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Dry Bones, Death, Not a Problem
Ezekiel 37:1-14, John 11:1-45
I’ve got a couple one-liners to get started today that will likely make you groan… Q.
What do the skeletons
say before eating? A. Bone appetite.
Q.
Who was the most famous French skeleton?
A. Napoleon bone-apart.
Told you they were bad.
Speaking of bad, the priest and prophet Ezekiel had a bad dream about bones and
skeletons coming back together and being reanimated.
Sounds like a scene out of a walking dead horror movie.
Ezekiel was indeed a strange man whose words and actions appear in his weird, yet wonderful, book.
Besides
being the sci-fi hero for alien visitations with visions of the wheels (which he meant to associate with the glory of the
Lord), today we have his passage about dry bones.
Stephen King, step aside.
Dem bones, dem bones, dem - dry
bones ... gonna rise again.
Now hear the word of the Lord.
As we approach Good Friday and Easter, what does Ezekiel 37 tell us?
Well, at the time of Ezekiel, God's
wayward people had been exiled to Babylon (modern-day Iraq) before and after the fall of Jerusalem (586 B.C.).
The Babylonians had killed much of the population, had destroyed the temple and much of the rest of Jerusalem,
and were taking the remainder of the populous off to Babylon.
Had God abandoned them forever?
Would they
cease to exist as a people, hundreds of miles from home?
Would they ever return?
How could they survive in a
strange land?
Psalm 137 gives voice to their agony: "By the rivers of Babylon… there we sat down and there we
wept when we remembered Zion ... How could we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land?"
Ezekiel also reflects
their anguish: "Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are doomed, done for, finished, cut off completely."
The Lord, directly or through a vision, set Ezekiel down in a valley full of dry bones.
Ezekiel said, "The hand of the
Lord came upon me, and He brought me out by the Spirit (or wind) of the Lord ..."
Not only were the bones dry, they were very dry.
It is as though a vast army had been slaughtered, their
armor and clothing stripped, and their bodies left unburied for scavenger birds and animals to pick clean and scatter,
and for the winds to scour and the sun to bleach the bones dry, very dry.
When God asked Ezekiel if those bones
would live, he said essentially, "How should I know, Lord?
Only You could possibly know that."
God told
Ezekiel to prophesy, to speak on His behalf, to the bones.
God said that He would cause breath (spirit) to enter
them, so that they would live.
2
So Ezekiel prophesied to the bones and there arose this rattling and rumbling, a violent shaking, a seismic
event; and the bones from the separated skeletons came clanking together, linking bone to its bone, along with
muscle, tissue and skin.
The bones were rejoined and covered with flesh; but the bodies were still lifeless, there
was no breath in them.
In a second step, God told Ezekiel to prophesy to the breath (or wind or Spirit) that the
cadavers might be reanimated.
And Ezekiel prophesied, and "the breath came into them, and they arose and lived,
and a vast multitude stood on their feet.”
These dry bones are identified with the whole house of Israel.
They are the dis-spirited people which
Ezekiel had just resurrected so that they “shall know that I am the Lord."
The imagery shifts from bones
to graves as Ezekiel prophesies to them directly, saying that God will open their graves and bring them home.
By
God's words and actions, "they shall know that I am the Lord."
He further calls them "My people," reaffirming the
covenant.
God declares, "I will put My Spirit within you, and you shall live ...."
Now, take a step back.
Let's say that you were praying today, and in your pray, you had a vision and God
took your spirit and whisked it away to a very dry, hot place.
You can hear the wind whistling among the rocks and
the crackling of dry weeds brushing together.
You feel the hot, desert wind on your face, your lips are becoming
sore and your throat is parched; you can't even swallow; the sand is too hot to hardly stand.
Now, look around and you see the bones!
Hundreds, thousands of bones.
Bones so dry and sun-bleached,
you know they have been there for a very long time.
Then you hear the voice of God saying, "Can these bones
live?"
You say to yourself, “Don’t think so.”
But your answer is, "Only You know, O Lord." God says, "Tell
these bones that they will live.
They will be covered by muscle and flesh and breath will come into them and they
will live."
So, you tell the bones what is going to happen to them and, behold, they start coming together.
There
goes a femur by your foot and a skull rolls toward a rib cage, flesh starts growing and soon, bodies are strewn all
about - but no breath is in them.
Then you hear God again, "Tell the winds, ‘Blow, breathe upon these slain, that they may live.’"
You do
and the bodies heave as they begin to breath.
They stand, and a great army of healthy bodies gather around you.
These bones, whose life was long dried up and gone, now live.
This vision happened to Ezekiel, and it happened
3
again in Jesus’ day, only Lazarus’ bones hadn’t dried up yet, though he was just as dead as Ezekiel’s bones.
Jesus had the same quandary as Ezekiel.
Lazarus had died.
He had been ill but Jesus had not come back to
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