Your Situation Isn't Hopeless!

5th Sunday in Lent, 4/10/11
Ezekiel 37:1-14


Your Situation Isn’t Hopeless!
I. The Lord is almighty.
II. The Lord is gracious.


About once a week someone forwards to my email box pictures of the devastation on Japan’s northeast coast. Do you get the same? If so, how do you react? Those pictures leave me speechless. Entire towns are gone. Homes and businesses have been destroyed and washed out to sea. In many places there’s nothing to salvage. Everything these people built during their lifetimes is gone. Imagine one minute enjoying life in your home and the next minute watching it all destroyed by a wall of water. And I’m not even mentioning the toll in human life.

The still pictures are horrific enough, but the video footage is beyond belief. I don’t know that I could have stood still with a camera in my hand recording the sea water washing over everything in my life. I think I would have dropped the camera and crumbled to my knees in utter disbelief and despair. How could this be happening? And there’s nothing I can do to stop it. How helpless! How hopeless!

I think I know all of you well enough to say that we’ve never faced anything like what I’ve described above. We’ve never watched everything in our lives destroyed before our very eyes. But we do know times of helplessness and hopelessness. Who of us hasn’t held a loved one in our arms or stood by their bedside, offering words of comfort and care but unable to do anything that will help them? All of us have faced those times in our lives—momentary or extended—when we’re staring at a crisis and we don’t know what to do and, even if we did, we’re powerless to do it.

That’s how God’s people in the days of Ezekiel felt. We’ll get into their situation in a moment. In a word, it seemed hopeless, much the way ours does at times. But that simply isn’t the case. Not with the Lord on your side. As bleak as things may be, your situation isn’t hopeless. Your situation isn’t hopeless. Join me as we see why in these words from our Lord.

Part I.

What do you do when you’re in a hopeless situation? I’m sure many of you would answer, “Pray about it.” And I agree. And then after we pray about it, we probably look for some advice. I went to one of those “self help gurus” on the internet to find some advice. I don’t recommend going there. This guru’s advice was to look at your life, as hopeless as it might be, as if it were a game of Monopoly. Play the game. See what happens. You might win. And if you lose, then make sure you learn from your mistakes. At least then a little bit of good will come out of it.

Really? Play the game? Since when is financial crisis, or terminal illness, or prolonged joblessness, or a gut-wrenching end to a relationship a game we can play and hope to win?

Tragically, the Jews of Ezekiel’s day had been playing games with God for centuries. The problem was that God wasn’t playing with them. He was dead serious. And now they found themselves in what appeared to be a hopeless situation. Ezekiel was one of about 4,000 Jews who went into exile in Babylon right around 600 BC. The unthinkable had happened. The Jews, descendants of Abraham, had been forcibly removed from the land God promised to Abraham and his descendants.

And now there seemed to be no hope of return. You see, a messenger had just come from Judah to Babylon and had reported that the Babylonians had destroyed the city of Jerusalem along with its glorious temple of the Lord. Up until that point the Jews had been hoping to return and re-inhabit their homes. In exile they had learned their lesson. They longed to return and worship the Lord once again in the temple. Now there was no hope of ever doing that again. No, their homes had not been washed out to sea; they had been reduced to a pile of charred rubble.

And their hearts cried out in utter despair and hopelessness. They said, “Our bones are dried up and our hope is gone; we are cut off.” They pictured their situation as hopeless as dry bones—there’s no life left, not even a sign of former life.

And that’s exactly the picture, then, that the Lord used to offer them hope. He gave Ezekiel a vision. We’d call it a horror movie. He showed Ezekiel a valley full of dry bones, like an old, open mass grave, the kind of sight that makes you shudder and turn away. And when the Lord questioned Ezekiel about the possibility of life existing there, Ezekiel deferred to the Lord and said, “You alone know.”

And then it got really creepy. The Lord told Ezekiel to speak the Lord’s words to the bones and suddenly there was a rattling and the bones started coming together, forming skeletons. And then the bones attached to one another by tendons. Suddenly the unthinkable happened—flesh appeared on the bones. In other words, bodies appeared. And then, by the word of the Lord, breath entered the bodies and they came to life.

It’s just a vision, but it illustrates something about our Lord that we know and believe to be true. He’s almighty. He and he alone can bring life where there is only death.

And that’s the answer to anyone’s hopelessness. Your situation isn’t hopeless. The Lord is almighty!

Ezekiel witnessed a vision of the Lord’s almighty power. He didn’t actually see that power, but he had heard the events from Israel’s history in which the Lord had exercised that power—the angel of death in Egypt, the parting of the Red Sea, and more recently, the angel of the Lord putting to death 185,000 Assyrian soldiers in one night. He knew those stories. So do we. We just wish we’d see some of that almighty power in our lives. We wish he’s use some of it right now and solve our problems. Then maybe our lives wouldn’t be so hopeless.

First, how do you know he isn’t using his almighty power to guard and protect you right now? How many times in your life’s history has he used his power to avert disaster, the disasters that Satan wants to bring into your life?

But more importantly, know for certain that he is using his almighty power right now. Your faith in Jesus as your Savior is a miracle of the almighty power of God. He has brought you to faith and he is feeding that faith right now. By his word he is strengthening that faith so that you hold onto him in faith until the day he calls you home to heaven. Now that’s almighty power! He used that power when he sent his Son in human flesh to be your Savior. He used that almighty power to send the flood of the Savior’s blood into your life to wash your sins away. He brings you his forgiveness daily for all the times we’ve doubted his power and have accepted our own invitations to our personal pity parties. Your situation isn’t hopeless! Your Lord is almighty!

Part II.

And as long as you have a promise from the Lord, you always have hope.

The Lord. It’s significant that God uses that name for himself throughout this account. That’s the special name that God used for himself when he spoke about his covenant or promises with his Old Testament people. It’s the name that emphasizes that he is faithful and loving toward his people.

And that’s how God had acted, not just recently, but throughout his dealings with his people. Don’t think that this disaster befell the Jews suddenly and without warning, like a tsunami. Just the opposite. For centuries God had been warning his people. Do you recall the prophet Isaiah? I’m sure you do. Isaiah lived 150 years before Ezekiel and the Lord used him to tell his people that, if they didn’t repent, the Babylonians would come and destroy them. And Isaiah wasn’t the only one who warned them. All these prophets with their warnings were evidence that the Lord had been patient with them.

And even when the Babylonians attacked, the Lord didn’t give his people what they fully deserved. They deserved to be wiped completely from the face of the earth and suffer eternally. But he didn’t do that. He spared a remnant of the people. He kept them safe and under his loving protection. Eventually, he led them back to Jerusalem and blessed their efforts to rebuild their city and their temple. A little more than four centuries later, he fulfilled his promise to send the world’s Savior through this remnant of his people.

And it’s all because of who he is. He is the Lord, who is merciful and gracious. He is still merciful and gracious. We trust him for his mercy every time we confess our sins. Just a single sin is punishable by death in hell. When we plead, “Have mercy on us, Lord,” that’s what we’re asking. We ask him not to give us the hell we deserve.

And instead, we trust in him to be gracious toward us. He has every right to tell us, “Fine, I won’t punish you in hell. Now go and prove to me how sorry you are.” In other words, work for God’s forgiveness. But God doesn’t work that way. Instead, he is gracious. He gives us what we don’t deserve. He gives us his forgiveness, full and free, won for us by Jesus, God’s Son. Walk with me in the next 14 days as we see what our sins cost Jesus and how he offered his perfect life on the cross for them. Marvel with me at his glorious resurrection and join your voices with mine in singing his Easter praises. Those saving events are the grace of God, my friends, God’s grace in action.

And because he is gracious, your situation isn’t hopeless. In fact, it’s just the opposite. It’s full of eternal hope in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ! Live daily in that hope! Amen.