The Valley of Dry Bones

In the Revelation of John, too, the order of these times is laid out where you can see it. It is what the souls of the martyrs under the altar are told to wait for, while they pray hard to be avenged and judged. Told to wait, I say — so that first the world may drink to the dregs the plagues that are stored up for it in the angels’ bowls; so that the city of prostitution may get from the ten kings the doom it deserves; so that the beast, the Antichrist, with his false prophet may make war on the church of God; so that, after the devil has been thrown into the bottomless pit for a while, the blessed privilege of the first resurrection may be granted out from the thrones; and then, once he has been handed over to the fire, so that the judgment of the last and general resurrection may be settled out of the books. [a]

So then: the Scriptures both mark out the stages of the last times and gather the whole harvest of Christian hope at the very end of the world. That being so, one of two things follows. Either everything God promises us comes to pass then — in which case what the heretics pretend about a resurrection here and now falls to the ground. Or else, even granting that confessing the mystery is a kind of resurrection, there is still room, with no damage to that view at all, for believing in the one announced for the end.

More than that: holding to this spiritual resurrection actually argues for the bodily one. If no resurrection at all were announced for that time, there would be fair ground for asserting nothing but a spiritual one. But since a resurrection is proclaimed for the last time, it is proved to be bodily — because no spiritual resurrection is announced for then as well. Why announce a second time a resurrection of only one kind, the spiritual? That one ought to be taking place either now, with no regard to different times at all, or else then, at the very close of all the periods. So we have the better right to hold a spiritual resurrection at the beginning of a life of faith — we, who acknowledge that it is fully completed at the end of the world.

There was an objection made earlier that the Scriptures speak in figures. I have one more answer to make to it: we are just as free to defend the bodily character of the resurrection out of the language of the prophets, which is figurative in exactly the same way. [e]

Take that first sentence God passed when he called man earth: “Earth you are, and to earth you will return.” He said it of the fleshly substance, of course — the substance taken out of the ground, which was the first thing to be given the name man, as I have already shown. Does that not teach us to read whatever wrath or grace God has determined for the earth as applying to the flesh as well? Strictly speaking the earth is not liable to his judgment, since it has never done either good or evil. Cursed it was, no doubt, for it drank a man’s blood. But even that was a figure of murderous flesh.

If the earth has to suffer joy or injury, it is only on man’s account: so that through what happens to the place he lives in he may feel the joy or the sorrow, and be the one who really pays the penalty which, on his account alone, even the earth has to suffer. So when God threatens the earth, I would rather say that he is threatening the flesh; and when he makes the earth a promise, I would rather understand him as promising the flesh.

Take that passage of David: “The Lord is King; let the earth be glad” — meaning the flesh of the saints, whose business it is to enjoy the kingdom of God. Then he goes on: “The earth saw and trembled; the mountains melted like wax at the presence of the Lord” — meaning, surely, the flesh of the wicked. In the same sense it is written, “They will look on him whom they pierced.” If anyone thinks both passages were spoken simply of the element earth, how does it hang together that the earth should shake and melt at the presence of the Lord, when a moment before it was exulting at his royal dignity?

So again in Isaiah: “You will eat the good of the land.” The words mean the blessings waiting for the flesh when in the kingdom of God it is made new, and made like the angels, and waiting to receive the things “which no eye has seen and no ear heard, and which have never entered the heart of man.” Otherwise, what an empty business it would be for God to invite men to obedience with field crops and the elements of this life — things he hands out even to irreligious men and blasphemers, under a general arrangement made once for all with mankind: “sending rain on the good and on the evil, and making his sun shine on the just and on the unjust.” A happy thing, no doubt, is faith, if what it is to get are gifts that the enemies of God and Christ not only use but abuse, “worshipping the created thing itself against the Creator.” I suppose you will count onions and truffles among earth’s bounties — seeing that the Lord declares “man shall not live on bread alone.”

This is how the Jews lose the heavenly blessings: by shutting their hopes up inside earthly ones. They know nothing of the promise of heavenly bread, or of the oil of God’s anointing, or of the wine of the Spirit, or of that water of life which draws its strength from the vine of Christ. On exactly the same principle they take the actual soil of Judea to be that holy land — which ought rather to be understood of the Lord’s flesh. In everyone who puts on Christ, that flesh is from then on the holy land: holy indeed, by the Holy Spirit living in it; truly flowing with milk and honey, by the sweetness of his assurance; truly Judean, by reason of friendship with God. For “he is not a Jew who is one on the outside, but the one who is a Jew inwardly.”

God’s temple and Jerusalem have to be understood the same way where Isaiah says: “Awake, awake, Jerusalem! Put on the strength of your arm; awake, as in your earliest time” — that is, in the innocence that came before the fall into sin. For how could words of that kind, exhorting and inviting, suit the Jerusalem that killed the prophets, and stoned the men sent to her, and in the end crucified her own Lord? Nor, in fact, is salvation promised to any one piece of land at all; land must pass away along with the fashion of the whole world. And even if somebody wants to press hard for paradise as the holy land — since it can fairly be called the land of our first parents, Adam and Eve — even then it follows that the restoring of paradise is a promise made to the flesh, whose lot it was to live there and keep it. Man is to be called back to it exactly as he was when he was driven out of it.

The Scriptures give us robes, too, as a picture of the flesh’s hope. In the Revelation of John it says, “These are they who have not defiled their clothes with women” — meaning virgins, of course, and men who have made themselves “eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven.” So they will be “dressed in white clothing,” that is, in the bright beauty of unmarried flesh. In the gospel, even “the wedding garment” can be taken as the holiness of the flesh. [m]

And when Isaiah tells us what sort of “fast the Lord has chosen,” and then adds a statement about the reward of good works, he says: “Then your light will break out like the morning, and your garments will quickly rise.” He is not thinking of cloaks or heavy gowns; he means the rising of the flesh, whose resurrection he was announcing after its fall in death. So we are supplied with a defense of the resurrection of the body even out of the figures.

Then when we read, “Go, my people, go into your storerooms for a little while, until my anger passes by,” we have in those storerooms the graves, where those will have to rest a little who at the end of the world have left this life in the last furious onset of Antichrist’s power. Why else would he say storerooms, rather than name some other container? Only because the flesh is kept in these rooms, these cellars, salted down and set aside for use, to be brought out again when the occasion suits. It is on the same principle that embalmed bodies are put away for burial in mausoleums and tombs — so that they can be taken out of them when the Master gives the order.

There is sense in reading the passage that way, for what shelter of little storerooms could ever screen us from the wrath of God? And so it appears that by the very phrase he uses, “until his anger passes by” — the anger that will put out Antichrist — he is in fact showing that after that indignation the flesh will come out of the tomb where it had been laid before the anger broke out. Out of storerooms nothing is brought but what was put into them; and once Antichrist has been rooted out, the great business of the resurrection will be pushed busily forward.

But we know that prophecy has expressed itself by things done as much as by words said. The resurrection is foretold by words, and by deeds as well. When Moses puts his hand into the fold of his robe and draws it out again dead, and puts his hand in again and pulls it out living — does that not stand as a sign for the whole human race? Those three signs stood for a threefold power of God: first, that in the appointed order it should bring the old serpent, the devil, under man’s foot, however formidable he is; second, that it should draw the flesh out of the folds of death; and last, that it should pursue all shed blood in judgment. [q]

On this last point we read in the writings of the same prophet that God says: “For your blood, the blood of your lives, I will require from every wild beast; and I will require it from the hand of man, and from the hand of his brother.” Now nothing is required except what is being demanded back, and nothing is demanded back except what is going to be handed over; and what is going to be handed over is, of course, what is demanded and required for vengeance. But there is no possible way of punishing something that never existed. Exist it will, then, when it is restored in order to be punished. So everything said about the blood applies to the flesh, since without flesh there is no blood. The flesh will be raised so that the blood can be punished.

There are other statements of Scripture, again, put so plainly that they are free of every obscurity of figure — and yet they thirst to have their very plainness interpreted. Take that passage in Isaiah: “I will kill, and I will make alive.” His making alive certainly has to come after his killing. So, since it is by death that he kills, it is by resurrection that he will make alive. And it is the flesh that death kills; the flesh, therefore, is what the resurrection will bring back to life. If killing means taking life away from the flesh, and its opposite, reviving, means giving life back to the flesh, then the flesh has to rise again — the flesh to which the life that killing took away has to be given back by being made alive.

So then: the figurative parts of Scripture, and the arguments drawn from things done, and some plain statements of the holy Scriptures all throw light on the resurrection of the flesh, even without naming the substance outright. How much more effective for settling the question will those passages be that point to the actual substance of the body by naming it! Take Ezekiel, who says: [u]

The hand of the Lord was upon me, and the Lord brought me out in the Spirit and set me down in the middle of a plain that was full of bones. He led me all the way around them in a circle: there were a great many of them on the face of the plain, and they were very dry. And he said to me: Son of man, will these bones live? And I said, “Lord God, you know.” And he said to me: Prophesy over these bones, and say to them: You dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. This is what the Lord God says to these bones. See, I am bringing on you the breath of life, and you will live. I will give you the spirit, and I will put muscles on you, and I will spread skin over you; and you will live, and you will know that I am the Lord. And I prophesied as the Lord commanded me. And while I was prophesying, there was a voice, and there was a movement, and bones came up to bones. And I looked, and there were sinews and flesh coming up over them, and muscles were put around them; but there was no breath in them. And he said to me: Prophesy to the wind, son of man; prophesy and say: This is what the Lord God says. Come from the four winds, breath, and breathe into these dead men, and let them live. So I prophesied to the wind as he commanded me, and the spirit went into the bones, and they lived and stood on their feet — strong, and a great many of them. And the Lord said to me: Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say themselves, “Our bones have become dry, our hope has perished, and we along with them have been violently destroyed.” So prophesy to them, and say: See, I myself will open your graves and bring you up out of your graves, my people, and bring you into the land of Israel. And you will know that I the Lord opened your graves and brought you, my people, out of your graves. And I will give you my Spirit, and you will live, and you will rest in your own land; and you will know that I the Lord have spoken and done these things, says the Lord.

I am well aware how they twist even this prophecy into a proof of the figurative sense. Their ground is that by saying “These bones are the whole house of Israel,” he made them a figure of Israel and took them out of their own literal condition; and so, they argue, what we have here is a figurative prediction of the resurrection and not a true one. For the state of the Jews, they say, is a humiliated one, dead in a manner of speaking, and very dry, and scattered over the plain of the world. So the image of a resurrection is applied to that state as a figure: it has to be gathered up and fitted together again bone to bone — that is, tribe to tribe and people to people — and put back into a body by the sinews of power and the nerves of royal rule, and brought out as if from graves, meaning out of the most miserable and degraded quarters of captivity, and made to breathe again in a restoration, and to live from then on in their own land of Judea. [v]

And what is to happen after all that? They will die, no doubt. And after death, what? No rising from the dead, of course, since nothing of the sort is revealed to Ezekiel here. Yes, but the resurrection is foretold elsewhere. So there will be one in this case too, and they are being rash in applying this passage to the state of Jewish affairs. Or even if the passage does point to some recovery different from the resurrection I am arguing for, what is that to me, so long as there is also a resurrection of the body, just as there is a restoration of the Jewish state?

In fact, the very circumstance that the recovery of the Jewish state is prefigured by bones being put back into a body and joined together again is itself the proof that this will happen to the bones as well. The comparison could never have been built out of bones if the very same thing were not going to be brought about in bones. Now although the image is a sketch of the real thing, the image still has a truth of its own. So it must be that whatever is used figuratively to express something else has an existence of its own first. Emptiness is no solid ground for a comparison, and a thing that does not exist makes no foundation for a parable. It will therefore be right to believe that the bones are going to be re-clothed with flesh and breath, exactly as it is said here they will be. It is only because of that that their renewed state could stand for the reformed condition of Jewish affairs, which is what the passage is pretended to mean.

All the same, it shows more of a religious spirit to hold the truth on the authority of a literal reading, which is what the sense of the inspired passage calls for. If this vision had to do with the condition of the Jews, then as soon as he had shown the prophet how the bones lay, he would have added straight away, “These bones are the whole house of Israel,” and the rest. Instead, the moment he shows the bones, he breaks off to say the thing that suits bones best. Without naming Israel yet, he tests the prophet’s own faith:

Son of man, can these bones ever live? so that the answer comes back: Lord, you know.

And God, you may be sure, would not have tested the prophet’s faith on a point that was never going to be real, that Israel would never hear of, and that it was not proper to believe. But the resurrection of the dead had in fact been foretold, and Israel, in the distrust of his great unbelief, was offended at it. Staring at the state of the crumbling grave, he despaired of a resurrection — or rather, he never gave his mind to it at all, but only to his own harassing circumstances. So God first taught the prophet, who was not free of doubt himself, by showing him how the resurrection works, so that he might set it out in earnest. Then he charged the people to believe what he had revealed to the prophet, telling them that they themselves, refusing though they were to believe in their own resurrection, were the very bones that are to rise again.

Then in the closing sentence he says, “And you will know that I the Lord have spoken and done these things.” He means, of course, to do the very thing he had spoken of. He would never have spoken of it at all if what he meant to do were something other than what he said.