He Asked the Prophet Whether the Bones Could Live and Waited for an Answer

The thing about dry is that it stops feeling like a season.

For the first year a man tells himself it is a stretch. Everybody has stretches. He has heard sermons about the desert and he assumes he is in one and that it will end the way the sermons say it ends.

By year four it has stopped being a stretch and started being a description. This is what he is like now. This is what his prayer life is. This is how church feels to him, which is to say it feels like a room he is standing in.

And the honest thing that has happened, which he would only say to one person on earth if he said it at all, is that he has quietly stopped expecting it to change. Not in anger. He is not shaking his fist at anybody. He has just done the arithmetic on four years, and adjusted, the way you adjust to a bad knee.

There is a chapter written for men in exactly that position, and God opens it with a question.

He makes him walk around in it first

The passage does not open with the promise. It opens with a survey.

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)

This is the King James Version. Caused me to pass by them round about. He is walked through it. He is made to look at the whole field, at close range, before anything is said about what is possible.

Very many. Very dry. Both words are doubled for a reason. It is not a small problem and it is not a recent one. Dry bones are old. Whatever happened here happened a long time ago.

God does not minimize the field. He gives the man a tour of it. That alone is worth something to a person who has spent four years being told his dryness is smaller than it is.

You are not exaggerating and you have not been asked to describe this as less than it is. Ezekiel 37 has God walking a man through the whole field and calling it very dry Himself, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than a better attitude who makes an accurate look at the worst of it survivable.

The question, and the answer that is not the obvious one

Then He asks.

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

Can these bones live?

There are two obvious answers and the prophet gives neither one. He does not say yes, which would be religious noise from a man standing in a field of skeletons. He does not say no, which is what the evidence in front of him supports.

O Lord GOD, thou knowest.

That is not a dodge. It is the most honest sentence available to him, and it is the sentence of a man who will not manufacture a faith he does not have and will not close the door either.

If you have been dry for years and somebody asks you whether it can come back, that answer is available to you and it is in the Bible with no correction attached to it.

You have permission to answer honestly and you were never required to produce a certainty you do not have. Ezekiel 37:3 preserves thou knowest as the prophet's reply and nothing in the chapter rebukes it, and it is His Spirit who makes an honest three words a place where God keeps talking.

Then God quotes the people He is talking about

Here is the part that identifies exactly who this chapter is for, and God says it Himself.

Then he said unto me, Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel: behold, they say, Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost: we are cut off for our parts. (Ezekiel 37:11)

Our hope is lost: we are cut off.

That is not the enemy's line. That is what His own people were saying, and He quotes it accurately, and the vision He gives is the answer to that sentence rather than a rebuke of it.

They had said hope was gone. He does not argue with how it feels. He shows them a field and then He shows them what He does to fields.

You are the person that vision was given for and you were the one whose sentence He quoted before He answered it. Ezekiel 37:11 has God repeat our hope is lost out of His own people's mouths, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than a recovered optimism who makes the answer to that sentence land in a man.

And if the dryness has gone further than dryness, if it has gone as far as not wanting to be here, that is not a thing to sit alone with. A doctor, a counselor, somebody you trust who will pick up the phone. In the United States the 988 crisis line answers day and night. Nobody has to hold that by himself.

It happens in two stages and the first one is not enough

The vision is precise about the order, and the order is where most people misread it.

So I prophesied as I was commanded: and as I prophesied, there was a noise, and behold a shaking, and the bones came together, bone to his bone. And when I beheld, lo, the sinews and the flesh came up upon them, and the skin covered them above: but there was no breath in them. (Ezekiel 37:7-8)

Bones assemble. Tendons. Flesh. Skin. A whole valley of complete bodies.

But there was no breath in them.

That is stage one and it is a full reconstruction and it is still not alive. Which is an unnervingly good description of a man who has all the parts. He has the doctrine and the attendance and the vocabulary and the correct opinions, and the assembly is complete, and there is no breath in it.

Then the second command comes, and it is a different word aimed at a different thing.

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)

And the chapter says plainly whose breath it is:

And shall put my spirit in you, and ye shall live, and I shall place you in your own land: then shall ye know that I the LORD have spoken it, and performed it, saith the LORD. (Ezekiel 37:14)

My spirit. Not their effort at stage two. The same thing He had already promised a chapter earlier: I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes (Ezekiel 36:27).

You have His Spirit named as the one who does the second stage and you were never going to assemble your way into it. Ezekiel 37:14 says I shall put my spirit in you, and ye shall live, and it is that same Spirit rather than a completed set of parts who is the difference between a body and a man.