The bones stand up
Breath enters the slain
Once, in the deep of the wilderness, God set Ezekiel in a valley of dry bones and asked the cruel-seeming question: can these bones live? And Ezekiel, who could not say yes to the evidence and dared not say no to the LORD, handed it back: Lord, you know. This is the day the answer comes. God tells him to prophesy, and as the words leave his mouth there is a sound, a rattling, and across the whole valley bone finds bone. Sinew threads them, flesh climbs over them, skin draws shut. And yet they are not alive; they lie there, whole and still, bodies without breath, which is somehow worse than scattered bone. So God sends the prophet to call the breath itself from the four winds, and the breath comes into them, and they live, and stand up on their feet, an exceedingly great army. Look at the distance covered. From very many and very dry to a host standing upright and breathing. The deadest valley the prophet could be shown does not get tidied or improved. It is raised. God did not answer the question with an argument. He answered it with resurrection.
“The breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up on their feet, an exceedingly great army.”
— Ezekiel, in the valley — Ezekiel 37:10 (WEB)
“I will put my Spirit in you, and you shall live, and I will place you in your own land.”
This is the turn at its most dramatic, disorientation answered by resurrection. The valley where everything looked dead is not merely eased; it is raised. The phase asks you to let the breath come where you had only learned to grieve, and to receive as God's gift the life you could neither produce nor, as it turns out, rule out.
The dry bones you once handed back to God with Lord, you know, this is His answer over them. You refused the hollow yes, dared not say the final no, and handed the verdict back. The dried-up calling, the relationship gone to powder, the faith you feared was finished — you looked honestly, refused the hollow yes, and handed the verdict back: Lord, you know. This is the payoff of that honesty. The God to whom you handed the impossible question is the God who breathes on dust until it stands.
He does not specialize in improving dying things; He specializes in raising dead ones. Optimism says the bones were not really so dry; faith admits they were bone, and waits for the breath anyway. The breath came. It always was His to send and never yours to manufacture, and that is precisely why it could come at all — resurrection is the craft of God, not the achievement of the determined. What you gave up for dead is not beyond Him. The breath can still come, and the dead stand up alive. The honest no you refused to speak was the right restraint, because He had a yes you could not have seen.
The Church that surveys itself and sees only a valley of bones, life gone, hope gone to powder, nothing left but skeleton, is exactly the ground God loves to raise. Across history He has answered can these bones live not with an argument but with resurrection, the rattling, the standing, the exceedingly great army on its feet. The Spirit who raised a slaughtered valley can do the same to whole movements and traditions counted gone. Western and global Christianity, honest enough to admit the bones are truly dry, need not force a hollow yes or settle for tidying what is dying. Resurrection is the craft of God, not the achievement of the determined. The breath He sends can stand a dead Church on its feet before a watching world.
Everything that can dry up does; hope itself goes to powder, and the valley fills with bone. But the breath of God is not subject to the death it stands over. When all that can die has died and been shaken away, what cannot be shaken is the living Spirit who raises what no will of yours could revive.
- What did I once hand back to God as too dead to live, saying only Lord, you know?
- Do I still believe He raises dead things, or have I quietly settled for improving them?
- Where am I waiting for a breath only He can send, and refusing to call it finished?
Lord GOD, once I stood over dry bones and could only say that You knew. Here is Your answer: You breathe, and the dead stand up. Send Your breath into what I gave up for lost. Raise what I could never revive, until it stands on its feet alive. Amen.