Breathing new life...
If you’re one of the people who receive my monthly newsletter, you’ll have read the thoughts I shared earlier this week from a few verses in Ezekiel chapter 36. (If you haven’t read it yet, you can click on the picture here on the right to enlarge it, or click here to download it in PDF format.)
This morning I was reading further in Ezekiel chapter 37 - quite possibly one of the best known chapters in that Old Testament book. It’s the part where the prophet has a vision of a valley of dry bones, and I was struck today by the similarity of its message of hope.
In my letter, I’d alluded to the fact that there are some believers who feel that they’ve become cold of heart and numb of spirit, and who doubt that things can ever really change again. In chapter 37 verse 3, God asks Ezekiel, “Can these bones live again?” And because the prophet has noticed them to be “very dry,” he answers, “God, only you know if that is possible.”
In the next few verses, the words breath or spirit are repeated nine times. I can’t help wondering how the Bible translators decided when to translate it as “breath” and when to translate it as “spirit”, because it is the same Hebrew word, ru’ach, that is used for both. In fact, the same word is used a tenth time in those verses and translated as wind. In other parts of the Old Testament, the same Hebrew word is translated as life.
What’s clear from this short passage is that it is the Word of God (vs 4) and the Spirit of God (vs 5ff) that bring new life, even to people who feel that they have been spiritually dead or dry for a long time. If we spend time reading the Bible, the Word of God, and we allow the Holy Spirit to bring that Word alive to us, new spiritual life will soon begin to flow again. No one is too dry, too cold or too dead from God’s perspective; no one is beyond the reach of the Spirit’s life-giving power. And if whole groups or congregations of people allow God to breathe on them, they too can rise up like the “vast army” of verse 10.
I couldn’t help noticing that the dead bones are described in verse 9 as the slain (from the Hebrew word hǎrêgáh - to be murdered or destroyed with deadly intent.) They hadn’t simply dried up by their own doing or neglect (although that was probably the largest reason for it) but had also suffered violence. Often what begins a person’s slide away from spiritual life and closeness to God is a violent enemy attack in the form of difficult or tragic circumstances. These people in the vision actually say in vs 11, “Our hope is gone; we are cut off.”
But God’s restoring, renewing and reviving are so dramatic that He actually compares it (vs 12 - 13) to opening up graves and bringing the dead back to life again. What an amazing picture of hope. No matter how dead or dry someone feels spiritually, they can still come back to God and have new life breathed into them. What a God of grace!
