37, verse 1, The hand of the Lord came upon me and brought me out in the spirit of the Lord, so this is a vision that he sees, and set me down in the midst of the valley, and it was full of bones. Then he caused me to pass by them all around, and behold, there were very many in the open valley, and they were very dry. They were dried up bones because they were very old. That's what the meaning of this is. These people have been dead for a long, long time when Ezekiel has this incredible vision. And he said to me, Son of man, can these bones live?

So I answered, O Lord God, you know. And again he said to me, prophesy to these bones, and say to them, O dry bones, here are the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God to these bones, Surely I will cause breath to enter into you, and you shall live. I will put sinews on you, and bring flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you.

And you shall live, then you shall know that I am the Lord. So God promises to resurrect these countless old dry bones, and give them, put them together as bodies again, and to give life, huge numbers of them. And sometimes we may wonder, how in the world is God going to do this? How will He resurrect all of these bodies, and give them life again? How will He put them all together again? Because after all, what happens when we die? Our bodies decay. They decay into the molecules and the atoms, and some get blown into the wind, some decay into the ground, some wash down into the seas, and so on.

So how will this take place? Scott Moss talked this morning, and I mentioned the word, what's the mechanism for this? I've given a lot of thought to that, but really assembling billions of physical human bodies is no problem for God, because after all, what are our bodies? I remember taking physiology class back in high school, and chemistry, and learning about what our bodies are made of. It's really pretty simple. We're basically just a bag of chemicals walking around.

That's about all we are. We're mostly water, and carbon, and various other elements thrown in. And in the resurrection, God doesn't need to resurrect the exact same body. He just needs the raw materials. The carbon, the hydrogen, the oxygen, the nitrogen, the calcium, and all of that. And the universe is full of those. He doesn't need the same body. All he needs is the raw materials.

And every human being, how will he know what each body is supposed to look like? Or be like? Well, science has made all kinds of interesting discoveries lately about DNA. DNA. Every human being who has ever lived has his or her own unique DNA. And what is DNA? If you think about it, it's really a blueprint. It's a blueprint for building a specific living organism. Plant, animal, human, whatever. It's a blueprint.

And you may have read that scientists have been able to extract DNA from bodies that are literally thousands of years old. Theoretically, you could take that if you watch the Jurassic Park movies and recreate living creatures out of that DNA. Just a trace of DNA. Can God do that? Absolutely. Is it how he's going to do it? We don't know. He doesn't tell us. God has perfect memories, something like ours. So he may be able to recreate every human being who has ever lived just based on his perfect knowledge of them. We don't know. He doesn't explain how he's going to do it. He may choose to reconstruct every one of billions of human beings just based on his perfect memory and knowledge of them. Anyone who can build a universe with billions and trillions of galaxies and stars, it's nothing to create billions of human bodies, which is harder to make a human body or a universe or a galaxy. Not a problem for God. Not a problem for him. If he can speak and entire galaxies can spring into existence out of nothing, what is it for him to make billions of human bodies and return those spirits to those bodies? Let's continue in verse 7 where we're reading in Ezekiel 37. So I prophesied as I was commanded, and as I prophesied, there was a noise and suddenly a rattling. And if I'm Ezekiel, I can't help but think maybe some of that rattling was his own knees knocking together as he sees this incredible sight taking place before him. And the bones came together, bone to bone. Indeed, as I looked, the sinews and the flesh came upon them and the skin covered them over, but there was no breath in them. So Ezekiel is looking over this vast valley of human bodies, thousands, maybe millions of them, but there is no breath in them. Continuing in verse 9, Also he said to me, prophecy to the breath, prophecy, son of man, and say to the breath, Thus says the Lord God, Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe on the slain that they may live. So he prophesied as he commanded me, and breath came into them, and they lived and stood upon their feet, an exceedingly great army.

So what an incredible sight Ezekiel sees here. These thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people, bodies coming together out of nothing but bone before his eyes. And these people are now standing upright as far as his eyes can see. Then he said to me, son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel. And if you read the entire chapter, this is talking about God's great plan and purpose for Israel in the context of how he will work for them. It doesn't mean this vision is limited strictly to Israel and no one else will experience this resurrection. God is simply using Israel as a model nation, which he does often in prophecy, to describe what he's going to do to all of humanity. So this is really what this is talking about here. Continuing in verse 11, they indeed say, our bones are dry, our hope is lost, and we ourselves are cut off. In other words, they acknowledge that they have died in a state of hopelessness, cut off from God. Their dreams, their hopes, their goals were lost in the dust of the grave. But again, God has never forgotten them. He's never forgotten their hopes and dreams. Verse 12, therefore, prophesy, and say to them, thus says the Lord God, behold, O my people, I will open your graves and cause you to come up from your graves and bring you into the land of Israel. And then he says something very interesting. Then you shall know that I am the Lord your God, when I have opened your graves, O my people, and brought you up from your graves. Think about that statement for a minute there. Then they shall know that I am the Lord.

What is this saying? One of the great questions of life and culture and society these days is the debate over whether God really exists. Does He exist or not? Many people just don't know. They're agnostic. Many people deny it. They're the atheists. Many of them don't accept that miracles happen. And these people that are being talked about here, however, are going to be different. They are going to know and know that God exists in a way that none of us sitting here can possibly know.

How is that? Why is that? Every single one of them will know that God exists because they have personally been raised from the dead.

They have been raised from the dead. You talk about proof that God exists. Do you need any more proof than being raised from the dead? Think about this. You talk about a receptive audience. Are they going to be willing to listen? You bet they will! If you've been raised from the dead, will you be willing to listen to God? Of course you will. Think about the condition of many of these people. Their last conscious thoughts would have been their awareness that they were dying. Many will have suffered long from disease that sapped away their life. Many will have died in epidemics. Many will have died in wars or battle where they lay there on the battlefield watching their blood ooze out and knowing they were dying. And the very next thing they know, here they are upright again and alive and whole. Yes, that's going to be a receptive audience, I would say. Billions of those in this resurrection will perish from disease. Many will have lived with crippling ailments, with chronic diseases, with blindness, deafness. How will these people feel? What will they know in the resurrection? They will have died knowing their condition. Their blindness, their deafness, their cripplement condition, whatever. Because they couldn't see, or couldn't walk, or couldn't breathe properly. And the next waking moment they're going to be alive and whole again and healed of whatever affliction it was that killed them.

They will know that not only were they resurrected to life again, but they were divinely healed of whatever it was that killed them. In this resurrection people aren't going to question whether God exists. They're going to be living proof that an all-powerful and all-loving God exists because God has raised them from the dead. God won't have to do a whole lot of convincing that He exists. He will have their attention.

And then continuing in verse 14, God says, God says, I will put my spirit in you, and you shall live, and I will place you in your own land, and you will know that I, the Lord, have spoken it and performed it, says the Lord.

And now they will have their opportunity for salvation, the same opportunity that each of us has been blessed with right now. And for the first time ever, they will come to know and to understand who and what God is. They will have the opportunity to repent and to receive God's Spirit, as it says here in verse 14, I will put my spirit in you. They will have free opportunity to receive God's Spirit, and they will have the opportunity to see their hopes and dreams finally become a reality. Who will be in this resurrection? We just read that this is referring to the whole house of Israel.

Does this mean that Israel is the only group of people in this resurrection? Well, Jesus Christ explains who will be in this resurrection over in Matthew 12. Several other places. We'll just read this one passage here, though. In the context here, Jesus has performed many great miracles, but people still refuse to believe, especially the scribes and the Pharisees.

They come to Jesus wanting to see a miracle, but Jesus had already given them miracles, and they refused to believe what they had seen and heard. And then Jesus warns about the consequences of their refusal to believe. So he says, the men of Nineveh will rise up in the judgment with this generation and condemn it, because they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and indeed a greater one than Jonah is here. The queen of the south will rise up in the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon, and indeed a greater one than Solomon is here.

And traditional Christianity doesn't have a clue what to do with this passage. You simply can't fit the traditional view of heaven and hell into what Christ is here. Because who are the men of Nineveh that Jesus refers to? Well, we know them better as the Assyrians. And they were the bad guys who came and took Israel away into captivity about 800 years earlier. And who's the queen of Sheba? That's the queen who came to visit Solomon after hearing of his wisdom. And that was roughly a thousand years earlier. So Jesus says that these people from a thousand years earlier and 800 years earlier will rise up in the judgment with the people that he's talking to right there in his day, and they will live and learn of the truth for the first time.

So you have people a thousand years apart being resurrected together in a period of judgment. How do you fit that into the traditional idea of heaven and hell? You can't. It just doesn't work because, according to traditional belief, these people were already judged centuries before and went to heaven or hell then. And the same with those of Jesus Christ day.

They either went to heaven or hell when they died. So what's the point in a resurrection to be judged in the future? It just makes no sense without understanding the meaning of this day. This day shows that God is far greater and far more loving than people give him credit for and shows that all people will have the wonderful opportunity for eternal life in their own time regardless of when and where they lived in all of human history.

So there will come a future time of judgment for all those who have ever lived or died. Not a time of sentencing, although that will come, but sentencing and judgment are two different things. They will have to be judged first. And how are they judged? They're judged by the same standard we are judged. By the Word of God and what we do with what we know about it.

And those people will be judged by the exact same standard. So God will give everyone, according to his own timetable, the opportunity to learn and to choose, to choose either God's way and life or our own way and death. And so far, only very few in human history have been offered that choice. The vast majority have lived in a world blinded by Satan and imprisoned by his deception. But God has a plan to remedy that through the meaning of this day.

Back to the question I mentioned earlier, the very beautiful special music that's kind of a sermon in itself teaching us about God. But what does this day teach us about the God that we worship? Junior was a young man who grew up in West Texas.

He was called Junior because he shared the same name as his father. And out there in that West Texas farmland around Meadow, Texas, but have you been through there near Long, near Lubbock, Texas? Out in that West Texas farmland and ranch land, he didn't have much use for church. He wasn't a bad person, it's just that like most young men, he just didn't care for church. There were simply a lot more interesting things to occupy his time.

And World War II came along, and like many other men, he was drafted and sent to the Pacific Theater and the U.S. Army to be part of the island-hopping campaign as the U.S.

Army and the U.S. Marine Corps recaptured the islands from the Japanese. And the telegram arrived at Junior's parents' home like it arrived in so many homes during that war. In the Philippine Islands in the last year of the war, Junior's time ran out. He was felled by a piece of shrapnel from a Japanese artillery shell, and his body was shipped home to be buried there in the small town of Meadow, Texas. It's a tragic story, a very tragic story, what happened to this young man.

Hundreds of thousands of others as well, but perhaps what was even more tragic is what happened to this young man's mother. Because Junior, who had never cared for church, had never been saved. His mother was a sincere churchgoer, and she believed, as her religion taught, that those who aren't saved go to hell, and ever burning hell after death, and that there in hell they will suffer torment for all eternity. And in her mind, that is where her firstborn son, whom she loved, firstborn of four sons, was now and forevermore would be tormented in the flames of hell.

And she couldn't deal with it. She had a nervous breakdown, a nervous breakdown so severe that she had to be hospitalized, and so severe that she never really got over it. Over the years, she learned to cope, but she could never get over the thought that her beloved 25-year-old son was burning in torment in hell forever. Junior's mother was my wife Connie's grandmother. My wife never knew Junior, who was killed in World War II, before she was ever born.

But Connie and her grandmother were very close, and my wife used to visit with her whenever she could. And Connie's grandmother understood we had somewhat unconventional beliefs about life after death, and on more than one occasion she and Connie would be talking, and she would say, Connie, explain to me again about that second chance. I want to know more about that second chance.

And second chance is what she termed our understanding of this day and the second resurrection. Connie would patiently explain and go through some of the scriptures of it, and her grandmother would sit there and listen intently, and then she would almost inevitably say, I sure hope that's true. I sure hope that's true.

My wife's grandmother never fully understood it, but to the end of her days, this dear, sweet, kind, gentlewoman, typical grandmother, still wanted some hope, some something to hold onto, that her son wasn't burning forever in the flames of hell. And to me, this is one of the most damnable teachings ever, because it makes God into a monster.

It makes Him into a sadistic being who would torture people for all eternity, for whatever sins they committed in this life, or in the case of Junior, his 25 short years on earth, and condemned to an eternity in hell. But this is the picture of millions, maybe a billion or more people have of God, that He's allowing these people to be tortured in the flames of hell forever.

Is this the God of the Bible? The God we worship is very different from that. God's attitude toward us is found over in 2 Peter 3, verse 9. The Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some count slackness, but is long suffering toward us, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. That all should come to repentance. God doesn't want a single person to perish, much less be tortured for all eternity in flames.

But for all of us to come to repentance, to choose life, to choose God's way to have our hopes and our dreams of peace and meaning and life everlasting to become a reality. What is your personal picture of God? We just talked about the picture that many, perhaps up to 2 billion people, have of God, that He is a being who would allow billions of people to be tortured in hell for all eternity.

But what is your personal picture of God? We find a fascinating insight into God's nature and character over in Psalm 56 and verse 8. And to describe what is, to understand what is being said here, we need to understand the context, because David here is describing many of the trials and he is going through in life. He's how he's persecuted. He's being pursued by his enemies who are trying to kill him, how he's fleeing for his life, and yet he has hope.

And why does he have hope? He has hope because he knows the nature and the character of the God whom he worships, a God who loves him dearly and will never let him down. And then the part I want to bring our attention to is Psalm 56 and verse 8. Unusual passage, I just want to read this one phrase out of here and talk about it. David says to God, put my tears into your bottle. Are they not in your book?

And this sounds puzzling to us because we don't really understand what he's talking about. What's this bottle? What's this book? I have here, and I'm showing on screen, a reproduction of what an archaeology circles. It's called a tear bottle. A tear bottle. And archaeologists have found many of these in the burial caves in Israel, ancient tombs. And in David's time, presumably these were made out of clay or possibly even leather, like tiny wine skins or something. Later, in the time of Jesus Christ in the first century, they were made out of glass. And this is a reproduction of one made of Roman glass.

This happens to be plastic, but they found hundreds of these, maybe thousands of them in tombs from the first century here in Israel. And what happened, and what is being referred to here, is that when a person died, the mourners would gather and they would shed their tears into the bottle like this. And the bottle would be sealed with wax or something like that. And then that bottle would be placed in the tomb with a person who was buried as a reminder of how much the deceased person was loved as evidenced by the tears that were shed and collected in the bottle and placed in the tomb there.

This was done to remind God of how much the person was loved as evidenced by the tears that were shed at his or her passing. And apparently David is referring to this custom, or a custom very similar to it, saying essentially that God figuratively collects our tears in his bottle and that he remembers all of the suffering and the sadness that we go through in this life, the losses, the trials, that God remembers the tears that we shed in sorrow and he saves them in his bottle and he records them in his book so that he will never forget our suffering.

What an incredible picture of God! That he loves us so much that he collects our tears and records them in a book. And although mankind can't will forget all of those tears, God will never forget. God remembers these things and he promises in his plan to ultimately make all suffering and all tears go away. And this day teaches us how that will all come about. I very much look forward to the time when Anne Frank will rise in the resurrection to the greatest freedom that mankind has ever known. Anne Frank and her family lived in the prison of her family secret hiding place where they lived in continual terror of being discovered. And then she lived in the prison of a concentration camps where she and her family suffered humiliation and for most of them death. But she also lived as every human being has ever lived in the prison of a world that is enslaved in spiritual darkness to the God of this age, Satan the devil. And this day pictures the freeing of those prisoners, the proclaiming of liberty to those held in captivity, the recovery of sight to the blind, the healing of the brokenhearted, and the fulfillment of the hopes and the dreams of all of those who have ever lived. And yes, Jesus quoted Isaiah's prophecy that the freedom, the prisoners will be set free, the gospel will be preached to the poor, and so on. And we know that that will apply at his second coming in the millennium, which we celebrated for the first seven days here. But it actually, if you think about it, applies on a far, far greater scale to this time, to the meaning of this day, when billions of people who have ever lived and died will be freed from that spiritual prison. The blind will see, the brokenhearted will be healed, and all of their hopes and all of their dreams will eventually come through. And all of the scriptures that we've heard quoted here in the wonderful messages during this Feast of Chambernacles about the conditions during the millennium will also apply to all of those raised to life in the fulfillment of this day, too. But there will be a big difference between the two, because most of those who live during the millennium will only know that perfect world, excepting, of course, those who live over into that. But most who live during the millennium will only know that perfect world that is described in so many prophecies. Those in the second resurrection, typified by this day, will have lived in what the Bible calls this present evil age. They will have known firsthand where man's way leads, and they will have lived and died knowing that. But they will be brought to life in a world where the ills of this world no longer exist. Those who have lived in a world of fear will then live in a minimum world of peace. Those Islanders in a world of sickness and disease will live in a world of perfect health and happiness. And those who have lived in a world of crime and fear will live in a world of love and respect for other human beings. Those who have lived in a world of famine and starvation will live in But in the second resurrection, they will live under a very different reign. The reign of Jesus Christ and of His saints. Hopefully all of us who are here today. And they will know which choice leads to life and which leads to death. What choice will they make? I think billions upon billions will choose life. Eternal life in the family of God. And the hopes and dreams of all of those who have ever lived. All those whom mankind has forgotten will at last come true.

What a wonderful truth we have revealed to us in the meaning of this day. And what an awesome and loving and wonderful God we worship.