New Life for Dry Bones

When we come this morning to Ezekiel chapter 37 and the familiar vision of the valley of dry bones, you know nothing demonstrates the power of God more than a resurrection. Only God can reverse something as permanent and final as death.

Only God can do something as miraculous as breathing on dust and turning it into thinking, feeling, living, being. And of course the most profound and significant of these life giving acts was the resurrection of Jesus Christ. But the theme of resurrection comes up throughout all of scripture.

We're going to take a look at one of those today. A resurrection event so unbelievably miraculous that only God could have done it. In fact the whole purpose behind this event was to demonstrate, scripture says, to the world that God is God, that He alone is Lord of all. So if you would turn with me please to Ezekiel chapter 37 and we'll be reading the first 14 verses. If you would stand with me in honor of God's word as we read together. Ezekiel 37 verses 1 through 14. The hand of the Lord was upon me, and he brought me out in the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of the valley. It was full of bones.

And he led me around among them, and behold, there were very many on the surface of the valley, and behold, they were very dry. And he said to me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord God, you know. And he said to me, prophesy over these bones and say to them, O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. 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.

You shall know that I am the Lord. 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.

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 and 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.

Let's pray. Holy Spirit, apart from your work in us, our eyes are blind, our ears are deaf, our hearts are hardened to the life changing truths of your word. So I ask that this morning you would resuscitate that which is dead, that you would bring to life what is unresponsive and make your people a mighty army, equipped and enabled to work and serve and fight for your glory. Make us a mighty army whose very presence declares that our God is the Lord. Thank you that you will raise us up with Christ on the last day, but Lord this day we need renewed life, renewed zeal, renewed obedience, renewed repentance. So fall on your church once again I ask. Revive your people that we might rejoice in you and I pray this all in Jesus' name. Amen.

You may be seated. Well the vision we have just read was given to Ezekiel when he found himself in a hopelessly desperate situation. Jerusalem had fallen under the horrific Babylonian siege and all the inhabitants of Judah were stripped away from their homes and lands. And now this people, this prophet rather, the son of a priest found himself without a temple, without a promised land, without the covenant blessing of God. He found himself living in a community of Jewish exiles alongside some obscure river in Babylon. And to make matters worse, while he was in captivity his wife, the one joy he had retained in an otherwise miserable existence, died suddenly of a stroke.

It couldn't get much worse for Ezekiel and these exiles. But God had a very important lesson for his people to learn, a lesson that would spark hope in their hearts in the midst of this hopeless situation. The lesson was that God is able to work miracles in the midst of hopelessness because it brings glory to himself. But they were also going to learn that God's miracles come about most often through God's appointed means of grace. When God is ready to perform a miracle, he often begins by calling his people to a renewed zeal for prayer and to a renewed interest in his word. And as we walk through this passage of scripture today, we're going to see that when we find ourselves in hopeless situations, the best thing we can do is to avail ourselves of God's means of grace. When we need a life giving miracle, the best starting place is to immerse ourselves in God's word and in prayer. As we consider this account of an Old Testament resurrection, we're going to be asking what did these things mean for Ezekiel and the exiles. But also, what do these things mean for us today in 2024?

I'd like to divide our text into three headings then. First, there is a hopeless condition. Secondly, there's a divine command. And finally, we will see an unexpected miracle.

Let's begin then with a hopeless condition. The vision begins with God's Spirit leading Ezekiel to a valley that's full of skeletons. And scripture gives two emphatic descriptions of these dead remains. Verse 2 says that there were very many of them and that they were very dry. So Ezekiel finds himself in this windswept valley knee deep in human bones and these bones didn't die yesterday. There's not a scrap of human flesh remaining on them.

They're totally dried up. They've been there for a very, very long time. When I read these opening verses of our passage, I picture certain scenes from the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Whenever the characters there in Middle Earth are in a place where virtue and justice and goodness reign supreme, the landscape reflects that. It's lush and vibrant.

The sky is blue and beautiful. But the closer they get to Mordor where evil incarnate lives, the landscape becomes more and more barren. Nothing grows. There's no plant life.

Just rocks and stale ponds and black skies. I sort of picture Ezekiel standing in a place like Mordor where he's face to face with death as far as the eye can see. And in this place of death, God asks him what seems to be an absurd question. Son of man, can these bones live? Ezekiel responds by saying what you say when you really don't think something can happen.

God only knows. Now this bleak vision of death strung all over the valley is a picture of Israel, God says. God tells Ezekiel in verse 11, Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel. Behold, they say, our bones are dried up. Our hope is lost.

We are indeed cut off. The hopelessness depicted by that valley of dry bones is a vivid description of the hopelessness of Israel's spiritual condition. I've already mentioned that Ezekiel's vision occurred during the time of Israel's exile in Babylon.

And I want us to just really feel the hopelessness of this situation. Here is a generation of Israelites that have the most horrible scenes etched into their minds. Scenes of ancient siege warfare. Images of starving people in Jerusalem dying in the streets, cannibalizing each other. Children being slaughtered, the Psalms tell us, as they are ruthlessly thrown against rocks, rock walls by Babylonian soldiers. Women raped, families torn apart, homes burned. And now they had been taken to a foreign place as slaves with no freedom, no dignity, no future. Their situation was quite literally worse than death. This is the grim situation Ezekiel finds himself in. And he's confronted with a knife-stabbing question from God.

Can these bones live? Is there really any hope for Israel? Now, none of us has ever experienced exile like the Israelites.

We have not had to endure the violence and the horrors of ancient siege warfare. But hopelessness comes in many forms, doesn't it? I suspect any Christian here today has experienced any number of forms of hopelessness. There is the hopelessness of fighting a besetting sin. You battle the same addiction or the secret sin for years and it just seems that you can never make any progress. You're living with the constant guilt and distress of habitual sin. You feel like a slave in your own body and it begins to feel hopeless.

There's no chance that you'll ever experience victory. Some of us struggle with the hopelessness of doubting our salvation. I know a brother in Christ who spiritually was in a very dark place for a couple of years. He was plagued with doubts about whether or not God loved him, whether or not there would be enough grace for him and these doubts would wake him up in the middle of the night in terror.

They would intrude upon his free time, his work time, his prayer time. It was a spiritual battle that he didn't choose to go through. It was not something he wanted to have struggled with. In fact, he wanted nothing more than to be free of it, but it just seemed like there was no way out.

He felt like he was going to be a slave to those doubts for the rest of his life. It was a hopeless situation. Here's the hopelessness of illness.

You get the news of a tumor or some disease or a heart condition and the doctors just don't know what to do for you. Suddenly you're confronted with the reality of your own mortality. There's no way to win.

There's no way out. Perhaps the greatest sense of hopelessness comes when we're face to face with death, grieving the loss of a spouse or a child or a lifelong friend. Nothing is more permanent, more final than death. The grief and the sadness makes you numb. It makes you angry. Ultimately it makes you feel hopeless.

C.S. Lewis knew what hopelessness felt like after the death of his wife and he wrote about it in a journal called A Grief Observed. I want to read a quote from this journal because I suspect that there are many of us here today who have felt what Lewis felt.

Here's the raw grief that he expressed when he felt like all hope had gone. Lewis said, Talk to me about the truth of religion and I'll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I'll listen submissively. But don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don't understand. Go to God with gratitude and praise and you will be welcomed with open arms, but go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain.

And what do you find? A door slammed in your face and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. It's the feeling of hopelessness. The fact is we've all known that feeling. All of us have felt to one degree or another the despair, the despondency, the fear that comes when there seems to be no way out. But it is precisely this place of utter inability which God often brings us to in order to get our attention, in order to make us desperate enough to listen to Him and obey Him. And so right in the middle of this hopeless valley of dry bones, God gives a divine command. In fact, God gives two commands. The first one is found in verses 4 through 6. Then He said to me, Prophesy, and that is the Old Testament word for preach, preach over these bones and say to them, O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.

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. God has a plan. And so He gives a command to Ezekiel. Notice the command was not to bring in a front-end loader and start clearing out the valley of all the dead stuff.

Get rid of all this debris. He's not starting over. God doesn't say let's build a museum that can house all these bones and people can come and marvel at the remains of a once great army. No, God's solutions are not to cover up the deadness or to glory in the deadness. No, God confronts the deadness head on. He commands Ezekiel to preach the word of God to these dead, dry bones.

Now how would you like to be that preacher? Your assignment is to proclaim the word of God to dead people that cannot hear and cannot respond. Well, the fact of the matter is that any time a preacher heralds the truth to sinners, he is a dead man speaking to dead people. And apart from the life-giving power of the word of God, talking to dead things is futile.

It's a waste of time. You see, it's the word of God that brings life from death. It's the word of God that turns dry bones into a mighty army.

It's the word of God that turns hopelessness into hope. And so God commands Ezekiel to preach the word of God. And as Ezekiel begins to preach, a miracle happens. The bones come together.

Muscles and flesh and skin cover the bones. But verse 8 says, but there was no breath in them. So God gives a second command. Look at verse 9. 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 the slain that they may live. Now, the word breath is the Hebrew word for spirit, and it actually occurs nine times in our text. Sometimes it's translated breath, sometimes wind, sometimes spirit. God's second command to Ezekiel was to prophesy to the breath, to the spirit.

And I believe the word breath here is referring to the spirit of God. Now, what are we doing when we speak to the spirit of God and ask him to do something that the word of God promises? We call that prayer, right? We're praying to God's spirit. We're appealing to the breath of God, the spirit of God, to do what we cannot do, to do the impossible, to make the word of God effectual.

We're praying. So God not only commanded Ezekiel to preach the word of God, he also commanded him to pray to the spirit of God. God is commanding Ezekiel to avail himself of the ordinary means that God has provided in order to accomplish extraordinary results.

God's means of grace, the word of God in prayer, are God's solution in the face of this hopeless, impossible situation. You know, one of the challenges Ezekiel was up against was the notion that Israel's exile was gonna be a short-lived thing, that God would snap his fingers and it would all be over with quickly. And I think this is a common response to suffering, isn't it? We want the quick fix. We'd like to think that God won't let our suffering go on for very long, certainly not for a lifetime. And yet for this generation of exiles, it was going to take a lifetime.

An entire generation or more would spend their days in Babylon before anyone returned to the promised land. I think we naturally have the tendency to be like the Israelites in that we want the quick fix. We want to find the pragmatic solution that's gonna get things back on track quick and painlessly.

So we start oftentimes coming up with our own solutions. I'm gonna fight my addictions with medication. I'm gonna fight my loneliness by getting married. I'm gonna overcome my psychological doubts and issues with therapy.

Now, don't misunderstand me. There's a place for medication and meaningful relationships and therapy and all the rest. But my point is we're often quick to look for relief and solutions through secondary means while neglecting the primary means that God has given to us. I can't tell you how many times I've been talking to someone about a spiritual problem in their life, and as soon as I start probing into their use of the means of grace, the Word of God and prayer, they cut me off and say, oh, I've tried that. And I want to say to them, the Word of God and prayer is not something you try and then discard. No, it's something you commit to for a lifetime.

It's something you reorient all of your life around. It's something you believe in by faith with all of your heart until God moves. If God says, here's what you do when you're in a hopeless situation, here's where you'll find help, here's how you get to my grace, we don't respond to God by saying, oh, I've tried that, it doesn't work. When I'm counseling someone, I'll oftentimes at some point in the conversation ask about the nature of their interaction with the Word of God and about the quality of their prayer life. Are you immersing yourself in Scripture and in prayer on a daily basis? Are you using the means of grace?

Because it's uncanny how the answers to those questions about one's interaction with the Bible and prayer influence and affect everything else in a person's life. The degree to which we consistently and steadily use God's means of grace is the degree to which we enjoy victory over anger and lust and self-pity and bitterness and all the rest. We want God's healing to happen instantaneously. We want His deliverance to happen this afternoon. But God's solutions, His miracles, often involve the slow, persistent, faithful use of His prescribed means. Well, God gave these two commands to Ezekiel to preach and to pray, and Ezekiel obeyed.

So look at what happened next. We see, thirdly, an unexpected miracle. Look at verse 10. 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. Ezekiel says, I preached, the Spirit came, and the dry bones lived. Suddenly the prophet finds himself in the midst of a vast army. The silence of that dead valley is shattered by the deafening sound of innumerable soldiers, armor clanging against armor, swords rattling, shields lifted high, loud battle cries echoing across this valley. Church, this is a resurrection story, life from death, hope out of hopelessness.

God pulls off the miraculous, the supernatural, the impossible. This vision that God gave to Ezekiel was illustrating a promise that God was making to Israel. God was promising to raise them up out of the grave of captivity, as it were, and reestablish them in the promised land. Verse 12, I will raise you from your graves, and I will bring you into the land of Israel. Furthermore, God promises in verse 14 to put His Spirit within them.

Now, let's think about the fulfillment of these promises. Did Israel experience a return to the promised land after the Babylonian exile? Yes, they did. We read about that return in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah and in some of the prophetic books like the book of Malachi. Upon their return, did they immediately experience the filling of God's Spirit within them? Well, let's see how Scripture describes Israel's condition after their time in exile.

Malachi and Nehemiah describe post-exilic Israel like this. They intermarried with pagans. They stopped tithing.

They had no concern to keep the Sabbath day holy. The priesthood was eaten up with corruption, and there were all manner of social problems as a result. It doesn't exactly sound like a people filled with the Spirit of God, does it? So this leads us to ask the question, when did God fulfill this promise to put His Spirit within His people? Well, He fulfilled the promise on the day of Pentecost. We read in Acts chapter 2, verse 1. When the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all together in one place, and suddenly there came from heaven like a mighty rushing wind.

It's reminiscent of Ezekiel 37, isn't it? And it filled the entire house where they were sitting, and divided tongues of fire appeared to them and rested on each one of them, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit. After this happened, Peter got up and began preaching Christ to the crowds there gathered in Jerusalem, and at the conclusion of his sermon, he says, Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of sins, and you will receive the Holy Spirit.

The Spirit of God was given to those who repented of their sins and were baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. In other words, this Old Testament promise was fulfilled when it was granted to the true Israel of God, the Church of Jesus Christ. God's promise to Ezekiel that He would revive His people and pour out His Spirit on them is a promise that encompasses every Christian here today.

One preacher put it this way. He said, Ezekiel 37 holds out hope for all who accept the grace of God in Christ. With good reason, we who are heirs of the glorious message of the prophets and apostles may find in this text a dramatic affirmation that the sting of death will be overcome by the animating power of the Holy Spirit. It also holds out hope for a defeated and declining church. Revival cannot be worked up from within.

It will occur only as God, by His grace, breathes on us again and brings us back to life. When the church seems to be wavering and on the brink of annihilation, when Christians are losing the battle individually and corporately, when the gospel seems to be having no effect on the world, we can be certain that God's Spirit is the same life-giving breath that animated those dry bones in Ezekiel's day. He's the same Spirit that delivered Israel from Babylon and returned them safely to the promised land.

He's the one who empowered the disciples of Christ on the day of Pentecost, and He's the one who empowers you and me in the face of our own exiles and upper rooms and hopeless situations. Now, I want you to notice one last thing about this text, something that relates to our certainty in the promises of God. How can we be so sure that God will work on our behalf? How can we be confident that His prescribed means of grace won't fail?

We can be sure, because listen to this. God has inseparably attached His glory to His people. God has inseparably attached His glory to His people. The phrase, Then they will know that I am the Lord, appears 102 times in the Bible. Of those 102 times, 72 of them occur in the book of Ezekiel.

Three of those 72 times occur right here in our text. When God's people are in their most hopeless situation, God wants to make sure they know that He has tied His glory to their success. God's glory is put on display when His people flourish, and so He will not abandon us. He will not forsake us. Ezekiel's vision here concludes with God swearing an oath. He says, I have spoken, and I will do it, declares the Lord. That's how we can be so confident that He'll keep His promises to us. That's how we can be sure that His word won't fail and that prayer will never be a waste of time.

He wants us to avail ourselves of these things because He wants to move on our behalf. He wants to show us His glory as we preach the word to dead sinners and as we pray to the unseen wind. He's promised that He will put His glory on display as we faithfully utilize the means that He's given to us.

And so the result is nothing short of miraculous. The result is renewal and revival and restoration and resurrection. As I was asking myself the question, how does Ezekiel 37 apply to us today? What's this passage calling us to do? I was tempted to think that it's calling us to see ourselves as dry bones, to recognize or to acknowledge our own helplessness. But the more I thought about it, the more I began to realize that's not really what God is calling us to, at least not in this passage of Scripture. He's not telling Israel to recognize their own spiritual deadness. He's simply stating the reality that they are dead.

Whether Israel recognized their deadness or not is not really the main point, although I suspect the exiles in Babylon probably did see the hopelessness of their situation. Recognizing one's helplessness or one's spiritual apathy is not the emphasis here in this text. So I don't think the right application is for us to go away today and to try to conjure up some sense of our own failing and shortcomings. There certainly is a time and place for that, but that's not what Ezekiel 37 is about. This passage is about offering hope, offering a miracle when there is no other solution. It's about having confidence in God's method of delivering miracles to his people, God's means of resurrecting the church when it is spiritually apathetic and ineffective. There are only two commands in this passage, preach and pray. And so I think what Ezekiel 37 is calling Grace Church to do is to acknowledge the primacy and the centrality of God's means of grace. God says preach and pray.

We don't need to neglect or disparage either one of these commands. They are God's means for resurrecting dead bones. If the effectiveness and vibrancy of Grace Church depended on your attentiveness to the Word of God when it's preached and taught, if the spiritual impact of this community that we call Grace Church depended on the fervency and consistency of your prayers, how vibrant, how effective, how alive would Grace Church be? Brothers and sisters, Jesus Christ was not raised from the dead to produce a church that is apathetic and sickly and lifeless. Paul said in Romans 8-11, if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.

Are your bones dry? Is your situation hopeless? God says we need the Word, and we need the Spirit. We need preaching and prayer. So get into the Word of God. Give yourself to fervent, zealous prayer, and then let's watch God's resurrection power accomplish the impossible.

Let's pray. Lord, we are amazed at the dramatic miracles You perform, the conversions of unlikely people, the healings, the unexpected provisions You make for our needs. But Lord, we're often far too unimpressed with the means that You have ordained, ordinary means that lead to extraordinary things. Lord, we are fascinated with fame and a show of strength and hype. But Lord, preaching and prayer, these things often aren't impressive to us, and they would be simple unlikely methods except for the fact that they are Your methods, Your means of bringing about miracles. Lord, I would hate to think that I had missed out on some measure of Your resurrecting power in my life simply because I had failed to trust Your means of grace. Holy Spirit, would You make me and my family and this church and Your church throughout the world a people that stake our confidence and reputations and success on the power of Your Word and prayer through Your Spirit in Christ and for Your glory. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.