Dry bones

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How long, Lord, wilt thou hide thyself?
For ever, in thine ire?
And shall thine indignation
burn like unto a fire?

Remember, Lord, how short a time
I shall on earth remain:
O wherefore is it so that thou
has made all men in vain?…

Thy former loving-kindnesses,
O Lord, where be they now?
Those which in truth and faithfulness
to David sworn hast thou? 

(Psalm 89. 46-47, 49 – 1650 Metrical Psalter)

If I was to give this sermon a subtitle, I would have called it ‘Good News from the Graveyard’, because this is precisely what we have heard, isn’t it? The prophet Ezekiel is taken by the Lord’s Spirit into a valley full of dry bones. God asks him whether these long-dead corpses can live again, and proceeds to reanimate them. If, like me, you went to Sunday School, this may be a passage you’re familiar with; if not, you may have wondered what all of this was about. It is my sincere prayer that, over the next few minutes, I will be led to show you how these peculiar events from some six centuries before the birth of Christ are in fact a perfect illustration of the lengths that God is prepared to go on your behalf, and ask what ‘life’ really is.

I believe that this passage splits neatly into three sections: namely 1) Can these bones live?, 2) O Lord God, You know, and 3) I have spoken, and I will do it, declares the Lord. In the first we will consider the meaning of death, in the second we will consider the awesome power of God, and in the third we will consider the meaning of life itself.

Can these bones live?

The people of Israel were in a very difficult place. This vision took place some 550 years before the birth of Christ, in a highly turbulent time in the life of the people of Israel known as the Exile. In 597 BC the Babylonian Empire had captured the city of Jerusalem and taken the Judean King and many Judean leaders into exile. We can read about this in 2 Kings 24. 10-16:

Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came to the city while his servants were besieging it, and Jehoiachin the king of Judah gave himself up to the king of Babylon, himself and his mother and his servants and his officials and his palace officials. (2 Kings 24. 11-12)

As well as the king and his officials, the Nebuchadnezzar the king also took from Jerusalem the precious vessels and treasures from the Temple – these were the same treasures that would be his son Belshazzar’s downfall in Daniel 5, when the mysterious hand appeared and wrote on the wall, while he and his lords and ladies were partying, using the Temple treasures as their drinking apparatus. However, that is a little beside the point.

2 Kings tells us that some eleven years passed, with the puppet King Zedekiah being installed by the Babylonians in place of Jehoiachin. After these years had passed, chapter 24 ends by saying, “And Zedekiah rebelled against the king of Babylon” (2 Kgs 24. 20b). In response to this, the Babylonian armies returned to Jerusalem, razing it to the ground (including the precious Temple), and deported yet another group of Judean leaders.

It was among the first group of exiled Jews that we find Ezekiel. He had been living, among some of his people, in exile in Babylon for a number of years, before the Lord God called him into service as a prophet. Those first exiles were really struggling, they were looking to the future and seeing only despair and pain, sadness and destruction. They were casting their minds back to the Lost Tribes of Israel, who some 150 years earlier had been deported from the land of Israel and never seen again – these Tribes were lost to the mists of history, and the Judean exiles must have feared the same fate for themselves as well. Things were very difficult and, more than anything else, these people needed a word from the Lord. All of the symbols of their life, their faith, lay in smouldering ruins: Jerusalem, the Temple, the Davidic monarchy, it was all a distant memory in the peoples’ minds. This is how the Psalmist came to write such Psalms as Psalm 89 (which I quoted at the beginning of the sermon), and Psalm 137:

By the streams of Babylon
We remembered Zion’s hill.
There we sat and wept in grief;
on the trees our harps lay still.

For our captors asked for songs;
Our tormentors called for mirth:
“Sing us one of Zion’s songs
From the land that gave you birth.”

How can we sing to the Lord,
Exiles in a foreign land?
If Jerus’lem I forget,
Skill depart from my right hand!

(Psalm 137. 1-5 – Sing Psalms)

These Psalms are heartbreakingly raw, as the people of Jerusalem strain their minds and hearts to remember their lives before captivity. Things were especially difficult because, as Jacobson reminds us,

According to the theological rationality of the ancient world, many exiled Judeans assumed that their deity had been defeated by a stronger deity from Babylon (cf. Ps 42:3, 10; 79:10; 115:2). The people wondered if the Lord was truly lord and truly faithful.1

God had been leading up to this vision. Turn with me to Ezekiel 36. 22, where God Himself says, “It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act, but for the sake of my holy name.” Here God is building up to what He would reveal to Ezekiel in today’s passage. And, of course, He built up to it in one of the most beautiful pieces of imagery found in the Old Testament:

And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules. You shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers, and you shall be my people, and I will be your God. (Ezekiel 36. 26-28)

I suspect, had you asked those Judean exiles whether their nation, their faith, their livelihoods, would ever ‘live again’, they would have answered ‘No’. For, as I’ve said: the future was bleak. They were many hundreds of miles from their people, their religion, and seemed even further from their God. They were in the hands of a barbarian enemy who, far from understanding them, as the Psalmist shows us, mocked them (“Sing us one of Zion’s songs” (Psa. 137. 4)). They were doomed. The arrival of another tranche of exiles in the years to come would only strengthen their belief that they were doomed, destined to disappear as had the Lost Tribes of Israel a century and a half earlier.

I wonder, friends, what we would say if I was to ask you the same question. We could consider our nation, our town, and ask whether it will ever ‘live’ again. If you were to ask Mary Portas this question concerning the High Street, she may believe it will become a hustling bustling place once more; many of us would be less convinced. But that is a materialistic view of the question. As Christians we know a great deal concerning our spiritual ‘deadness’ (a word I had to make up for this sermon – how else can I describe a quantity of death?) - from the New Testament we have verses such as “Put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires,” (Eph. 4. 22) which shows us that our old selves (ie our lives before encountering Jesus) were entirely corrupted through our selfish ambitions and desires. We can see that through mankind’s innate ability to pick a fight with its fellow man and woman, can’t we. Barely a day goes past when we don’t hear of yet another war or rumour of war; of another stabbing from one of the big cities; of another criminal conviction for some other heinous crime. Or we can hear the words from Romans 6: “We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin.” (Rom. 6. 6), which clearly teaches us that our old selves were not only corrupted through our selfishness, but were also slaves to sin itself. There was not an ounce of goodness in us that wasn’t there through selfish ambition or desire. This is seen again a few chapters later, where we can read that “those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh,” (Rom. 8. 5), and these fleshy things are described in quite shocking detail in Galatians 5:

Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. (Gal. 5. 19-21)

When we consider these four verses (and these are just four examples from the eight I had picked out, the others being Genesis 5. 3 where we see Adam father a son “in his own likeness, after his image”, showing that we are no better than Adam, Psalm 51. 5 where the Psalmist laments that he was “brought forth in iniquity”, Ecclesiastes 7. 20 which declares that “there is not a righteous man on earth who does good and never sins”, and Isaiah 64. 6, which reminds us that “all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment.”), we may well ask ourselves whether our bones, our hearts, can live. And, of course, when standing before the God of all goodness and truth, the answer can only be ‘No’. We are sinners, and sinners do not inherit the Kingdom of God, as the Galatians passage warned us.

In ourselves there is no way that we can achieve or in some way regain the life that we lost when Adam and Eve ate of the Tree. Indeed, far from achieving salvation, we flounder around and continue to dig that spiritual hole which leads in only one direction.

“Son of man, can these bones live?” (Eze. 37. 3)

O Lord God, You know.

God puts this question to Ezekiel, and Ezekiel answers with the only possible answer. He knows that he is unable to limit God’s powers to ‘yes’ or ‘no’, so answers, “O Lord God, you know” (Eze. 37. 3b).

Scripture, time and time again, shows us that God alone is the source of all life. Right back at the beginning of time, in the book of Genesis, we see how it was God Himself who breathed life into Adam. Note that Adam was not some fluke of biology, a flask of different bacteria floating around and happening to fuse together and create man. No, friends, mankind is God’s creation – we can read that God “formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.” (Gen. 2. 7). Not only this, but one chapter earlier we can read that it was God who spoke creation into existence, crying “Let there be…” (Gen. 1. 3). Eve herself, we are told, was no less deliberately made. In fact, the late Donald Macleod makes the point that, while the Scriptures tell us that Adam was “formed” (Hebrew yatsar), the word used for Eve (in Gen. 2. 22) is banah, meaning “built”. God “formed” the man, and “built” the woman, the latter word showing the particular care that went into this specific act of creation.2 Neither man, nor woman, nor the earth itself could have been made, nor had life, without God’s supreme say-so. John’s Gospel sums this up so perfectly where, in the prologue he writes, “In Him was life, and the life was the light of men.” (Jn. 1. 1)

However, if you or I were to take a rational, or non-believing friend to any graveyard up or down the land, point to a grave and say, ‘Can these bones live?’, the answer would be a resounding ‘No’. It is, after all, the only rational answer. Dead bones, in the normal course of events, cannot live. Many of us here today are well acquainted with death, whether from within our families, our friendship groups, or in our professional lives. Some of you may have been to the funeral parlour and seen a loved one laid out in readiness for their funeral, or been there as the person died. We can look at their bodies laying there and see that they are undeniably different – their life has truly left them. They are dead. Try as we might, there is absolutely nothing we can do about it. And, again try as we might, one day we will be in exactly the same position. Furthermore, just as there’s nothing we can do about it, there was nothing that Ezekiel could do either. And, lest we forget, Ezekiel was not presented even with a pile of dead bodies, but with a valley full of dry bones, the mortal remains of the long dead.

Ezekiel realised that there was nothing that he could do. But he also realised he could not limit God’s powers to the reaches of his mind. So in his answer acknowledged both positions – “Son of man, can these bones live?… O Lord God, You know.” (Eze. 37. 3). He immediately ascribed all power back to God – the God who first gave life, the God who takes away, is surely the only one who could ever give life back.

We see this in the Gospels as well, don’t we friends: when people die, their loved ones realise that no doctor can bring them back. Try as they might, with all their potions and concoctions, their work is done. They have, to quote the American Doctor’s invoice, “Cured your husband until he died.” So they send for the only person who can do something – they send for Jesus.

Turn with me to Mark’s Gospel, where in chapter five we see Jesus summoned to the death-room of a little girl. He had been sent for a while earlier, but had been waylaid healing the woman with the issue of blood (vv. 24b-34). Owing to the delay, before He arrives at the house, word reaches the walking party saying that the girl had died: “Why trouble the Teacher any further?” (Mk. 5. 35b). Jesus, unperturbed, turns to the girl’s father and says, “Do not fear, only believe.” (Mk. 5. 36). On arriving at the house, He makes it abundantly clear that, to God, human death is no worse than human sleep – He can wake the dead as easily as He can wake the sleeper. What seemed so serious, so shocking to the men and women gathered around, He was able to revive with the words, “Talitha cumi… Little girl, I say to you, arise” (Mk. 5. 41).

We can see this again in John’s Gospel, chapter 11, where our Lord is called to another death, this time not a stranger’s daughter, but a dear friend, Lazarus. Yet again, the Lord Jesus does not go immediately to the death, and indeed Lazarus’ sister Mary even says to Him, “Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died.” (Jn. 11. 32). ‘Why did You delay?’.

Here, again, Jesus shows no hesitation in calling the now long-dead Lazarus out from the tomb, disregarding even the very understandable concerns of the “foul odour” (Jn. 11. 39) – so helpfully worded in the Authorised Version as, “Lord, by this time he stinketh” – because all things are possible to God. Jesus, only a few verses earlier, had declared Himself as “the Resurrection and the Life. Whoever believes in Me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die.” (Jn. 11. 25-26), and the raising of Lazarus is just one further proof that what He says, He means.

I have spoken, and I will do it, declares the Lord.

Returning to Ezekiel, we see that Ezekiel’s correct answer leads God to instruct him to prophesy:

Thus says the Lord GOD to these bones: Behold, I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. And I will lay sinews upon you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live, and you shall know that I am the LORD.” (Eze. 37. 5-6)

And that, once he has prophesied, God begins to work:

So I prophesied as I was commanded. And as I prophesied, there was a sound, and behold, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. And I looked, and behold, there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them. But there was no breath in them. Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the breath; prophesy, son of man, and say to the breath, Thus says the Lord GOD: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe on these slain, that they may live.” So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived and stood on their feet, an exceedingly great army. (Eze. 37. 7-10)

Don’t let us sanitise the scene – let’s just imagine it as it is described. This valley, perhaps stretching as far as the eye can see, is full of these dry bones. Yet, one by one, with a great rattling, these bones begin to vibrate, and as they vibrate, they begin to link together, re-forming the bodies they once were. And, as they re-form, they are slowly covered with the skin and sinew they once had. And, within a matter of moments, no longer was this valley covered in dry bones, but in human corpses. Then, to add to the flourish, God commands Ezekiel to prophesy breath into the bodies, and they transform from lifeless human bodies into standing human beings. What a sight.

Returning to verse 1, we can read that Ezekiel did not make his own way to the valley. He was not summoned there, he didn’t stumble upon the place. Rather, we can read that God “brought me out in the Spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of the valley;” (Eze. 37. 1). It was God’s Spirit that brought Ezekiel to this place, rather like we can read in Acts 8, where after baptising the Ethiopian eunuch, “the Spirit of the Lord carried Philip away, and the eunuch saw him no more, and went on his way rejoicing” (Acts 8. 39). Furthermore, in verse 5 and verse 10 God instructs Ezekiel to prophesy “breath” to enter the bones – the same word, ruach, meaning breath, wind and spirit in the Hebrew.

Jacobson explains this, thus:

The key to the unfolding story, of course, is that in order to live, they [the dry bones] need not only flesh, sinew, and skin. . . but also breath: [God says] “I will. . . put breath (xwr) in you, and you shall live” (v. 6). Then, in the vision, sinew, flesh, and skin cover the bones, but there is no breath (xwr) in them (v. 8). So, Ezekiel prophesies to the breath (xwr), “Come from the four winds (xwr), O Breath (xwr), and breathe upon these slain, that they may live” (v. 9). And “the breath (xwr) came into them, and they lived” (v. 10). …The prophet’s insistent use of repetition drums the point of the message into our heads: God’s spirit is the key. With God’s spirit, anything is possible. Without it, existence is just flesh and blood.”3

This is how, and why, the Genesis readings were relevant earlier – because God spoke creation into existence. Note how, before every act of creation in Genesis 1, it does not say, ‘Then God did’, but rather, “And God said” (Gen 1. 3, 6, 9, 11, etc.). To speak, as we will know if we place our hands in front of our mouths and say ‘Amen’, is to breathe. As God spoke these words, He breathed life into creation, and breathed creation into life.

Similarly this is how, and why, the readings from Jesus’ ministry were relevant, as we saw Him say to the girl (Mark 5. 41) and call out to Lazarus “with a loud voice” (John 11. 43). As Christ raised people from the dead, He spoke the wonderful words of life. Without these words, this ruach, this breath, this wind, this spirit, all of these people, all of those bones, would have remained utterly dead.

So far we have considered the meaning of death, we have considered how it is God (and He alone) who can impart life or take it away. Now we need to ask ourselves one final question – split into three parts – what does this new life mean? What did it look like?

What did this new life look like for the house of Israel? Well, it is always helpful for a preacher when his text answers his question for him. If we turn to Ezekiel 37 once more, we can hear God explain the prophecy and the vision:

Then he said to me, “Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel. Behold, they say, ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are indeed cut off.’ Therefore prophesy, and say to them, Thus says the Lord GOD: Behold, I will open your graves and raise you from your graves, O my people. And I will bring you into the land of Israel. And you shall know that I am the LORD, when I open your graves, and raise you from your graves, O my people. And I will put my Spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you in your own land. Then you shall know that I am the LORD; I have spoken, and I will do it, declares the LORD.” (Ezekiel 37. 11-14)

This entire vision was to show the exiled people of Jerusalem that, contrary to the worries and woes that we considered earlier, all was not lost. Ellicott explains this nicely when he says:

The vision is expressly explained to mean that the children of Israel, in their scattered and apparently hopeless condition, shall yet be brought together again and restored to national life. The vision is not at all concerned with the future resurrection; and yet it may well be thought that the idea of this was familiar to the mind of the people, as otherwise the prophet would hardly have chosen such a simile.4

Furthermore, as I mentioned at the beginning, the vision shows that God is still very much on His throne, that He has not been displaced by some “stronger deity”5 (to again quote Jacobson) – those cries from the Psalms such as “As with a deadly wound in my bones, my adversaries taunt me all the day long, “Where is your God?”” (Ps. 42. 10), or “Why should the nations say, “Where is their God?”” (Ps. 115. 2). Instead of those cries, we can continue in Psalm 115 to find the answer: “Our God is in the heavens; He does all that He pleases” (Ps. 115. 3). God could and would bring them out of captivity, breathing new life into the sorry house of Israel, and this is seen to come to pass in Ezra where the people begin to rebuild the city and the Temple after the new Babylonian king grants their freedom (Ezra 2. 1 ff).

What did this new life look like in Jesus? Well, of course, the obvious answer to this question is also the most exciting declaration in the history of mankind – that Jesus Christ rose from the dead and took death captive. We can sing with the Apostle, “O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?… thanks be to God who gives us victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” (1 Cor. 15. 55-57 abr.). This new life that Jesus had as He rose from the tomb is indicative of the extreme lengths that God was willing to go to for our salvation: the extreme pain and suffering that He was willing to take upon Himself to see us, as sinful and flawed as we are, walk free from the punishment that we really deserved. Through this new life, we are, with the Apostle Peter, “born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for [us]” (1 Pet. 1. 3-4). We are reborn, or, to say it literally, we are given life again. God breathes life into us anew. Gone is the old self, and here is the new.

This new life, the life of the Christian, is proof that, in God’s spirit, all things are eminently possible. Jacobson said that “Without [God’s spirit], existence is just flesh and blood. But with God’s spirit, there is life – and what Jesus called fulness of life”,6 and he is absolutely right. We may have come to God as dry, dusty bones, laying in a pile among hundreds of thousands of other dry, dusty bones (and, let’s face it, there are times where we still feel a little dry, dusty and skeletal!), but in His infinite goodness, power and mercy, God has been pleased to breathe new life afresh into us.

Thanks to this new life, we can understand the words of the Lord Jesus as He said to Nicodemus, “unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God” (Jn. 3. 3).

What God did before Ezekiel’s eyes in that valley of dry bones, He continues to do day in and day out, to believers in every nation under heaven. Each day, more and more are being added to the number of those who believe. This marvellous, gracious work of God is not something that happened in the past and stayed there; nor is it something that only happens to the best or most holy of people. But rather, as God Himself said to the doubting and homesick house of Israel, so too He says to those whom He has called and chosen:

And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules. You shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers, and you shall be my people, and I will be your God. (Eze. 36. 26-28)

Works cited:

  • Macleod, Donald. Faith to Live by - Understanding Christian Doctrine. Christian Focus Publications L, 2016.
  • Rolf Jacobson. ‘Commentary on Ezekiel 37: 1-14’. Working Preacher from Luther Seminary, 9 March 2008. https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/fifth-sunday-in-lent/commentary-on-ezekiel-371-14-2.
  • The Rev. F. Gardiner, D.D. ‘Jeremiah to Malachi’. In A Bible Commentary for English Readers by Various Writers, edited by Charles John Ellicott, Vol. 5. London: Cassell and Co., n.d.
  1. Rolf Jacobson, ‘Commentary on Ezekiel 37: 1-14’, Working Preacher from Luther Seminary, 9 March 2008, sec. Historical Context, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/fifth-sunday-in-lent/commentary-on-ezekiel-371-14-2. 

  2. Donald Macleod, Faith to Live by - Understanding Christian Doctrine (Christian Focus Publications L, 2016), 78. 

  3. Rolf Jacobson, ‘Commentary on Ezekiel 37: 1-14’, sec. Theological Symbolism. 

  4. The Rev. F. Gardiner, D.D, ‘Jeremiah to Malachi’, in A Bible Commentary for English Readers by Various Writers, ed. Charles John Ellicott, vol. 5 (London: Cassell and Co., n.d.), sect. Ezekiel XXXVII, 306. 

  5. Rolf Jacobson, ‘Commentary on Ezekiel 37: 1-14’, sec. Historical Context. 

  6. Ibid., sec. Theological Symbolism.