Rattling Bones

 

The Lord set me in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones… And as I was prophesying, there was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone.

—Ezekiel 37:1,7

Talk about bizarre! Perhaps, by the time Ezekiel had the vision of the valley of dry bones, he had experienced the Lord’s visions enough times to not completely freak out. Here he sat, among the exiles from Israel in Babylon, with a message from God and the hand of the Lord upon him. The Jews had been captive there for more than thirty years and, according to God’s timeline given to other prophets, they had forty more years left in their captivity.

The people around Ezekiel appeared as those dry bones—lifeless and ignorant of the God who was ordering their nation’s woes. Yet here, in the most forsaken place, God was giving Ezekiel a message of hope using this strange vision.

Ezekiel, the obedient prophet, did as God commanded. In response to the vision, Ezekiel preached to these dry, lifeless bones. Surprisingly, he heard the sound of the rattling skeletons and saw them come together and reconnect with flesh surrounding them.

Next, God commanded Ezekiel to preach to the wind and ask for breath to come again and revive those dead bones. In obedience, Ezekiel did as God asked. As he watched, Ezekiel saw a huge army of people and he heard them confessing that they were dry and without hope. God responded by bringing a message of hope to all of them, by promising that, with His Spirit upon them, they would live and go back to their own land!

What hope this must have brought the prophet and, as he recounted his vision, to the people! God had not forgotten them. In fact, He acted in their behalf to restore them to life.

Sometimes, when we look at our country in the midst of this pandemic and with the political and cultural unrest all around us, it must feel like we lie in a valley full of dry bones. Can God cause us to live again? What must we do to see that happen? Like Israel, we need to confess that we lie dead without hope and without obedience to the living God.

But, not only does our culture look dry, dead, and useless. Oftentimes, we also look at our churches and see that they carry on without the “life” of the Holy Spirit moving them and giving them health and strength to serve God. We ask, “Can these bones live again?” Once again, can we stand like a mighty army and with renewed energy serve Him? In Robert Coleman’s book on revival from the 1960’s, he writes:¹

Yet there is hope. Dry bones can live again. In other days of crises when catastrophe has threatened, men have turned unto the Lord and found in him deliverance and strength. In fact, our greatest spiritual awakenings have come during the darkest periods of church history. Perhaps again the peril of the age may bring us to our senses.

The church uses the term “revival” as “the return of something to its true nature and purpose.” Certainly, dry bones need to form skeletons, and skeletons need not only flesh and blood, but life breathed in, as God did when He created Adam. From Coleman again:²

In the Old Testament, the word revival comes from a root meaning “to live,” which originally conveyed the idea of “breathing,” inasmuch as breath is the expression of life in all animate beings.

Hence, the word to the prophet in Ezekiel 37:5 refers to this kind of reviving power:

“This is what the Sovereign Lord says to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life.”

Let us listen for the rattling of the bones. As it did at Pentecost, let us pray to see the wind of the Holy Spirit come into our own dry existence, into the life of our churches, and into our lifeless culture. Then, may the Holy Spirit’s power within us and our churches accomplish all that God wants to accomplish, to the glory of His Holy Name!

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1 Coleman, Robert E. Dry Bones Can Live Again. Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1969. Pp. 7-8.

2 Ibid. Pp. 11-12.