1. 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, 2. 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. 3. And He said unto me, Son of man, can
these bones live? And I answered, O Lord God, Thou knowest. 4.
Again He said unto me, Prophesy upon these bones, and say unto
them, O ye dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. 5. Thus saith the
Lord God unto these bones; Behold, I will cause breath to enter
into you, and ye shall live: 6. And I will lay sinews upon you, and
will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put
breath in you, and ye shall live; and ye shall know that I _am_ the
Lord. 7. 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. 8. 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. 9. 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. 10. So I prophesied as He
commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and
stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army. 11. 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. 12. Therefore prophesy and say unto them,
Thus saith the Lord God; Behold, O My people, I will open your
graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, and bring you
into the land of Israel. 13. And ye shall know that I am the Lord,
when I have opened your graves, O My people, and brought you up out
of your graves. 14. 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 xxxvii. 1-14.
This great vision apparently took its form from a despairing saying,
which had become a proverb among the exiles, 'Our bones are dried up,
and our hope is lost: we are clean cut off' (v. 11). Ezekiel lays hold
of the metaphor, which had been taken to express the hopeless
destruction of Israel's national existence, and even from it wrings a
message of hope. Faith has the prerogative of seeing possibilities of
life in what looks to sense hopeless death. We may look at the vision
from three points of view, considering its bearing on Israel, on the
world, and on the resurrection of the body.
I. The saying, already referred to, puts the hopelessness of the mass of
the exiles in a forcible fashion. The only sense in which living men
could say that their bones were dried up, and they cut off, is a
figurative one, and obviously it is the national existence which they
regarded as irretrievably ended. The saying gives us a glimpse into the
despair which had settled down on the exiles, and against which Ezekiel
had to contend, as he had also to contend against its apparently
opposite and yet kindred feeling of presumptuous, misplaced hope. We
observe that he begins by accepting fully the facts which bred despair,
and even accentuating them. The true prophet never makes light of the
miseries of which he knows the cure, and does not try to comfort by
minimising the gravity of the evil. The bones _are_ very many, and they
_are_ very dry. As far as outward resources are concerned, despair was
rational, and hope as absurd as it would have been to expect that men,
dead so long that their bones had been bleached by years of exposure to
the weather, should live again.
But while Ezekiel saw the facts of Israel's powerlessness as plainly as
the most despondent, he did not therefore despair. The question which
rose in his mind was God's question, and the very raising it let a gleam
of hope in. So he answered with that noble utterance of faith and
submission, 'O Lord God, Thou knowest.' 'With God all things are
possible.' Presumption would have said 'Yes'; Unbelief would have said
'No'; Faith says, 'Thou knowest.'
The grand description of the process of resurrection follows the analogy
of the order in the creation of man, giving, first, the shaping of the
body, and afterwards the breathing into it of the breath which is life.
Both stages are wholly God's work. The prophet's part was to prophesy to
the bones first; and his word, in a sense, brought about the effect
which it foretold, since his ministry was the most potent means of
rekindling dying hopes, and bringing the _disjecta membra_ of the nation
together again. The vivid and gigantic imagination of the prophet gives
a picture of the rushing together of the bones, which has no superior in
any literature. He hears a noise, and sees a 'shaking' (by which is
meant the motion of the bones to each other, rather than an
'earthquake,' as the Revised Version has it, which inserts a quite
irrelevant detail), and the result of all is that the skeletons are
complete. Then follows the gradual clothing with flesh. There they lie,
a host of corpses.
The second stage is the quickening of these bodies with life, and here
again Ezekiel, as God's messenger, has power to bring about what he
announces; for, at his command, the breath, or wind, or spirit, comes,
and the stiff corpses spring to their feet, a mighty army. The
explanation in the last verses of the text somewhat departs from the
tenor of the vision by speaking of Israel as buried, but keeps to its
substance, and point the despairing exiles to God as the source of
national resurrection. But we must not force deeper meaning on Ezekiel's
words than they properly bear. The spirit promised in them is simply the
source of life,--literally, of physical life; metaphorically, of
national life. However that national restoration was connected with
holiness, that does not enter into the prophet's vision. Israel's
restoration to its land is all that Ezekiel meant by it. True, that
restoration was to lead to clearer recognition by Israel of the name of
Jehovah, and of all that it implied in him and demanded from them. But
the proper scope of the vision is to assure despairing Israelites that
God would quicken the apparently slain national life, and replace them
in the land.
II. We may extend the application of the vision to the condition of
humanity and the divine intervention which communicates life to a dead
world, but must remember that no such meaning was in Ezekiel's thoughts.
The valley full of dry bones is but too correct a description of the
aspect which a world 'dead in trespasses and sins' bears, when seen from
the mountain-top by pure and heavenly eyes. The activities of godless
lives mask the real spiritual death, which is the condition of every
soul that is separate from God. Galvanised corpses may have muscular
movements, but they are dead, notwithstanding their twitching. They that
live without God are dead while they live.
Again, we may learn from the vision the preparation needful for the
prophet, who is to be the instrument of imparting divine life to a dead
world. The sorrowful sense of the widespread deadness must enter into a
man's spirit, and be ever present to him, in order to fit him for his
work. A dead world is not to be quickened on easy terms. We must see
mankind in some measure as God sees them if we are to do God's work
among them. So-called Christian teachers, who do not believe that the
race is dead in sin, or who, believing it, do not feel the tragedy of
the fact, and the power lodged in their hands to bring the true life,
may prophesy to the dry bones for ever, and there will be no shaking
among them.
The great work of the gospel is to communicate divine life. The details
of the process in the vision are not applicable in this respect. As we
have pointed out, they are shaped after the pattern of the creation of
Adam, but the essential point is that what the world needs is the
impartation from God of His Spirit. We know more than Ezekiel did as to
the way by which that Spirit is given to men, and as to the kind of life
which it imparts, and as to the connection between that life and
holiness. It is a diviner voice than Ezekiel's which speaks to us in the
name of God, and says to us with deeper meaning than the prophet of the
Exile dreamed of, 'I will put my Spirit in you, and ye shall live.'
But we may note that it is possible to have the outward form of a living
body, and yet to have no life. Churches and individuals may be perfectly
organised and perfectly dead. Creeds may be articulated most correctly,
every bone in its place, and yet have no vitality in them. Forms of
worship may be punctiliously proper, and have no breath of life in them.
Religion must have a body, but often the body is not so much the organ
as the sepulchre of the spirit. We have to take heed that the externals
do not kill the inward life.
Again, we note that this great act of life-giving is God's revelation of
His name,--that is, of His character so far as men can know it. 'Ye
shall know that I am the Lord' (vs. 13, 14). God makes Himself known in
His divinest glory when He quickens dead souls. The world may learn what
He is therefrom, but they who have experienced the change, and have, as
it were, been raised from the grave to new life, have personal
experience of His power and faithfulness so sure and sweet that
henceforward they cannot doubt Him nor forget His grace.
III. As to the bearing of the vision on the doctrine of the resurrection
little need be said. It does not necessarily presuppose the people's
acquaintance with that doctrine, for it would be quite conceivable that
the vision had revealed to the prophet the thought of a resurrection,
which had not been in his beliefs before. The vision is so entirely
figurative, that it cannot be employed as evidence that the idea of the
resurrection of the dead was part of the Jewish beliefs at this date. It
does, however, seem most natural to suppose that the exiles were
familiar with the idea, though the vision cannot be taken as a
revelation of a literal resurrection of dead men. For clear expectations
of such a resurrection we must turn to such scriptures as Daniel xii. 2,
13.