Vision of the Valley of Dry Bones

Mm.

So again, like with the Valley of Dry Bones, where death was there, and God changed death to life, even the salty seas where a lot of things can't dwell, you think of the Dead Sea, where nothing lives, that's gonna be turned to fresh water, and it's gonna be teeming with life.

So it's life all around, it's abundance all around, and it's, it's utopia.

That's a, that's a good way to look at it.

All right.

Furthermore, and again, we quoted from Joel, so I'm not going to go down into Joel there, but we see it also with the picture of the Valley of Dry Bones.

And again, we've been through this before, but you see the picture of the Spirit here.

The hand of the Lord was upon me, and he brought me out by his spirit, set me down in the middle of the valley, and I was full of bones, or it was full of bones.

And today, our first chapter, Ezekiel 37, fits very well with the hopeful restoration theme of the second half of Ezekiel.

It's often referred to as the Valley of Dry Bones.

This is the vision where Ezekiel sees all of these, well, bones and skulls and things like this slowly coming back to life.

This is one of my son's favorite stories because obviously the skulls, every little boy would love all the skulls and stuff.

Yeah, absolutely.

I think my takeaway from this chapter has got to be just God's power, His omnipotence, if you want to say it that way, that He can take something that is totally dead.

If you think a valley of dry bones, I mean, these are... long gone.

There is no human hope here, but he's able to breathe new life there.

[upbeat music] Today we open with a valley vision and a stick sign act.

Ezekiel's vision in the Valley of Dry Bones is probably his 20 minutes of fame.

This is what he's most known for.

In fact, I've heard probably half a dozen sermons preached on this using it to illustrate a variety of different things like God making dead people into a powerful army, or how people have the power to speak life into things, but lots of them have nothing to do with what the text is actually teaching here, and some of them are even biblically inaccurate.

Ezekiel reads the Daily Audio Bible for kids, and maybe you don't know that Ezekiel was named Ezekiel based on one of the passages from today's reading.

ezekiel chapter 37 has been hugely hugely meaningful to brian and i during the time of ezekiel coming into the world and ezekiel 37 is such a beautiful hopeful passage a prophecy of the valley of dry bones and to read something so visual these dry bones that are explained as very dry now If you're a meat eater or a carnivore like myself, you know that some bones on a plate, it's kind of gross looking, but it doesn't take long for time and air to dry these bones out.

So for the visual to be that they're very dry shows that these bones are as dead as a human being alive.

but what we really should take note of before we get to the Valley of Dry Bones is what takes place before this beautiful prophecy of hope and life having a rebirth and being rebirthed through the breath of God.

What I want us to recognize today that I think is very important is that we have talked about a repentant heart and turning to God and God cleaning us, cleansing us from all unrighteousness when we repent.

But what we must pay attention to here is the sequence of events that that transpire in today's reading.

But ultimately revival would be in the sense that we typically use it for would be the greater harvest and the greater things that God is doing in that respect, spiritually speaking.

I think that when I think of the term revival, one of the first biblical examples that comes to mind is Ezekiel in the Valley of Dry Bones.

Can these bones live? And when you think about the dry bones coming back to life, he prophesied.

Well, he was prophesying revival when he was talking to bones to come together.

He won't see the land of Judea again, though he does see it in a vision.

We get that toward the end with the vision of the temple, of course, probably one of the most well-known visions that we have in the book of Ezekiel or after the vision of the Valley of Dry Bones, which is in chapter 37.

There's a lot of visions in the book of Ezekiel, as a matter of fact.

I think that he receives more visions than even Isaiah and Jeremiah did.