Today’s devotional reading offered another picture, that of the prophet Ezekiel overlooking a valley of bones, old dead, not newly dead. He must have felt great dismay for he did not have an answer for the question God asked.
And he said to me, “Son of man, can these bones live?” And I answered, “O Lord GOD, you know.” (Ezekiel 37:3)Hundreds of years later, Jesus came, was killed and buried, then rose from the dead. Because of Him, I know that my friend will rise again. He believed in this One who gives eternal life and in the promises that He gave. Yet I am also thinking of those bones covered in flesh who are walking about with no faith in Christ and no hope for eternity. I pray for them, yet sometimes despair as some have been wandering without Jesus for many years. Can these bones live again?
Sometimes I’ve thought that if they just heard the gospel, or if they just had someone give them a good testimony, or if they just had the trials of life become more than they can handle by themselves, maybe then they would turn to God and to the Savior, Jesus Christ.
All of my ideas involve doing something, yet my reading today says that it is much easier to do something than to trust God. It is much easier to go ahead with what we think is His will than it is to actually wait on Him and find it out for certain. It is much easier to get in and do something than wait on God when He is silent and does not tell us to do anything.
Am I positive that God will do what I cannot do? Do I think some souls are beyond His reach? The reading startles me by saying that my degree of panic over the impossibility of God being at work in the lives of others is directly related to my own spiritual experience. It asks if God has been working in me.
God speaks again to Ezekiel a few verses later. He says, “Behold, I will open your graves and raise you from your graves, O my people. And I will bring you into the land of Israel” (Ezekiel 37:12).
The author of today’s reading reminds me that when God wants to show me what human nature is like apart from Himself, He has always first shown it to me in myself. He opens my ‘grave’ as it were, and reveals the spiritual deadness of my bones. Whenever the Holy Spirit shows me what I am like apart from the grace of God, I am deeply aware that there is no sinner who is as bad in real life as I am in possibility. When God opens my ‘grave’ to my own lack of life, then I can say as Paul said, “For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh . . .” (Romans 7:18)
God’s Spirit continually reveals what human nature is like apart from His grace. We are all dead bones without Jesus. My friend would not be with Him now, apart from grace. I would not know Him now, apart from grace. When I look at those who are without light and hope and then compare them to my own deadness apart from Jesus, then I am filled with hope. Ezekiel didn’t know that God can cover dead bones with living flesh and give eternal life to lost, dead souls, but I know it. He did this for me.
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Father, when I intercede for those who are in darkness and without life, may You continually remind me that because You saved me, You can save anyone. I have no need for panic or despair. While I do not like seeing what I would be like without Your Son, my hope is in Him alone, not in what I do. For that, I then have hope in what You can do in the lives of others. New life does not depend on what they do either. This is Your arena, Your realm. With You, all things are possible.Today, I also pray for the living, the relatives of my friend. As they mourn his passing, may You assure them beyond all doubt that this man is now more alive than any who remain, and that he will be that way forever.
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