Can These Bones Live? (Ezekiel 37:1-10) Series

Can These Bones Live? Ezekiel 37:1-10

Good morning. Please open your Bibles to Ezekiel 37. (Pew Bible: p 678)

The story goes that during World War II, the army was scrambling to get medics up to speed on basic human anatomy so they could get them deployed quickly. And so they worked with an oldn country doctor to create a field manual of the human body that could be understood by everyday people. Here’s what he came up with:

“This is the human body, from head to toe:

A man has one skull. His brains are on the inside of it, if he has any, and his hair is on the outside, If he has any.

A man has one mouth, one nose, two ears, and two eyes. The mouth catches food. The nose catches cold. The eyes catch dust, and the ears catch his hat before it falls off his head.

The skeleton is what’s left when the insides are taken out and the outsides are taken off.

Most men have a backbone, but not all of them. For those that do have a backbone, their head sits on one end of it and they sit on the other.

Men have a calf at the bottom of their leg, an ankle at the bottom of their calf, and a corn on the bottom of their toe. The ankle is there to keep the calf away from the corn.

And that’s the human body.

The army actually would have done better if they had given every incoming medic a copy of Ezekiel 37! Because Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones was a remarkably accurate description of how the human body fits together, even before x-rays or MRI’s or anything else.

I’d like us to read Ezekiel’s vision together. This is Ezekiel 37, beginning in verse 1 and going to verse 10. It’s a pretty long passage, so I won’t make you stand up for the whole thing.

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May God bless the reading of his word. Pray with me.

What the vision meant, and what it means

One of the basics of hermaneutics (which is a fancy word for how you interpret the Bible) is that the Bible can never mean what it never meant. So before we go off and try to apply a passage like this to our lives, first we have to figure out what it would have meant to Ezekiel.

God Himself tells us what this vision means in verse 11:

The bones are all the of Israel.”

By this point, there hasn’t been a “whole house of Israel” for over three hundred years, ever since Solomon died. Maybe there might have been hope for reunification before the Assyrians conquered the Northern kingdom, but once that happened in 722 BC, that hope took a big hit. The one thing that might have reunified the two kingdoms was the temple in Jerusalem. But once the Nebuchadnezzar burned that to the ground, Ezekiel was like, “Yeah… we are never ever ever getting back together.”

So when God says, “Son of Man, can these bones live?” Ezekiel had to be like, “Nope.” Look at verse 2:

2 He made me walk all around among them. I realized there were a great many bones in the valley, and they were very dry.

They were very dry. They had been in that valley for a long time. They weren’t just mostly dead—they were dead dead!

So what this text specifically meant to Ezekiel and to his readers was, “Can God bring someone or something that is dead back to life?”

Now, the obvious answer is, “Of course He can.” There are nine accounts of dead people being raised back to life throughout the Bible. And not just in the gospels. So the question isn’t just “Can bones live?” The question is, can THESE bones live?”

Can THESE people, who had rebelled and sinned against God, and turned away from Him and worshiped false gods, and been judged by God and punished for their sin—could they live?

And not just “Can God give them life,” but WILL God God bring them to life?

That’s what Ezekiel 37 meant. And that’s where the application is for us. Can God bring people who are spritually dead back to life? Can God bring a dead church back to life? Can God bring a dead nation back to life?

If the answer wasn’t yes, we wouldn’t be here. But let’s look at the four conditions that make it possible for God to bring us back to life.

1. It depends on the sovereignty of God.

Ezekiel’s response to this question is, “Lord God, only you know.” The prophet understood that anything and everything that happens is dependent on God’s sovereign will. Humanity would have been wiped out completely if God had not saved Noah and his family. Israel would never have existed in the first place if God had not chosen Abraham way to bless him and make of him a great nation. They would have all died in slavery if God hadn’t delivered them through Moses.