The Lord sees things that we don’t see. I know that seems pretty elementary. I mean we all know this, but we don’t all believe it. We say things like “God’s ways are not our ways” or “God sees things we can not see,” but inside we still want to be able to understand God. We still think that He should see things the way we see them, do things the way we want them done, and give us what we’re asking for. We still struggle with the fact that God runs an upside-down kingdom where to be the leader you have to serve and to have victory means to completely surrender.
Sometimes it seems like the dry seasons of our life are never-ending. That’s how the nation of Israel felt during the time of Ezekiel. The nation had been torn apart after the death of Solomon and had split into two nations: Israel, which included 10 of the 12 tribes, and Judah, which included the tribe of Judah and the tribe of Benjamin. Israel was defeated by the Assyrians and scattered around the world. Now, it was Judah’s turn. First, members of the royal family and the ruling elite were taken to Babylon. Then, Babylon eventually overthrew Jerusalem. Only a remnant was left.
Ezekiel was a priest. He had trained to serve in the temple, but he was taken to Babylon along with others like Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. These young men served God faithfully while in captivity. They probably questioned God’s purpose in all of this. I’m sure Ezekiel did. After all, what use is a priestly inheritance when there is no temple? But God sees what we do not see, and He gifted Ezekiel as a prophet. Two of Ezekiel’s prophecies are quite famous. Most people have at least heard reference to the “wheel within a wheel” and “the valley of dry bones.” There are even songs about the latter.
I’d like to take a look at this latter prophecy, the Valley of Dry Bones found in Ezekiel 37: 1-14.
**Again, my disclaimer about interpreting books of prophecy applies here. Unless God has said the prophecy has been fulfilled or has declared the full meaning of prophecy, we can’t give definitive answers on the meaning. God is the one speaking through the prophet, and so He is the only one who can declare for certain the meaning and fulfillment of prophetic utterance.**
“The hand of the Lord was on me, and he brought me out by the Spirit of the Lord and set me in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. 2 He led me back and forth among them, and I saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very dry. “
So Ezekiel is in prayer, probably. He is taken by the Spirit of the Lord to a valley. There’s lots of debate on whether Ezekiel was actually taken to a valley full of bones or whether this was a vision. I don’t really think it matters. Either way, it’s a pretty gruesome picture. Here Ezekiel is in a valley full of bones. Now, Ezekiel is a priest. He isn’t supposed to touch the dead. Touching the dead makes him unfit for service in the temple. It makes him unclean unless the body belongs to a close relative, and here he is in a valley full of nothing but the bones of the dead. Can you imagine? And God is leading him back and forth among the bones. I imagine it was probably extremely uncomfortable for Ezekiel to be in such close proximity to the dead. He must have been wondering what God was doing here.
The other thing to note here is that the bones are very dry. It takes several years for a body to decompose, although that time is faster when unburied, and it takes a bit after that for the bones themselves to dry out. These aren’t recently dead people. They have been dead for a while. Everything that had the potential for life is gone from them. There is no marrow in them anymore, no cells that produce blood cells of any kind. They are thoroughly and completely dead. They are dry. They are turning to dust.
And it’s in the midst of this death that God asks a strange question:
3 He asked me, “Son of man, can these bones live?”
Now, I have to say that if God had asked me a question like this I would say an emphatic “No!” After all, these bones are dry. There is no life-giving potential in them anymore. They are done for, but Ezekiel has a history with the Lord. He has walked with the Lord for a while now. He has seen visions from the Lord before, and he gives a very different answer. To me, Ezekiel’s answer is full of faith.
I said, “Sovereign Lord, you alone know.”
Ezekiel isn’t willing to discount the ability of God. He doesn’t say “God, I’m sorry, but the idea of resurrecting these bones is completely ridiculous!” He sees a valley full of dry bones. He knows that these bones have not lived in a very long time. He knows that in the natural order of things, these bones won’t ever live again. BUT, he also knows the God he serves. He knows that this is the one true God. This is the God who created the heavens and the earth. If God speaks, things happen, and so Ezekiel answers with full faith in who God is. If God wants these bones to live, Ezekiel knows that that is exactly what they will do.
4 Then he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones and say to them, ‘Dry bones, hear the word of the Lord! 5 This is what the Sovereign Lord says to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life. 6 I will attach tendons to you and make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you, and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the Lord.’” 7 So I prophesied as I was commanded. And as I was prophesying, there was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone. 8 I looked, and tendons and flesh appeared on them and skin covered them, but there was no breath in them.
So Ezekiel is commanded to prophesy to the bones. He is to speak the Word of the Lord to them. After all, God spoke creation into existence. The Word of God contains creative force. It contains life itself. So Ezekiel speaks in agreement with God’s Word. He speaks life over the bones. Notice, too, that God doesn’t just tell Ezekiel to speak haphazardly over these bones either. There’s an order to what God wants spoken: tendons, then flesh, then skin, then breath, then life. God always has an order to what He is doing. He always has a systematic process, and God is going to do this life-giving work from the inside out.
So Ezekiel begins speaking to the bones, and there was a noise and a rattling sound as the bones came together. Can you imagine how that must have sounded? How it must have looked? Can you imagine the thoughts that must have entered Ezekiel’s mind? These are bones that have been left out unburied after a great battle. The birds and scavenging animals have picked them clean. They’ve been carried all over the place and scattered as animals fed on the remains, and now they’re whipping back together, each bone to its own skeleton! And as if that weren’t enough, tendons and flesh began to form on the skeletons. That’s a pretty gruesome picture!
When you begin to partner with God and speak His Word of life over your own dead bones, there will be some noise. There will be some shaking. It will be chaotic for a moment and disconcerting. It may even be down right frightening because we all like to stay in our status quo comfort zone area of life. As a general rule, we don’t really like change. If we’ve been living in death for a while, it’s going to be a bit scary stepping out into the abundant life that God calls us to.
But notice that nowhere in the text does it say that Ezekiel wavered in his faith in God. Nowhere does it say that he allowed his fear to get the better of him or that his doubt over came him. Somehow Ezekiel kept it together while these bodies were being rebuilt from the inside out. This priest, completely out of his comfort zone, trusted God enough to wait to see what would ultimately come out of all this mess. And we need to have that kind of mindset too. Yes, in the midst of rebirth, things are going to look messy. They are going to look anything but good, but God isn’t finished yet. We can trust that God knows what He is doing. His finished work is going to make all this discomfort and fear seem small in comparison.
Notice another thing here. At the end of this section, Ezekiel is standing among a vast army of bodies. These bodies are fully formed, but they still lack life. Many times, we are like this as well. We are the walking dead, trying to do things in our own power without the spirit of God working. That’s one of the reasons many people apply this vision to the church in calls for revival. It takes more than just the operational components. It takes more than just adequate organization. It takes more than just the parts. We can have all those details in place and still lack life!
9 Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the breath; prophesy, son of man, and say to it, ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: Come, breath, from the four winds and breathe into these slain, that they may live.’” 10 So I prophesied as he commanded me, and breath entered them; they came to life and stood up on their feet—a vast army.
Now the bones are alive! The Spirit of God in the form of the wind has blown into the bodies. They are alive because the Spirit of God is inside them. Now, they are prepared. We get a glimpse of their purpose here as well: a vast army. When God brings us back to life with His Spirit, He intends for us to go to battle on His behalf. He intends for us to take on the enemy and gain back territory and expand the kingdom. We aren’t given rebirth and new life so that we can sit around and wait until some future heaven. We are given life so that we can expand the kingdom here and now.
11 Then he said to me: “Son of man, these bones are the people of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are dried up and our hope is gone; we are cut off.’ 12 Therefore prophesy and say to them: ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: My people, I am going to open your graves and bring you up from them; I will bring you back to the land of Israel. 13 Then you, my people, will know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves and bring you up from them. 14 I will put my Spirit in you and you will live, and I will settle you in your own land. Then you will know that I the Lord have spoken, and I have done it, declares the Lord.’”
This part is extremely important. As a general rule, most people stop reading at verse 10, but remember what I said earlier about books of prophecy? This is one place where God gives Ezekiel the meaning of this vision. This vision is about the people of Israel as a nation. God promises to restore them to life, to bring them back to the land He promised them, to put His spirit within them.
The cool thing about prophecy is that there are generally layers of fulfillment. Rabbis often consider this vision to have both a corporate, national level of fulfillment as well as an individual level of fulfillment. They see resurrection as both an individual thing and a corporate thing. This is one of the reasons that the Pharisees and Sadducees of Jesus’ time differed in their understanding of what happens to the soul at death. The Pharisees pointed to this vision as evidence of a resurrection of the dead at some future Messianic age. The Sadducees said the soul died with the body and that there was no such thing as a resurrection.
There are teachers that say that this prophecy came to pass when the nation of Israel was established in 1948. They point to the Holocaust as the valley of dry bones and the establishment of Israel as an independent nation as God’s fulfillment of His promise of rebirth and return to the land. I’m not saying that that’s wrong. But there seems to be more to this because at the moment, Israel does not have all of the land God originally gave them, and I would say that they also do not necessarily have His Spirit living in them either. It seems there is another, future, layer of fulfillment still to come.
This is also why we need to be careful with Old Testament prophecy. The Bible tells us that all scripture is for us, but not all scripture is to us. Yes, we can apply this prophecy to our lives on an individual and a corporate basis because we are the spiritual children of Israel as the church, but ultimately we have to be careful to remember that God said this prophecy was specifically to the nation of Israel. That means total fulfillment of this prophecy has not happened until every detail has been accomplished in the literal nation of Israel itself.
So, then what do we do with this passage as the church? The consensus seems to be that we view these dry bones as ourselves. We were dead in our sins. We were past all hope of life. Until God…and then we were offered new birth through Christ, an infilling of God’s Spirit, and we became a new creation. We are called to prophecy to the dry bones of those around us who are still dead in their sins so that they, too, can experience the resurrection power of Jesus in their lives. But also, we can view these dry bones as the areas in our life that appear dead and beyond hope. We can offer those places in our life, in our hearts, in ourselves to God and trust that He can breathe new life into them. Because God is a God of life, nothing is impossible for Him. Nothing it too dead for Him to resurrect it and give it new life.
And we can pray for the ultimate fulfillment of this prophecy in the actual, physical nation of Israel. It is a wonderful promise of what God plans to do when Jesus returns. He will resurrect the nation of Israel from where they are scattered. He will restore them fully as a nation. He will fully restore their territory, and He will put His Spirit within them.
A Beautiful Mess 