Death is both a metaphor and a reality in the Scriptures. In Biblical Theology, Gerhardus Vos says that the physical dissolution of the body—what we would call death in its real or embodied form—is symbolically significant in communicating to human beings the nature of the final form of death, which is the ultimate outcome of sin and separation from God. To see and understand death is to understand the place where sin spiritually leads. The principle of resurrection—of life returning to a dead body and bringing it back to life—is therefore symbolic of the redemptive work of God for sinners. Spiritual death is more ultimate than physical death because it is more permanent.
You can see resurrection recurring as a theme throughout the Old Testament. David speaks of this in Psalm 16 when he says, “You will not abandon my soul to the grave,” anticipating that the righteous will escape the hold that death has upon them. These words are prophetic of Christ, as Peter points out in the first gospel sermon in Acts 2. When God intervenes to prevent Abraham from killing Isaac, the author of Hebrews tells us that this was a type of resurrection, figuratively restoring his son from the sentence of death that stood over him. The greatest symbolic imagery of resurrection, though, occurs in Ezekiel 37, when a great valley of dry bones is re-fleshed and re-aspirated so that they are restored to life. And what does the metaphor convey? It is the revival of the whole house of God from a position of lifelessness into obedience and joy in their redemption at God’s hand.
Resurrection, therefore, communicates the purpose of redemption in restoring what is dead back to life—not physical death, but the death into which sin casts us: a spiritual and eternal condition of dissolution and banishment from the presence of God. In the kingdom of Israel, this was symbolized by the periodic banishment and restoration that would occur as God’s presence dwelt in their midst. The book of Judges teaches us this through the frequent repetition of a single pattern: the nation grows cold and lifeless in its worship of and dependence on Yahweh, turning instead to the gods of the nations around them. God’s presence is then withdrawn, and they are oppressed unto death by foreign enemies. They are subsequently revived in their desire for God and cry out to Him, whereupon He raises up a judge to deliver them from their enemies.
Periodic revivals of this kind were the general experience of the kingdom throughout its existence. Under Hezekiah, for example, after the wickedness and idolatry of Ahaz and Jotham had nearly ended the cult of Yahweh and perverted temple worship, a great revival of worship led to the entire nation being cleansed of foreign altars and “high places.” This reform was so thorough that the Rabshakeh, a servant of the king of Assyria, knew about it and commented on it in Isaiah 36 (although he misunderstood its purpose). Several generations later, another great reform would occur under Josiah. Any serious study of the history of God’s people brings this pattern to the fore. The people of God were not stable in their adherence to their God but were subject to constant ups and downs. It should not surprise us, therefore, that the same pattern continues in the church.
Most Christians today can probably identify at least one “revival” that occurred in the history of the church—the Protestant Reformation. This was not, as it is often portrayed, a movement aimed at dividing or breaking apart a monolithic church that existed previously (no such monolithic institution truly existed), but a wide reform movement that was largely spontaneous and driven by the Holy Spirit. It swept through the entire Western church, including areas that never formally broke allegiance to Roman primacy. The result was a massive return to personal piety and pure worship, undiluted by the host of superstitions and corruptions that had crept in during the preceding centuries.
But this was only one of many such revivals in church history. Large reform movements occurred in the 3rd and 4th centuries, the 7th century, the 9th and 10th centuries, and the 12th century, and continued even after the Reformation. The Reformation is remembered particularly because it had immense political significance during pivotal centuries in European development.
For our purposes, we can say that revival is a constant necessity in the church—because of our dependence on the Holy Spirit and because of the dangerous pull of sin and its power within the church, so long as it exists as a mixed body at war with the world in which it lives. This war will be waged as long as this world endures, and we cannot have true rest from it until we pass from it. This is why we call the church on earth the church militant, or the church at war. Our weapons are not the weapons of the world, but spiritual weapons, as Paul says in 2 Corinthians 10.
Our text this past week, Psalm 85, is a prayer that God has given us to seek revival. He has equipped us with the words to pray, to seek from Him what we need to survive as a people in this world. We should, therefore, pray for revival using the words He gives us in the Psalm. It is a communal prayer for the church and an individual prayer for our own faith. We should be constantly asking God to send His Spirit to revive our hearts and recapture our affections with the greatness of our God and the glory He has in store for us!