He Asked Him If They Could Live

God takes him out into the middle of it and walks him around.

That is the detail I want you to hold before anything else. Ezekiel 37 does not begin with a promise. It begins with a tour.

The hand of the LORD was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the LORD, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones, And caused me to pass by them round about: and, behold, there were very many in the open valley; and, lo, they were very dry.Ezekiel 37:1-2, King James Version

Caused me to pass by them round about. He is made to walk the whole floor of it. And the two things the text stops to tell us are the two things a person in that valley would notice: there are very many, and they are very dry.

Very dry means old. It means this did not happen last week. Bones go dry over years in the open, and by the time they are dry there is no one left who remembers the day it happened.

Then God asks him a question.

And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord GOD, thou knowest.Ezekiel 37:3, King James Version

Ezekiel does not say yes. Look at it again. A prophet, standing in front of God Himself, asked a direct question, and he will not say yes and he will not say no. He says thou knowest.

I have heard that read as a dodge. It is not a dodge. It is the only honest sentence available to a man standing in a field of dry bones, and God does not correct him for it, which tells you something about what God is actually asking for from a person looking at a dead thing.

Ezekiel is writing this in Babylon. He was deported out of Jerusalem with the first wave, he is living by the river Chebar with the other exiles, and the country he came from is finished. When he asks who the bones are, God tells him plainly in verse eleven: these bones are the whole house of Israel: behold, they say, Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost. The valley is a picture of a sentence a whole nation was saying out loud about itself.

There were two prophecies, not one

Here is the thing that changed how I read this chapter, and once you see it you will not unsee it.

God tells him to prophesy to the bones, and he does, and there is a noise and a shaking, and the bones come together, bone to his bone. Sinews come up on them. Flesh comes up. Skin covers them over.

And then the text says something that stops you dead.

and the skin covered them above: but there was no breath in them.Ezekiel 37:8, King James Version

Everything is assembled. Every part is in the right place. It looks, from any distance at all, like a valley of people. And there is no life in it.

You are not the one who has to decide whether this can live. Ezekiel 37:3 puts that question in God's mouth and leaves thou knowest in the prophet's, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps that division of labor from collapsing back onto your shoulders at two in the morning.

I want to stay in verse eight, because I think a great many people are standing in verse eight and have been told they are in verse ten.

Verse eight is the stage where the shape is right and the life is not there yet. The marriage where both people are polite and nothing is alive. The faith that still has all its parts, church on Sunday, the right words, the shape of a believing life, and no breath in it. The son who came home and sits at the table and is not there. Assembled. Correct. Silent.

You have been standing in the honest middle of this chapter, and the chapter has a second half written specifically for people who got that far and stopped. Ezekiel 37:9 exists because verse eight was not the end, and the same Spirit who was the subject of that second prophecy is the one keeping the page turning in your house tonight.

Because God does not say well, that did not work. He tells Ezekiel to prophesy a second time, and this time not to the bones. To the wind.

Then said he unto me, Prophesy unto the wind, prophesy, son of man, and say to the wind, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.Ezekiel 37:9, King James Version

The word the passage uses for that breath is the same word it uses for the wind and for the Spirit of God, right through the chapter. That is not a puzzle to be solved. It is simply how the sentence holds all three together, and the passage is standing in the middle of the three deliberately.

You were never asked to supply the breath, and no honest reading of this chapter puts that job on a person. Ezekiel 37:10 says the breath came into them, arriving from outside, and the same Spirit is the one who came and not the prophet who spoke.

And then the last line of the passage, which is the one I want you carrying out of here.

and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army.Ezekiel 37:10, King James Version

Not a crowd. An army. Something that came out of that valley with a purpose attached to it. What was very many and very dry stood up organized.

You are looking at something God called an army before it ever stood up, and He said it in the same chapter where He called the same valley very dry. Ezekiel 37:2 and 37:10 describe one place, and it is the same Spirit who holds both descriptions at once without pretending the first one away.