DEATH DEFEATED

Ezekiel 37 serves as a message of hope and restoration, symbolically through God bringing life and unity out of death and desolation.  The prophet is given a vision where he is placed into a valley filled with dry bones and is asked by God if the dry bones can live.  While today we would probably view such a sight, even in a dream (think nightmare) to be gruesome, in the days of Ezekiel, it would be an image people understood, as empires clashed regularly in battle with the resulting dead left at the scene for the animals and birds to consume.  God instructs the prophet to prophesy to the bones, resulting in resurrection as the bodies come together, overcoming death.  This vivid description symbolizes the redemption of the divided nation from its current exile/captivity into a future revitalized and unified people, even though the time for that to completely happen might take many centuries.  But the Israelites understood, more than most, that God’s timing is not like that of humans and that He always keeps His promises.  

There are many takeaways from Ezekiel’s dry-bone vision but the one most personal to us as Christ-followers, at least in the opinion of yours truly, is that death has no hold on us.  And for the reader who may not yet be a Christ-follower, the dry bones of your life and death itself can be defeated by the redemptive nature of Christ.  As an example, He took a filthy wretch like me, a life full of dry bones, and wrapped it up in righteousness.  Because of that redemption, I will die a physical death (if Christ doesn’t return before then) but not a Spiritual one.  Death is nothing but a stone that my Savior rolled away.  While Israel’s unification is taking centuries to complete and seems like forever to us, in God’s timing, that is a blip.  Regardless, I will spend eternity with Him, which is far longer than that.  All of us Christ-followers are living examples of the redemption of dry bones coming alive.