Day 251 (Ezekiel 37-39) - Year 8

Tara-Leigh Cobble (0:01)

Hey Bible Readers, I'm Tara-Leigh Cobble, and I'm your host for The Bible Recap.

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. So today we're going to make sure we keep our eyes on the text and the context to see what God is actually communicating to us about himself and his plan. Ezekiel has a vision of a bunch of dry bones in a valley. As far as the eye can see, there's nothing but femurs and fibulas. Then, through Ezekiel, God commands the bones to live. This is God's command, not Ezekiel's. We can hear it in verses 4-6 where God says, Prophecy over these bones, and say to them, O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God to these bones, Behold, I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live, and I will lay sinews upon you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live, and you shall know that I am the Lord.

So we can see that God is the one who issued the command, and God is the one who breathed life into them. And yes, of course, we know God could have done it without Ezekiel. God doesn't need Ezekiel for this, but he loves him and he's using him, so Ezekiel gets the joy of being part of God's process in this vision.

God says this vision represents the twelve tribes, the people of both Judah and Israel. He will give them new life and bring them back to their land. Here are three things I find interesting about this story. First, it connects us back to God's original creation of mankind in the Garden of Eden. Back in Genesis 2, God created Adam out of the dust of the ground and breathed life into him too. God is recreating things here.

Second, the word used for breath here is the Hebrew word ruach, which is also translated more often as spirit. And third, did you notice that God doesn't command the bodies to breathe? That seems like it would make more sense, right? Instead, he commands the breath to enter the bodies. I think there's some spiritual symbolism for us in there somewhere.

Then God tells Ezekiel to perform a sign act. Here's the plan. He'll take a stick and write Judah and Company on it to represent the Southern Kingdom. Then he'll write Joseph and Ephraim and Company on another stick representing the Northern Kingdom. Then he'll tie the sticks together like a law firm merger, except it'll actually be the restoring of all that has been broken relationally in the 350 years since the Kingdom divided. This is an especially big deal, because it's been 150 years since the Northern Kingdom was overthrown by the Assyrians. So it's possible that the newly exiled people of the Southern Kingdom think that the Northern Kingdom has been destroyed entirely. But this sign act lets them know that God has preserved a remnant from the Northern tribes too. They get their own stick, and he'll bring them all back to their land and set one shepherd over them, a king from the line of David. And the remnant of Israel will be restored, reunited and repented because God himself will be among them. He will sanctify them, and he will live out his eternal covenant of peace with them.

In Chapter 38, we meet a king named Gog. I'm going to pronounce his name Gog, so there's no mistaking whether I'm saying Gog or God. So, Gog rules a nation named Magog, except no one knows who he is or where this is. And even the details Ezekiel gives us about him make things more uncertain. For instance, his army is comprised of people from all over the place, so that doesn't help us narrow down his location. What do we make of this mysterious king and kingdom?

Lots of commentators think Ezekiel has invented this king as an amalgam of all the powerful nations that have opposed God's people throughout history. Ezekiel even uses a lot of the same imagery he used earlier with Tyra in Egypt. So Gog seems to be an archetype that represents God's enemies. For that reason, and the fact that God twice tells us that this will happen in the latter days, most commentators think this is a yet to be fulfilled prophecy about the end times.