Come with
me to a desert and imagine it robbing the moisture from your skin and eyes. You
squint against the heat of the sun and lick your lips only to be rewarded with
sticky dust gathered there uninvited. As you suck in a breath of heat it gives
no relief to your lungs. All around you lay the remnants of a once-thriving
community. People that once danced, moved, and breathed. You don’t have to look
hard at the landscape at your feet to know that the bones scattered as far as
the eye can see have nothing left. Buzzards don’t bother circling overhead.
Their meal from this tragedy was satisfied long ago. The wind causes a hollow
clattering as a fragile femur rustles against a phalange or fibula. The passage
of time has secured their current condition; ghostly white, splintery, dry. An
ocean of dried out, hollow bones.
What are your dry bones? What have you given up on? Where lies
your discontent?
Failed
marriage? Failed parenting? Failing grades? Failed unity in our country? A
prison sentence? A failed career? Failed religion? A failure to
communicate?
How about death?
So much failure abounds that the flies don’t even bother hovering.
There’s nothing left that attracts them. These bones are so wispy, the breeze
pushes them around like trash.
When Ezekiel stood at the edge of a scene like this, it had been
so long since he had been home, he didn’t even think it was possible to go
back. Yet he was tasked to bring word of the Lord to the living among his
fellow captives. It’s hard enough to bring a tough word to a tough crowd but
here he stood in the valley of dry bones about to give the directive of a
lifetime. God said, “Prophesy to these dry bones.”
He stared at the pile of bones maybe questioning his sanity. He
looked at the hopelessness and felt it in his own bones. I’m not sure if he
expected anything or not.
But those bones are us. They are me. We face hopelessness daily
with a sense of dread we may not even be aware of. We walk through our lives in
a daze crushing dry bones under our feet as if they weren’t lifeless enough
already! I’ve become hopelessly lost in a world that does not want, need, or
even acknowledge any part of the existence of God. It discourages me, not
because I need others to believe in order for me to believe,
but because I don’t understand what is so offensive about God
that keeps people from Him.
Now His people are another story! I understand why we are
offensive. All one has to do is scroll through the newsfeed of one’s favorite
social media site. We are a mess, fighting with each other, talking over each
other, lashing out at figures we’ve never even met. I totally get it if people
don’t want to believe in me. I have a list of names in my Bible of those I’ve
shared about Christ with who still do not buy it as far as I can tell. And
Those are my dry bones; trying to love God in a world that doesn’t even care
He’s alive.
Ezekiel stood in front of a mass gathering of still bones and
spoke them to life. It is largely believed to have been a vision
(http://biblehub.com/commentaries/ezekiel/37-1.htm) but a vivid one and one
that had impacted him deeply. In front of his squinting eyes, the bones
gathered to themselves and connected bone to bone to create a vast army as
sinew and skin wrapped around the skeletons like a hug from a long lost friend.
So can
that which was dead be brought back to life? Can there be resurrection in the
most definite of finalities? The marriage, the friendship, the career, the
class, the faith, the conversation.
Or death?
God asked if the bones could be brought to life. Ezekiel's answer
was a safe one, "Only you know, God."
The resurrection of the bones in Ezekiel’s vision has implications
for me. The first is that only the author of life can reverse the finality of
death. We will all be seen to our grave one day; that is unavoidable but “if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised
either. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are
still in your sins” (1 Cor 15:16-17). “But Christ has indeed been raised from
the dead” (1 Cor 15:20a). Those dry bones coming to life told a story of a
promise that Israel would be gathered again and returned home one day. It also
told the story of what would happen for anyone who would follow Christ. About
600 years later (give or take), Jesus would call a man out of his grave in
order to prove that death was not the final answer and that He Himself could
overcome it.
But even that is not the rest of the
story told in the dry bones. The re-animation was not the end result. I’m
telling you, that would’ve been enough for me! I’m pretty sure I’d have peed
myself watching and listening to the sounds as lifeless bones came together,
the shaking as they stood upright, skin latching onto them before my eyes.
Those bones-turned-bodies had no breath in them so the work wasn’t complete.
Neither is it with us. The word in the
passage for breath is also the same word denoted for Spirit and it is used
interchangeably 10 times in the passage
(http://biblehub.com/commentaries/ezekiel/37-5.htm). As we walk through our
valley of dry bones, God’s promise is so much more than simply reassembling our
parts and wrapping us in skin. He breathes His spirit, His breath, into us, and
that is how we have hope and that is how we can overcome the most grievous
heartaches in this life.
In the end, the pile of brittle, lifeless
bones stood on its feet as a vast army and inhaled the spirit into their
bodies. “This is what the Sovereign Lord says:
My people, I am going to open your graves and bring you up from them . . . Then
you, my people, will know that I am the Lord, when
I open your graves and bring you up from them. I will
put my Spirit in you and you will live . . . Then you will know that I
the Lord have spoken,
and I have done it, declares the Lord”
(Ezekiel 37:12-14)
Can my failures give way to new life? God knows.
All
references from:
http://biblehub.com/commentaries/ezekiel/37-7.htm
http://biblehub.com/niv/1_corinthians/15.htm
