valley of dry bones
One of my favorite stories in the Bible is the prophecy Ezekiel had, the Valley of Dry Bones. Ezekiel was a prophet and a priest who was exiled to Babylon. The book of Ezekiel begins with Ezekiel addressing the exiles and people left in Judah with messages of warning and judgment, predicting the fall of Jerusalem. After the fall of Jerusalem, Ezekiel began to prophesy hope and reassurance for the people of Judah.
The vision Ezekiel saw was a valley dense with dry bones. The lives that the bones represented were not only dead but disgraced. In ancient Isreal, an unburied corpse with exposed remains was a shocking disgrace to the dead. Sounds intense, right?
I love this story though because it’s a classic picture of God’s ability to renew His people. How powerful is it that God can bring dead, dry bones back to life? They weren’t just bones, they were dry bones. Dry bones aren’t just dead, they’ve been dead for a long time. We have areas in our life that feel dead, and when things feel like that, we tend to give up hope. We begin to believe that that area of our life will never reap fruit again.
Our spiritual lives are a great example. Keeping our spiritual lives healthy and fed takes work. It takes time, consistency, and the desire to know Him more. However, we aren't perfect and we go through dry seasons in our lives. I know I have. So, we get to a point where our spiritual lives have felt dead for so long, that we just give up on it. Ezekiel 37 is a testament that no matter how dead something feels, God can renew it back to life. Nothing is too far gone for God to renew. You are not too far gone for God.
In Ezekiel 37:3, God asked Ezekiel if these bones could live. Ezekiel responded with “O Lord God, you know.” Ezekiel completely surrendered the situation to God. Ezekiel had complete trust in God’s power & wisdom. I think there are 3 important things to note here:
Ezekiel had no hope in the bones themselves, but he had hope in God
Ezekiel did not presume to know what God wanted to do with the bones
Ezekiel was confident that God did know
If Ezekiel had any doubts, he didn’t show them. He put them away and did what God commanded him to do. Ezekiel had faith in what God could do, not what Ezekiel, himself, could do. I think this is why we begin to experience dry seasons in our life. We begin to put too much emphasis on what we can do for ourselves. Hard truth: we can’t do it on our own, no matter how hard we try. When we begin to try to go our own way, we are leading ourselves toward a path of death and destruction, just like the people of Isreal that the valley of dry bones represented.
What areas do you need revival in? Charles Spurgeon once said, “If we want revivals, we must revive our reverence for the Word of God.” Diving into the word of God is absolutely key here. Ezekiel may have been the one to speak life to the dead, dry bones, but God was the one who had made the promise to fill the dry bones with the breath of the living God. The breath in the revived bones was the spirit of the living God. This couldn’t have been done had Ezekiel not completely surrendered it to God. It was a work of revival! It wasn’t a new creation of life from nothing, it was the restoration of life!
