The Lord Breathes His Holy Spirit into Us
Grace and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. The Word of God through which the Holy Spirit guides our hearts and minds today is recorded in Ezekiel 37:1-14:
Dear friends in Christ Jesus, our Lord,
These words from Ezekiel 37 are not a scene from a horror movie. They have nothing to do with Halloween or people dressed up as skeletons. This scene that Ezekiel saw was a message of comfort. Our modern mindset, conditioned by Hollywood, may have a hard time seeing that. So let’s step back and place ourselves in Ezekiel’s day.
Ezekiel was a prophet a little after 600 B.C. These were traumatic times for God’s people. Half of the nation of Israel had already been destroyed over a century and a quarter earlier. They had turned away from the Lord and worshipped other gods. Only the people of Judah remained. But they did not learn from the example of the others. They, too, turned away from the Lord, so the Lord sent the Babylonians against them. Now the Babylonians, led by Nebuchadnezer, were dealing death blows to the people of Judah.
Nebuchadnezer had taken many of the people into exile. Ezekiel was one of them. They were taken away from their home, away from the land in which the Savior was promised to be born. They were resettled in Babylon. During the exile word reached them that Jerusalem was destroyed. The Lord’s temple was leveled.
This news crushed all hope they had. Not only did they lose the hope of returning home, but their spiritual hopes were devastated as well. Their religious life was tied to the temple that was no more. God’s promise to send the Savior was tied to the land God had promised to Abraham and tied to the family line of King David. How could the Lord send the Savior to be born from David’s family in the town of Bethlehem, if David’s descendants were in exile? No wonder the people were saying, “Our bones are dried up and our hope is gone; we are cut off” (Ezekiel 37:11). They felt like bones that had been dead so long that all the moisture was dried up out of them. No hope.
Through this vision of dried bones the Lord teaches them the he breathes his Holy Spirit into them through his word to give them life. That is what the Lord wants to teach you and me today as well: The Lord breathes his Holy Spirit into us through his word to give us life.
We may not experience exile, but don’t we at times struggle with feelings of hopelessness? Do you feel that your life is in a rut? You go through the same routine each day: Getting up, doing some work, coming home, going to bed. Getting out of the rut seems hopeless. Life seems meaningless. Does life seem boring and whatever excitement does come doesn’t really satisfies but quickly passes so that you are hopelessly bored? Do you struggle with pain or an illness or a disability and some days it just seems too much to put up with ? Do you feel rejected, alone or isolated so that establishing a meaningful relationship seems hopeless? Does your conscience accuse you and trying to lead you to give up hope that God could forgive you?
If you are struggling with feelings of hopelessness now or whenever they may come in the future, think of the valley of dry bones and see what the Lord can do for you. The Lord breathes his Spirit, the Holy Spirit) into you through his word to give you life. That’s the theme we focus on this morning. The Lord breathes his Holy Spirit into us. First we see that he does it 1) through his word. Then we want to see that he does it 2) to give life. The Lord breathes the Holy Spirit into us.
1) Through his word
He does it through his word. Dead bones can not come to life by themselves. That’s obvious. Human power can not bring them back to life either. Only the Lord’s power can. And that’s why when the Lord asks Ezekiel whether these bones can life, he answers, “Lord God, you know” (Ezekiel 37:3). If the Lord wanted them to live, he could do it.
But notice how the Lord does it. He doesn’t simply make it happen. Rather he tells Ezekiel to prophesy. Now the word translated prophesy doesn’t necessarily mean “to foretell the future.” Often in the Bible the word prophesy means to speak a message from God. So instead of foretelling it means telling forth God’s Word. The Lord’s command to Ezekiel to prophesy is his command to speak his word.
Notice how the Lord emphases the importance of speaking his word. Four times Ezekiel receives the command to prophesy. Three times the Lord tells him, “Say to them.” The Lord instructs the listeners, “Dry bones, hear the word of the LORD!” (Ezekiel 37:4 NIV). And we are told that Ezekiel did indeed prophesy just as the Lord commanded him. He faithful spoke the word and did not change it. As Ezekiel spoke what the Lord commanded, the Lord brought breath to these dry bones through his word.
That brings us to another word we need to talk about briefly, the word breath. In Hebrew, the word translated breath is ruach. That same word means spirit/Spirit. That helps us understand that the breath in the vision represents the Holy Spirit. That’s the way the Lord explains it to Ezekiel. In the vision, through his word he puts breath into the dead bodies and in verse 14 the Lord promises his people, “I will put my Spirit in you.” Through his Word the Lord breathes into us his Holy Spirit.
How does this apply to us? Well, where do you think the Lord wants us to turn when we feel down and hopeless, when we feel like dry bones? He wants us to turn to his word. He says to us, like he said to those dry bones, “Hear the word of the LORD.” Through his word he wants to breathe his Holy Spirit into us to renew our hope.
And yet all too often we don’t turn to his word, do we? We think we can get through it our own. We can grit our teeth and bear it. But without the Lord and his word, we are dry bones. Maybe we avoid God’s word because we think we know it well enough or we don’t have time to read it or there’s too many hard parts that we don’t understand. Laziness in hearing and reading God’s Word is sin, and for it we deserve God to take his word away from us so that we become dead, dry bones forever.
But what a change when the word of the Lord comes into our hearts! For as you hear the word of the Lord and take it to heart, he breathes his Holy Spirit into you again and again. And the Holy Spirit points you to Jesus again and again. That’s the reason the Lord gives us his Holy Spirit – not to give us special powers but to give us Jesus. For in Jesus you have forgiveness of sins. The Holy Spirit opens our eyes to see that even though we deserve hell and its utter hopelessness, Jesus took our hell when he suffered and died for our sins on the cross in our place. The Holy Spirit shows you the risen Jesus. We have a living hope because Jesus is our God and our Savior who alone has taken away all our sins. You are forgiven because of Jesus’ blood. You can sing, “My hope is built on nothing less / Than Jesus blood and righteousness” (Christian Worship 382:1). This was the message the Holy Spirit spoke through the Apostles on the first Pentecost. This is the message that the Holy Spirit speaks to you through God’s Word today. This is the message that gives us hope for through the message of forgiveness in Jesus God breathes his Spirit into us to give us life, eternal life.
2) To give life
That brings us to the second point. The Lord breathes his Spirit into us through his Word to give life. We see that pictured in the vision as the dry bones come together and are covered with tendons, flesh, and skin and then breathe comes into them, and they stand on their feet – a vast army (Ezekiel 37:10). So also the Lord talks about opening his people’s graves and bringing them up out of the grave of hopelessness. He will bring those exiles back to the promised land, so that his promise of the Savior will be fulfilled. We now from the Bible that the Lord did bring them back and the Savior did indeed come.
So also as we take to heart the word of the Lord, he restores our hope. The hope that he promises is not the fleeting hopes and dreams that at times seem so important to us but really aren’t. He promises a greater hope, the unfailing hope that through faith we have life with him now and forever. He reminds you and me this hope does not fail or disappoint, because it is built on Jesus Christ who not only died for us but who rose from the dead in victory. No matter what we may feel at this time or how hopeless our life might seem, through faith in Jesus you have life with God. That truth gives us a sure, unfailing hope that will not disappoint.
To help you live each day in this sure hope that the Lord continues to breath his Spirit into you and give you life in fellowship with him, look at what the Lord has done for you and will do for you.
What has the Lord already done for you? He took you and me while we were dead in sin, while were still his enemies, and he made us alive. He did it by grace alone. We had not earned or do not deserve it in any way. Ephesians 2 teaches us that by grace alone God gave us spiritual life while we were dead in sin. Now since his grace has done that for you and me while we were still his enemies, how much more now that we are his children through faith in Jesus will he not continue to give us life as he breathes his Spirit into us so that we have hope?
And think of what God has promised to do for you and me. We who die believing in Jesus, will only sleep in the grave. Jesus will raise our bodies from the dead on the Last Day. He will glorify our bodies like unto his glorious body, and we will live with him forever in heaven. He, who has the power to do that for us, certainly has the power to give us hope no matter how hopeless we might feel our situation is. For if you think about it, even the most hopeless situation in this life, can not rob you of the hope of heaven. For our hope of heaven is built on Jesus. God breathes his Spirit into us to give us life in Jesus.
There’s an African-American spiritual based on these verse from Ezekiel. One variation of it has a refrain that goes something like this, “Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones/ Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones/ Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones/ Hear, ye, the word of the Lord.” In modern society maybe you have heard it more as a children’s song to teach them that the toe bone is connected to the foot bone and so on. Yet think of what the slaves most have thought as they sung it and remembered Ezekiel’s vision. Just as the children of Israel seemed to be in a hopeless situation, the Lord promised to breathe his Spirit into them through his Word to give life. So those slaves could also place their hope in the Lord. So also you, no matter how hopeless life might seem, hear the word of the Lord. For through his word the Lord breathes his Holy Spirit into you to give you life, life with Jesus. Amen.
