THE VALLEY OF DRY BONES
Some people are keen on doing crosswords. There were two people sitting on a park bench discussing a clue to a crossword. There were 7 letters to enter in two words - one of 3 letters and the other of 4. The clue was "The beginning of the universe". What do you think was the answer? A Christian person was sitting nearby and overheard the discussion and listened carefully to what was said. One was thinking aloud, "’In the beginning...’ Well, what about ’Big bang’." That’s the well-known theory of the beginning of the universe. "Yes" said the other, "it would do, but in doesn’t fit in with the other words. I know, it must be ‘God Said’." I think it’s quite possible that the universe began with a Big Bang in which the starry galaxies were flung into space, but there must have been Someone who caused the Big Bang to happen - and who could have done it but God?
In that little story we have a parable to understanding the world as we find it in its chaotic state on so many levels. It’s because mankind has rejected the Biblical solution of "God Said". They’ve gone along with Frank Sinatra’s song, "I’ll do it my way" with disastrous consequences. Mankind is God’s masterpiece of creation, made in the moral likeness of his Creator, and yet our first parents fell into a sinful state that robbed them and the human race of the priceless possession of the intimate presence of God through his Spirit. As a result man is now only a pale shadow of what God intended him to be.
Thinkers down the ages have puzzled over the place of mankind in this immense universe in which we find ourselves. Perhaps you, like me, in a quiet moment have wondered, "What am I? Who am I?" G K Chesterton summarized it rather well when he said, "One thing is certain: man is not what he was meant to be." Down the ages mankind has constantly sought to reinstate its lost glory but because of the inherited bias to sin, has failed repeatedly, bringing disaster and further suffering on the world. But God hadn’t given up on his creation. God so loved the world and he wanted to bring about a restoration of fellowship with his fallen creation.
God’s revelation to mankind was focussed on the nation of Israel that had sadly departed from its calling to be the people of God. His people had turned their backs on their great benefactor who had given them a beautiful and fruitful land. They had persistently ignored his entreaties, ridiculed his warnings and abused his blessings. They had spurned his love and rebelled against his authority. Nothing short of the most severe discipline would restore the situation. It came in the form of the Babylonian army! It was a dark day in the life of the nation that had been given the mandate by God to be a light to the nations.
But time after time he attempted to recall them to their spiritual heritage - and he’s doing it to us today. Let’s see what "God said" to Ezekiel and through him to us. If ever a man had a call to preach it was Ezekiel: "Son of man, I send you to the people of Israel ... and you shall say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord’" (2:3,4). It’s a message to which we must pay careful attention.
Ezekiel didn’t have an easy time. The people to whom he ministered were thoroughly depressed. They’d been defeated in battle, permanently removed from their homeland, mocked by their heathen conquerors, shot through with guilt and overwhelmed by the incredible wealth and strength of Babylon. One of the psalms conveys their feeling of shame, hopelessness and humiliation: "By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion" and they moaned "How can we sing the songs of the Lord while in a foreign land?" (137:1,3).
It was in this miserable situation that God spoke to Ezekiel in a vision. He showed him a valley full of heaps of dried-up bones. It was hardly a vision to cheer him up! That’s how an ordinary person would see it. But have you noticed how this passage from the book of Ezekiel began: "The hand of the Lord was upon me, and brought me out by the Spirit of the Lord" (37:1). It’s the Spirit of God that makes all the difference. He is the key to knowing God, as the apostle Paul would write: "No-one can say, Jesus is Lord, except by the Holy Spirit" (I Cor 12:3).
As the Spirit came on Ezekiel he was no longer fully himself but somehow detached from his physical environment. It was rather like when we watch a film on television where the story goes into a flashback and the picture is transformed into another scene. The dry plain in which Ezekiel stood was suddenly turned into a battlefield of yesterday. The vultures and the elements had done their grisly work and nothing remained but disintegrated skeletons scattered over the ground. What a bizarre sight - the Valley of Dry Bones - a valley which turns out to be a vast slaughterhouse in the open countryside. The Jews were careful about burial, so the scene spoke of pollution and the curse of God.
The Spirit of God caused the prophet to go on a tour of inspection of the bones, and his comment at the end was that there were very many and that they were very dry. At one time these bones had been the means of support to a great army of people, but long since the grip of death had laid hold on them, and now there was no possibility of life. An apparently dead body can sometimes be resuscitated, but a skeleton, impossible! There’s absolutely no way the scattered bones could be revived into people!
The picture that flashed before Ezekiel’s eyes would have been of the aftermath of the siege of Jerusalem, with corpses of the slain remaining unburied. It was a terrible but graphic picture of his nation in its state of apostasy. The Divine voice broke into Ezekiel’s thoughts, "Son of man, can these bones live?" (2). What was he to make of this macabre scene, even if it was only a vision?
I think Ezekiel must have been something of a diplomat because he gave a guarded reply. It was a very direct question which required an answer, "Yes or No", but instead he replied rather cautiously, "O Sovereign Lord, you alone know" (3). Quite possibly he would have liked to answer "No", but it wouldn’t have sounded very spiritual for a prophet! And he wasn’t inclined to answer "Yes" because he had the suspicion that he would be landing himself with an assignment with some very unpromising-looking bones!
Isn’t this a comment on human nature? He thought to himself, how can these bones live? Can stubborn Israel ever come to life again? Perhaps like ourselves we wonder if we as individuals or a church community can be revived? If we say "Yes", what will the implications be for us? Like us, Ezekiel hadn’t the nerve to say "No" but he hadn’t the faith to say "Yes"! All he could say was "Lord, you alone know". Thankfully, there was just sufficient faith in the rather wavering reply to encourage God to continue the conversation, and to point the way to spiritual renewal. First of all there was:
A WORD TO THE PROPHET
Ezekiel’s first duty was to persist in the ministry to which God had called him. Renewal doesn’t come through discarding the old and trusted paths that God has led his people over the millenniums. There’s no secret formula for blessing that’s just been discovered, even though it might be dressed up as being a "word from the Lord" by some forceful and charismatic person. The prophet is called to keep on prophesying, not to try some new technique in the hope that it will prove more effective. Look at the young church in Jerusalem: "They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer" (Acts 2:42).
Ezekiel was instructed to prophesy a word of hope even if he wasn’t exactly sure of its outcome. There’s the story told of John Wesley when ministering in the United States. He was discouraged because he didn’t seem to be getting his message through. Then one of the Moravian pastors pleaded with him, "Brother John, preach faith until you have faith!" He did, and soon afterwards he had that heart-warming experience which revolutionized his ministry and was the beginning of a great evangelical awakening. The Word to the Prophet was followed by the instruction to:
PROPHESY TO THE BONES
God told Ezekiel, "Say to them, ‘Dry bones, hear the word of the Lord ... I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life ... and you will know that I am the Lord’" (4, 6). And it happened! There was a shaking and a rattling, and the bones came together before his eyes. There’s a famous Negro spiritual which says it all: "The foot bone connected the anklebone; the anklebone connected to the leg bone; the leg bone connected to the knee bone ..." and so on. Miraculously, as each skeleton took shape, muscle and flesh formed around them, and then a covering of skin to complete the human form.
Ezekiel saw in his vision a vast army of what had been a heap of bones. But there was a problem - they were lifeless corpses! Some progress had been made, but a vital element was lacking. It’s clear from the words of the prophecy that Ezekiel was primarily addressing his nation, Israel. The symbolism is that the scattered nation would be gathered together as were the bones. This in fact happened some 70 years after the exile, and has happened again in our lifetime, with the Jews returning from many countries to their own land. But both then and now there’s something missing: spiritual life. In both cases, the people had returned to their homeland in unbelief. The lessons of their suffering had gone unlearned.
It’s a parable for us as well. It’s possible to have all the trappings of Christianity, as the New Testament warns, "Having a form of godliness but denying its power" (2 Tim 3:5). What does this mean? We can appear like Christians but lack a living faith in Christ. This was the state of Nicodemus, the man who came to Jesus one night to hear more of the kingdom of God. He was told gently but firmly that he was born, as it were, "of the flesh" (John 3:6), just like those lifeless bodies in Ezekiel’s vision.
The same principle applies to Christ’s followers. If we try to live the Christian life with only our natural resources, without the means of grace - being in touch with the Lord in prayer and absorbing the Scriptures - we’ll still be living "in the flesh". The apostle Paul gave a powerful illustration of this when he wrote to the Christians in Rome, "For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do ... For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out ... What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?" (7:15,18,24). Ezekiel’s vision has the answer.
The prophecy was in two stages. The first was to clothe the skeletons with flesh, but if they had remained at that halfway point - just lying with no breath in them - how impotent they would have looked, just like the strange but wonderful sight of the Terra-cotta Army found in China. Those thousands of beautifully made statues are a great tourist attraction, but otherwise useless, being cold and motionless. And likewise the bodies that Ezekiel saw, as a people of God, they too would be quite useless. It’s an application that we must make for ourselves, as we turn to the second stage of the drama acted out in the vision. The key to understanding it is in Ezekiel’s words:
PROPHESY TO THE SPIRIT
Many of Ezekiel’s prophecies have the theme of renewal. He uses different images to teach the same message. In the previous chapter he had called upon the people to put away their idols, to discard the pollution of the heathen nations. If they did this their God had a wonderful future in store for them: "I will give you a new heart ...And I will put my Spirit in you ... you will be my people, and I will be your God" (36:26-28).
In the Vision of the Dry Bones Ezekiel was told to "Prophesy to the breath" (9). The words "breath" and "wind" and "spirit" are one and the same in Hebrew. Prophesying "to the breath" means calling upon the Spirit of God to "breathe into these slain, that they may live." He did so and what happened? "Breath entered them, they came to life and stood up on their feet - a vast army" (10).
When man was first created we read in Genesis that his body was made from the dust of the earth and then the breath of life was breathed into it and Adam became a living being (Gen 2:7). The same principle is found in Ezekiel’s vision. The breath of God, his Spirit, seen in the emblem of the wind, is his power to blow and bend, to fill and make alive. Picture a yacht on a perfectly calm day; its sails are flagging, but then suddenly they fill out and the unseen wind stirs and fills them. The vessel begins to move, come alive and gets somewhere. Strong trees bend and windmills whirl when the great winds blow in force. Have you ever experienced the wind of God blowing your doubts away, breathing new life into dead plans, rescuing hopeless situations, giving courage and comfort? That’s what he wants to do for each of us.
The most dramatic picture of the Spirit of God is the scene in the Upper Room on the Day of Pentecost. "Suddenly" we’re told, "a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house ... (the disciples) were filled with the Holy Spirit" (Acts 2:4). This was the fulfilment of the Old Testament prophecies: "I will put my Spirit in you" said Ezekiel. "I will pour out my Spirit on all people," words spoken by the prophet Joel (Act 2:17). Jesus had told his disciples, "Do not leave Jerusalem, but wait for the gift my Father promised ... you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit" (1:5,6).
The Holy Spirit came in order to reveal Christ to us, to make Christ real to us, to show us what Christ has done. If we’re Christians we’ve been through the Valley of Dry Bones experience, we’ve passed from death to spiritual life in Christ, by the work of the Spirit of God. But just as the Day of Pentecost was the official public birthday of the Christian Church, our conversion experience is but the beginning of a relationship with God. It must be on going and developing or it will wither.
Ezekiel’s prophecy ends with a telling phrase: "I will put my Spirit in you and you will live, and I will settle you in your own land" (14). The prophecy was primarily to the exiled Jews, but it has an abiding meaning for us in our day. The Holy Spirit is given to Christian believers, to give us a longing and a love for Christ, to enable us to live as Christ lived, to conform us to his image. For a brief span of years we live on the earth, but this isn’t our real land, we’re pilgrims bound for a better country, our heavenly land.
Where are we in terms of this parable of the Valley of Dry Bones? Are we still in the condition of the skeletons that were made to say: "Our bones are dried up and our hope is gone"? (11). Or are we in the position of the fleshly bodies but, as the prophecy described, "there was not breath in them"? (8). Or are we filled with the Spirit of God, and in the words of God to Ezekiel: "Then you will know that I the Lord have spoken, and I have done it"? (14).
This takes us back to my illustration of the crossword puzzle "In the beginning". The words Big Bang would have done but that’s a materialistic solution - scientists tell us that eventually the universe will run down - and so it is with our own efforts to live the life that God wants us to live. God’s solution is in his word to us: "God said". And what does he say to us through Ezekiel? "I will put my Spirit in you and you will live" (14).
The Holy Spirit is God’s gift to the Church. We can’t earn this gift - we can but receive him into our lives as we make room for him so that he can glorify Christ through us. May that increasingly be so.
