MEN OF VALOUR: THE RISING OF A VAST ARMY – PART 2

Part 2 – God’s Army at Creation and His Operation

“So, I prophesied as he commanded me, and breath entered them; they came to life and stood up on their feet – a vast army” (Ezekiel 37:10)

Everything God made within the space of six days of His creative activities was backed up with a statement of purpose. He gave a divine order to each of the creatures to serve a unique purpose. Man, obviously was not an exception. Going through the owner’s manual (The Bible) it is revealed that man was made for a specific assignment. In Genesis 1:26, God said:

“Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the earth, and over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

Subsequently God said in verse 28,

“Be fruitful and multiplied; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

Now, certain things immediately became obvious from the above passages:

1. Man was created with God’s deeper intention. In other words, Man was not an afterthought. It took the coordinating effort of the trinity to bring man forth.
2. Man was created in God’s image. The image of God talks about His nature, His character and His attributes and man carried all these at the beginning. More importantly,
3. Man was created to have dominion over God’s creation. He was given an assignment of SUBDUEING the earth. This is very significant.

To subdue means to control, to check, to discipline, to restrain. It means to bring orderliness to the earth. This is not a small assignment. These are actually the tasks of a soldier. Man, therefore was God’s army at the beginning. It means where there is chaos and confusion man must bring order and peace. Where there is unruly activities and misdemeanor, it is the duty of man by that commission to bring sanity.

 It was God that first handled this kind of task. In Genesis 1:1-3, God’s work of creation was confronted with darkness, void and chaos. God overcame by the power of light. This is the light John later referred to in John 1:5 that it shined in the darkness and the darkness could not put it off. Darkness represents the devil and all his activities on the surface of the earth. John later said this light is the life of men.

In other words, this light is a life-light. This is a very special attribute of God. It is a potent weapon against all kind of activities of darkness. For man therefore to be effective in His assignment as God’s army he has to be equipped with this life-light. And so, in Genesis 2: 7, the Bible said,

“And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostril the breath of life; and man became a living being.”

It is very important to emphasize here that, that was the first and the only equipping God gave to man in the beginning. That breath was the life-giving Spirit of God. It was the only weapon man possessed and the only thing he used to fulfill the entire divine mandate God placed on him. With this God’s life-giving Spirit man chased darkness away and demonstrated wisdom in naming all the animals. It was this breath that made him intellectually accurate and morally pure. As a matter of fact, it was this life that set man apart as the crown of God’s creation. With this embodiment of God’s life all the animals including lion were in subjection to man. This was the revelation the Psalmist saw when he exclaimed about man:

“You made him ruler over the works of your hands; you put everything under his feet” (Psalm 8:6)

Going back to Ezekiel revelation, you can now understand why the bones in the valley, though a great army, were useless until the breath of God came upon them. There were emphases three times of the need for the breath of the Lord if the dry bone would ever be effective as God’s vast army that must effect a change in the land. Just as God’s army at the beginning was lying down as ordinary dust until God’s breath came on him, so the dry bones in the valley without the breath of God.