Dardanelle Missionary Baptist Church — Dardanelle, Arkansas
Bro. Ken — Wednesday evening service, September 16, 2026 Ezekiel 37:1-28 · Matthew 24:32-34 · Zechariah 12:10
► Watch this lesson on video (35:30)
Bro. Ken brought the lesson this Wednesday evening. What follows is his lesson written up from the recording — his order, his words, and the places where he offered a thing as his own reading are marked as his.
What the Lesson Was About
Bro. Ken said up front it would be “sort of a rerun” — he had been torn four different ways on what to bring, and settled on going back through Ezekiel 37, the whole chapter, from the valley of dry bones to the two sticks joined into one. He told on himself before he started: a deacon once pulled him aside after a rerun and told him in no uncertain terms he needed to spend more time studying. He said you don’t forget a thing like that.
He also gave the reason he does not mind repeating himself. Paul told the church he would tell them, and tell them again, and tell them again. Some things bear saying more than once.
Before Ezekiel — God Works It Around
He did not go straight to the text. He started with the way God handles the things we set in motion. “All things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28). Every circumstance, Ken said — even one committed in sin — God will work around to the good, though we may still have to pay a terrible price in the flesh for what we started.
His example was David. David had Uriah killed and took Bathsheba. When it was settled with God, David asked forgiveness and asked for the joy of his salvation restored, and Ken believes God gave it. But David still went through the repercussions. And out of that marriage came Solomon, the third king over all Israel. God worked it to the good. If we ask forgiveness and mean it, He forgives us and puts our sins “as far as the east is from the west” (Psalm 103:12) — but there are things set in motion that we will still have to walk through.
The Nation That Was Dead
Then Ezekiel 37. Ken set the history first. The nation of Israel was wiped out of the land two different times — when Nebuchadnezzar came down, and again under Titus in AD 70 and Hadrian after him — and they were out of the land for nearly two thousand years. He was blunt about the people who now say the six million Jews Hitler killed is a lie made up by America or by the Jews: they are the liars, because it happened. And it was because it happened that the United Nations placed a homeland for Israel in 1948, and Israel began coming back in great numbers, and in 1967, when they took Jerusalem back, in greater numbers still.
Will every Jew get back to the land before Jesus Christ comes? No, Ken said. That comes in the millennial reign, after Christ has destroyed the greater part of the army that comes against Jerusalem. He raised a question there that he plainly likes to turn over, and offered it as his own thinking and not as doctrine. Zechariah says that in that day whoever will not come up to Jerusalem to keep the feast will have no rain (Zechariah 14:17). So if he is sitting in Dardanelle, Arkansas, in the millennial reign with no boats, no ships, no planes, and sharks in the water, is God going to withhold the rain on him for not coming? His conclusion: maybe everybody left in the world will be within walking distance of Jerusalem. When that reign starts, the kingdom of David is set up, Jesus Christ sits on the throne, it runs a thousand years on this earth, and then it goes right on into the heaven age and the New Jerusalem.
The Clock — What Started It and What Did Not
Ken said that ever since he came out of the Marine Corps at twenty-five he never thought he would live to be fifty-nine. When Israel took the Temple Mount back in 1967 — not all of it; the Wall, with the Muslims still on the mount above — he thought the end would come by 2007. “Let’s get it on.”
But the Lord said, “This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled” (Matthew 24:34). Ken’s reading: not the generation of 1967, but the generation living when these things begin to happen — when the king of the north pushes against the king of the south and overruns him. Then the count runs: 1,335 days to start (Daniel 12:12), then 1,290 (Daniel 12:11), then 1,260 — three and a half years, forty-two months — and after that the time of the Gentiles is fulfilled.
So did 1948 or 1967 start God’s clock? Ken does not believe it did. He thinks it started the awareness of the clock — the time we ought to be watching. He put that beside the beginning of sorrows in Matthew 24:8. The word, he said, is odin, and it means birth pangs: harder and closer, harder and closer, until the child comes. And we have been in the beginning of sorrows for a while.
Learn the Parable of the Fig Tree
“Now learn a parable of the fig tree; When his branch is yet tender, and putteth forth leaves, ye know that summer is nigh” (Matthew 24:32). Ken tied that parable to the fig tree Jesus cursed on the way to the temple — no fruit on it, cursed from the ground up, and the next day dried up from the roots (Matthew 21:19; Mark 11:20). Jesus was not a dummy, Ken said; He knew it was not the season for figs. He used that tree as a picture of the nation of Israel: no fruit on you. Ken believes with all his heart that the fig tree of the parable is the same tree, and that it put forth green leaves in 1948 and for sure in 1967. Did that start Daniel’s seventieth week? No, he does not think so. But we need to watch, because he believes the final clock is going to start pretty soon.
He said what he thinks about who the antichrist is — the church has heard it before — and added, in his own words, that he may just be “dumb as a rock” and not know any better. Then he pointed at the week’s news: Israeli troops in Syria fighting Syrian troops backed by Turkey, a tank brigade at the Golan Heights, and an airport bombed that was being enlarged to take heavy cargo planes. When the king of the north overruns the king of the south, he said, the clock will have started. God will put hooks in his jaws and pull him down, and he will overrun Israel and tread Jerusalem for forty-two months. And when that begins, we will think we know we have about 1,335 days left.
Somebody might say, if I could see the two witnesses go up, I could tell you when the rapture is. Ken said we will never know all that. Communications will be so bad in those days we will not even know what is going on over there. “We’ll not know the dates. But anyway, drive on.”
Earthquakes, famines — has anybody ever seen Arkansas this dry? It would not surprise him, he said, if this country is hungry in two or three years, with a cattle shortage from the drought and crops that will not grow. What will we eat? We will have to depend on the Lord.
The Bones Come Together — But No Breath
Back to the text. “The hand of the LORD was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the LORD, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones . . . and, lo, they were very dry” (Ezekiel 37:1-2). Not just dry, Ken said — very dry. Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead.
The nation of Israel was dead. When God scattered them through the nations for their punishment, they could not force their way back. It had to be a thing of God. Ken believes God was in the United Nations’ vote that gave them a homeland, and he knows God was in the Six-Day War, when Israel was outnumbered fifteen or twenty tanks to one and the Arab crews rolling down the road saw something in the sky, opened their hatches, and walked away from perfectly good tanks. That is an act of God.
“Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord GOD, thou knowest” (Ezekiel 37:3). Ezekiel did not have a clue, Ken said, and there is no shame in it — the prophets did not know everything. Then the command to prophesy, and the promise: “Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live” (Ezekiel 37:5).
Here is the heart of Ken’s reading. The bones came together, the sinews and flesh came up, the skin covered them — “but there was no breath in them” (Ezekiel 37:8). He thinks the bones came together in 1948 and stood up in 1967. The nation is in place. It has an army that man for man is as good as any in the world. But it is not alive. The breath is still to come.
He does not think Israel will ever be completely wiped out of the land. They will be pushed out of Jerusalem and driven south into the Negev — and here he told the church what he saw with his own eyes when he was over there in 1999: miles and miles of blacktop road through the desert, each one dead-ending at a mountain; the mountains honeycombed with bunkers under the sand; three big pipes running on a track into a mountain that he later learned were carrying water and other supplies inside; and one lucky day, the door of the mountain standing open and Merkava tanks and an Israeli jet in the hangar. Beersheba, he said, grew into one of the biggest shopping centers in the world because of all the troops in the Negev. The Negev has always been their fallback, because every time Israel has been overrun — the Babylonians, the Assyrians — it has come from the north. When they are overrun from the north, they will go south.
Zionism and the Drawing of God
Ken read verse 6 — “I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live; and ye shall know that I am the LORD” — and then talked about Zionism, which he dates for sure from around 1898. The Jews want to go home, and more and more of them every year. Ken believes that pull comes from God. Why are they being drawn? Because the end is about here.
And what does that mean for us? We need to be faithful. We need to study the Word of God. We need to ask the Lord to help us be ready. Because when it breaks loose, if we have not studied the Scripture and do not avail ourselves of the grace of God, we are going to fall apart. The only way to stand true is to study the Word and apply it to our life and know He will bring us through. What if you die? That is all right. What if you get caught in an earthquake? That is all right too — then, as one of the men had said, you will not have to go through the tribulation.
He read verses 7 through 10, the shaking, the bones coming together bone to his bone, the prophesying to the wind, “and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army” (Ezekiel 37:10). Israel has a great army now. But they do not have enough. When the antichrist leads a ten-nation Arab confederation against them — Ken said he would go ahead and say that — they will be so overwhelmed they cannot stop it. Not bombs from the air; hand-to-hand, so many that it will be like a cloud covering the land, and they will drive Israel south into the Negev.
Whose Bones These Are
“Then he said unto me, Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel: behold, they say, Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost: we are cut off for our parts” (Ezekiel 37:11). God tells us plainly who it is, Ken said. When Titus and Hadrian dispersed them through the whole world, there may have been a few left in the land all along — but the nation was gone. It was no more.
Then verses 12 through 14, the opening of the graves and the bringing into the land, and the promise, “And shall put my spirit in you, and ye shall live . . .” (Ezekiel 37:14). Ken puts that on the day of atonement when Christ comes back. He said there are a good many Jews over there now looking for the return of their Messiah and calling Him Jesus Christ — whether they are born again he could not say — and that when He comes, down in the Negev, “they shall look upon me whom they have pierced . . .” (Zechariah 12:10), and the whole nation is saved, and that is the beginning of the reign.
The Two Sticks
Ken called this part excellent. When David died, Solomon reigned; the Lord had said back in the law that when Israel came into the land they would want a king like the other nations (Deuteronomy 17:14). God appointed Saul, then David, then Solomon. After Solomon, the ten tribes split off from the two, and God gave the ten to Jeroboam on the condition that he be a good king. What did Jeroboam do? He took them straight into calf worship, with one calf at Dan and one at Bethel — “behold thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt” (1 Kings 12:28) — so that his people would not go back down to Jerusalem, where God had told them to worship. And the northern kingdom was carried off by the Assyrians. Jeroboam was an Ephraimite; Solomon was of Judah. There was bitter animosity between the two kingdoms, and Ken noted the northern king once made a deal with Syria to go down and kill the king in the south.
That is the split behind the two sticks. “Take thee one stick, and write upon it, For Judah . . . then take another stick, and write upon it, For Joseph, the stick of Ephraim . . . And join them one to another into one stick; and they shall become one in thine hand” (Ezekiel 37:16-17). One in God’s hand, Ken said — the hand of Jesus.
He read straight through to the end of the chapter: the children of Israel gathered from among the heathen, made one nation in the land, one king over them all, no more two kingdoms, cleansed from their idols, “so shall they be my people, and I will be their God” (Ezekiel 37:23). Amen.
“And David my servant shall be king over them; and they all shall have one shepherd . . .” (Ezekiel 37:24). Is David the man coming back to be king? No, Ken said. David is dead. His soul will come back at the resurrection and he will be there in the millennial reign and in the heaven age — but this King is Jesus Christ, David’s Lord, the Son of God, the Son of man. One shepherd. And they dwell in the land God gave to Jacob — everywhere Abraham walked, God gave to him and his seed, and the same land to Jacob — they and their children and their children’s children for ever, with an everlasting covenant of peace and God’s sanctuary in the midst of them for evermore.
The Heathen Shall Know
“And the heathen shall know that I the LORD do sanctify Israel, when my sanctuary shall be in the midst of them for evermore” (Ezekiel 37:28). Ken said that when this thing happens, the people who have berated Israel, who hate the Zionists and hate Israel and hate us, are going to say, “Look what the God of Israel has done to us.” Not the United States. Not the Marine Corps — sorry to say. Not the Israeli army. Not any army put together. God Himself. And He is going to get glory out of the heathen.
He added a verse he did not turn to but paraphrased — that the heathen will know Israel went into captivity for their own transgressions and not because their God was weak (Ezekiel 39:23) — and illustrated it with the ark of the covenant in the house of Dagon. The Philistines set the ark in Dagon’s temple as if Dagon had beaten the God of Israel. Dagon fell on his face. They set him up again, and he fell again (1 Samuel 5:3-4). They sent the ark home. Why? Because no little god can overrule the big God. “I don’t care what they teach. I don’t care what they preach.”
We have won, Ken said. We have already won. We just have to go through the garbage to get to where we are going to win. God has already defeated Satan. He has defeated everything. And He will defeat these folks.
The Close
He said it may come to dire straits in this country, and it already has in the Middle East and in Ukraine, where six or seven hundred churches have been burned and more than sixty pastors killed by people who hate anyone who names Christ.
Then he told on both men inside him. His “carnal man” — he said “car man” — wants to take a gun and go do something about it. His spiritual man feels sorry for them, because “Fret not thyself because of evildoers . . .” (Psalm 37:1), and because if a man is not a saved, born-again child of God, and does not believe Jesus Christ is God’s Son who died in the flesh, there is only one place he is going to wind up, and that is hell. We need to pray for them. He said he admires the attitude of the Jews over there who say, “Pray for our enemies, that their heart may change” — and admitted, “I’m not that nice. I need to be that nice.”
The recording ends there, at 35:25, mid-sentence.
Scripture Used
Ezekiel 37:1-28 (read through) · Romans 8:28 · Psalm 103:12 · Matthew 24:8, 32-34 · Matthew 21:19 · Mark 11:20 · Daniel 12:11-12 · Zechariah 12:10 · Zechariah 14:17 · Deuteronomy 17:14 · 1 Kings 12:28-29 · 1 Samuel 5:3-4 · Psalm 37:1 · Ezekiel 39:23 (paraphrased, not turned to) — all KJV
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