In regard to the theory that the resurrection
is by a new birth, we will quote the 37th chapter of Ezekiel, when the whole
house of Israel is as a valley of dry bones. We understand that the whole house
meant all of them. This house of Israel was to be raised out of their graves,
and the spirit of the Lord was to be revived in them after they were brought up
out of their graves, and he was to gather them out of all nations, whither they
were gone, “The whole house of Israel” was then in the land of Canaan. They
were not scattered for a long time after this prophecy: then the Lord at some
then future time was going to scatter them among all nations. Did he do it?
History answers “Yes!” How has he scattered Israel, the whole house? Nature
again thunders out her eternal voice, by the same process that he brought us
all here, by that same principle of which baptism is a type, by their parents
being scattered among the various nations and propagating their specie. Verily
he has raised the whole house of Israel out of their graves; first, bringing
bone to bone, then sinew, then flesh, next skin, and lastly, breath. And is not
Israel now an exceedingly large army, scattered as they are throughout the
various nations of the earth? Yes, but one says, He is to put his spirit into
them after he has brought them out of their graves. True, does the child
breathe the breath of existence in this mundane sphere before birth? Have the Israelites
been an exception of coming into the world? Have they made their ingress here
in some mysterious, incomprehensible way? Or, are they like the rest of us,
also subject to the great eternal law of conception and birth. Oh, but the Lord
is to bring them into their own land. So the prophet did not mean by birth; but
he further says “Son of man, take two sticks and write upon them one for Judah,
and the Children of Israel his companions, and one stick for Ephraim, and
Israel his companion (the Bible and Book of Mormon) and take them in thy hands,
and say, I will bring you into your own lands, and you shall be my people and I
will be your God.”
*Now mark you, here is a people raised
from their graves, born among all nations. The spirit of God working upon them
through the restoration of the Gospel, or the joining together of the two
sticks or records, and those resurrected Israelites, are again brought together
into their own land, and David is to be their king. Oh, how natural men and
women are raised from their graves and the spirit of God, or life is placed in
them, and afterward the omnipotent hand of God shapes his purposes and makes
the wrath of man to praise him. (Solomon Clinton Stephens, The
Philosophy of the Earth and of Man [Ogden, Utah: W.W. Browning & Co.,
1898], 119-21)
*The whole house of Israel was at some
then future time to be raised as state, and we conclude that it was as stated
above, or to be raised again in a celestial state, or the prophecy is of no
avail. (Ibid., 121)