The call of God is a blessing, but it isn’t always anything the world would recognize as a blessing. We see that in the lives of a number of people in the Bible, but perhaps in no one more than the prophet Ezekiel. He was a young Jewish priest dragged off to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar and his armies during the Babylonian conquest of the kingdom of Judah. He’d been trained for a position of spiritual leadership, and he clearly took that responsibility seriously. However, while he may have been fine with being a priest, it seems clear he didn’t want to be a prophet. He fought God and tried to rebel, but the Spirit of God overwhelmed him and drove him to proclaim the word of the Lord to his people.
Looking back, you can’t blame him; maybe he had some sense of what the prophetic ministry would cost him. None of God’s prophets had it easy, for most of them were charged with proclaiming the grief and wrath of God at the unfaithfulness of his people, but Ezekiel bore that far more heavily than most of them. As the Old Testament scholar Daniel Block writes, “While prophets were known often to act and speak erratically for rhetorical purposes, Ezekiel is in a class of his own. The concentration of so many bizarre features in one individual is without precedent: his muteness; lying bound and naked; digging holes in the walls of houses; emotional paralysis in the face of his wife’s death; ‘spiritual’ travels; images of strange creatures, of eyes, and of creeping things; hearing voices and the sounds of water; . . . and the list goes on. . . . What other prophets spoke of, Ezekiel suffers. . . . [He carries] in his body the oracles he proclaims and [redefines] the adage, ‘The medium is the message.’”
Chapter 37 is all of a piece with that. The Lord reaches down and abruptly pulls Ezekiel into a vision—a horrible vision. He’s set down in the middle of a valley he appears to know well, though he doesn’t name it, and sees the ground covered with dry bones, bleached white by the Mediterranean sun. Clearly, the valley has been the site of a vast human slaughter; to make matters worse, the bodies had been denied proper burial and left out for the buzzards. That was the sort of treatment given to the cursed, to traitors and false allies and those who broke their covenant oaths—such as faithless Israel, whom God had sent into exile for their evil deeds. The prophet is amazed at the vast number of bones, and astonished at how dry they are. There’s no life in them at all, and hasn’t been for a very long time.
As Ezekiel already knew, these bones do indeed represent the people of Israel. As we saw some weeks ago, they’re a dead nation; they’ve been wiped off the map, and by all the normal rules, they’ll never be seen or heard from again. There were many individuals alive, but as a people, they had no present and even less future. And then the Lord turned to his prophet and asked, “Son of man”—mortal, human being, Earthling—“can these bones live?” Well, are yougoing to tell the Lord of the universe no? And yet, no other answer is conceivable. So Ezekiel does the reasonable thing: he ducks the question. “Lord, only you can answer that one.”
God doesn’t let him get away with it; if Ezekiel won’t give an answer, he will become the answer. “Prophesy to the bones,” the Lord commands—just as if dry bones could hear and understand. “Tell them, ‘Listen to the word of the Lord. The Lord God declares, “Look! I will put breath into you and bring you back to life. I will reconnect you with tendons and ligaments, I will restore your flesh, and I will cover you with skin; I will put breath into you and bring you back to life. Then you will know that I am the Lord.”’” Ezekiel does as he’s told, and the response is so rapid and so strong that while he’s still speaking, the bones rearrange themselves—so quickly that they knock against each other on the way—and bodies regrow around them.
And yet, despite God’s promise, they’re still dead. In fact, verse 9—the NIV softens this a bit—refers to them as “slain corpses,” the dead fallen in some enormous battle. The Lord again commands Ezekiel to prophesy, and at this point we need to step back for just a moment. In Hebrew, “breath,” “spirit,” and “wind” are all the same word, ruaḥ. The Spirit of the Lord, the breath God promises to restore to the bones, the four winds from which the breath is to come, are all the same word. This wordplay running through this passage emphasizes the point that all life is from God, and that he does what he will. For him, to carry off Ezekiel in a vision and bring human beings back to life when there’s nothing left of them but dead, dry bones is as simple as making the wind blow.
And so Ezekiel prophesies, and so the Lord does, breathing the breath of life—breathing the spirit of life—into this vast field of the dead just as he did into the first human being back in Genesis 2. Then beginning in verse 11, God gives his prophet the interpretation of his vision. The bones represent the entire nation of Israel—not just the southern part, the kingdom of Judah, recently conquered by the Babylonians, but also the northern part, which Assyria had conquered and hauled into exile over 130 years before. They had been conquered, everything that had made them a nation among the nations was gone, and they had no hope. A house had fallen on them, and they were really most sincerely dead; as Miracle Max would put it, there was nothing left to do but go through their clothes and look for loose change. They were in despair, feeling themselves even beyond God’s power to save them.
To this, the Lord says, “No. I will raise you from your graves, and I will bring you back to the land of Israel. I will fill you with my Spirit and you will come to life. You will stand on your own ground, and you will know that I am the Lord. I have spoken, and I will do it.” And he does, and he did. He brought in the Persians to conquer Babylon, and inspired their king to send the people of Israel back to their homeland; and then, at the right time, he sent his Son, Jesus Christ, to fill them with his Spirit and bring them fully to life. When Jesus came, their leaders forgot all the lessons of their history and treated him just like the prophets whom God had sent them throughout the years before—but they couldn’t overcome him. In fact, their efforts to destroy him only fulfilled his plan to save the whole world.
Jesus allowed his own people to kill him. Though he was perfectly innocent, he let them execute him as the worst of criminals, and by his death, he fulfilled the sentence due to all of us for all our sin. And then he proved that the Jewish leaders hadn’t been reading Ezekiel, because on the third day, he got up from the dead, fully alive again. He spent some time preparing his disciples, and then he left, returning in the body to the throne room of God. In his place, he sent his Holy Spirit to fill all of his people with his life and power—to make us his living body on this planet. With his Spirit, he gave us his ministry: the ministry of revival.