“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 37:13-14)
Horror movies and TV shows seem to be quite popular these days, particularly movies about zombies, vampires, and the undead. I don’t quite understand the fascination with such things as real life in the 21st century is horrifying enough. Perhaps people just want to escape from that frightening reality. They don’t want to face the horrors of the evil within themselves, the ugliness of their sin. It is easier to pretend that such evil is not real, or if it is, it does not apply to them.
The ugliness of evil is the focus of this passage from the prophet Ezekiel, one quite familiar to most people: the valley of dry bones, an image much more graphic and gross than those portrayed in the media. The Lord used these to symbolize the spiritual death of all Israel, but the image also reflects the spiritual deadness of all people. All are dead in their sins. Thus this image conveys the hideous nature of sinfulness. Israel had become as useless, dead, defiled and unclean as a skeleton, worse even because the valley contained multiple numbers of these unclean bones.
The bones convey the disgusting, helpless, and hopeless nature of all those who are sinners, which, means everyone who is alive today or has ever lived. They are nothing but dead, dry, and spiritually useless. Nothing they do matters, no matter how good or noble it seems, even if society honors and praises it. They are so dead that they cannot even help themselves.
The good news is that these bones can live, people can be raised from the deadness of sin. How? In the vision, the bones are restored to life by the word of God spoken through the prophet by the Holy Spirit. God has the power to create spiritual life out of what is spiritually dead. Spiritual life is accomplished only by the word of God, the revelation of the good news of Jesus spoken through the prophets, apostles, and the church by the sovereign power of the Holy Spirit of God. So we, before faith were all in the valley of death, dry useless bones. But now we who have been blessed with faith are alive in Christ. Our place is with Jesus in the fellowship of the Ezekiel, the prophets, and all the saints who have gone before us. And like them, the Lord calls us to speak the truth of God’s word so that He may raise others out of that valley of unclean sin and death to bring them all to eternal life.