Dem bones.

Ezekiel 37.1-10.

You’re likely thinking, “How is an Ezekiel passage a scripture for advent? Well, the passage is about resurrection, and resurrection takes place at the second coming of Christ Jesus. Ezekiel is the first time the LORD explicitly shows a resurrection to someone—in the Valley of Dry Bones Story.

The title of this article comes from the gospel song, “Dem Bones.” Most people have no idea it’s a spiritual, ’cause all they know is, “Ankle bone connected to the shin bone, shin bone connected to the knee bone…” They think it’s about anatomy. Or skeletons. Well anyway.

The point of this passage actually isn’t the literal resurrection of the dead. It’s the LORD trying to bring hope to ancient Israel. At this point in history, Israel had been conquered by Nabú-kudúrri-usúr 2 of the neo-Babylonian Empire (KJV “Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon”), and deported to Tel Aviv, Iraq. (Tel Aviv, Israel is named after Ezekiel’s village.) Ezekiel and his family had been part of the first deportation, a decade before that destruction, so he wasn’t around to witness the temple get destroyed. He heard about it after the fact, from survivors.

Nabú had installed Mattaniah ben Joash—whom Nabú renamed Zedekiah—to rule Jerusalem as his puppet king. Zedekiah proved insubordinate, and after 12 years Nabú had enough, and personally overthrew him. He invaded, besieged, and destroyed Jerusalem. His soldiers burnt the temple down. (The first temple was made of gold-plated cedar, which made it far easier to destroy than the stone temple the Romans knocked over.)

Word got back to Tel Aviv. Up to that point, the refugees had hoped some day they’d go home. Didn’t know when; just knew Jerusalem was waiting for them. Now it wasn’t. No more homeland. No more city. No more daily worship for the LORD, so for priests like Ezekiel, no job to return to. They were gonna die in Iraq.

If you’re an American who’s old enough to remember when the World Trade Center was destroyed in 2001, the destruction of the temple felt way worse. For Israelis it was a blow to both their patriotism and their religion. It didn’t only feel like their country was destroyed, but like they were now utterly cut off from the LORD. It felt like being damned.

So, through Ezekiel, God sent ’em a message of hope.

Ezekiel 37.1-10 KWL

1The LORD’s hand took me,

and by the LORD’s Spirit he brought me out:

2God put me in a valley full of bones.

He made me walk round and round them.

“Look how very many, all over the surface of the valley!

Look, how very dry!”

3God told me, “Son of Adam.

Can these bones live?”

I said, “Master LORD, only you know.”

4God told me, “Prophesy over these bones.

Tell these dry bones, ‘Listen to the LORD’s word.’ ”

5My Master LORD tells these bones, “Look!

I put a spirit in you. Live.

6I put sinews on you. I grow muscle on you.

I encase you in skin. I give you the Spirit.

Live. Know I’m the LORD.”

7I prophesied as instructed.

At the sound of my prophecy, look:

Shaking, and bone came together with bone.

8I saw—look!—sinews and flesh grew on them.

Skin encased them.

But there was no Spirit in them.

9God told me, “Prophesy to the Spirit.

Prophesy, son of Adam!

Tell the Spirit this: ‘My Master LORD says this.

Spirit, come from the four winds!

Blow into these who were killed.

They will live.”

10I prophesied as instructed.

The Spirit came into them. They live!

They stand on their feet—a very, very great army.

It’s not actually about our resurrection.

At about this point, Christians stop reading Ezekiel and start preaching about how this passage foretells our resurrection from the dead. Because we will rise from the dead at Jesus’s second coming. We’ll be dry bones and dust—or ashes, if we’ve been cremated or died in a fire. But God will reassemble us and we’ll live forever.

And while that’s true, Ezekiel is actually not about us. It’s about the restoration of ancient Israel, which was fulfilled when Zerubabel ben Šealtiel brought exiles back to Jerusalem to reestablish it and rebuild the temple.

As you can tell from the next batch of verses. Sometimes Christian preachers will actually read ’em to their audiences. But then they suffer a freakish bout of amnesia: They read it, then forget it, and still interpret the passage to suit themselves. You remember how James wrote about a person who looks at his reflection, then immediately forgets it? Jm 1.22-25 You’d think James was using hyperbole, but that’s precisely how some preachers behave with the bible. They read it, then it blinks out of their brains, and they preach their own agenda.

Now let’s read it and actually look at it.

Ezekiel 37.11-14 KWL

11God told me, “Son of Adam,

these bones are the whole house of Israel.

Look, they say, ‘Our bones are dry.

Our hope is dead. We’re cut off.’

12So prophesy! Tell them this:

‘My Master LORD says this.’

Look, I’m opening your tombs.

I’m taking you out of your tombs, my people.

I bring you to the very ground of Israel.

13You’ll know I’m the LORD when I open your tombs.

When I bring you out of your tombs, my people,

14I’ll put my Spirit in you. Live.

I’ll put you on the ground, and you’ll know I’m the LORD.

I said it; I’ll do it,” promises the LORD.

The Jews were calling themselves dead. God reminded them he raises the dead.

Losing Jerusalem and the temple felt like the end of the world. Obviously it wasn’t. And the real end of the world is actually the beginning of the next world, so God’s followers still have no reason to despair. That is, unless we’ve only put our hope in earthly things, like homelands, temples, wealth, heritage, good reputation, family, jobs, anything with an expiration date. Our hope needs to be in God alone. ’Cause everything ends. But God raises the dead.

And yeah, it took a few decades after Ezekiel’s prophecy, but God did let his people return to Jerusalem and rebuild the temple. You should know this from the fact Jesus went to temple. (You do read your bible, right?)

Anyway, because God resurrected the dead in this vision in Ezekiel, Pharisees realized he’s gonna raise the dead at the end of the world, and made it part of their End Times teachings. Sadducees, who didn’t consider Ezekiel to be bible, didn’t believe in resurrection either—even though the LORD had told Moses and the Hebrews, “I kill and make alive” Dt 32.39 in the books they did consider bible. God can create humans from dust, Ge 2.7 and God can re-create humans from the dust we decayed into.

Jesus’s own resurrection demonstrates how Pharisees weren’t wrong about resurrection. He will raise us at the End, same as he raised Jesus. Same as he raised those folks in Ezekiel’s vision. It’ll happen.

Illegitimately borrowing the story.

But like I said, people gotta borrow this story and make it about ourselves, and many a preacher will do just that. Wrongly. Because unless the Holy Spirit personally tells us, “I’m gonna do for you as I showed Ezekiel I can do for dry bones,” we have no basis for claiming this story for our personal circumstances. No Christian does.

Imagine a Christian wants to have a kid, reads in Genesis about how the LORD promised Abraham a kid, and now says, “See, God tells me, through these verses, I’m gonna have a kid.” Or if a Christian reads about how the LORD told Solomon he’d make him rich, and says, “See, God tells me he’s gonna make me richer than every other king.” Or if I took God’s message to Joseph that his son would save his people from their sins, and start claiming, “See, God tells me my son’s gonna be Messiah.” It’s just that stupid. But Christians commit this kind of stupidity on a regular basis.

And because they do it, we get the idea we can do it. We can take prophecies which don’t belong to us, and claim ’em for ourselves. We’re even taught this by various Christians: If you don’t carjack a prophecy, it means you lack faith. You just gotta believe harder.

Yeah, these people are only setting themselves up for failure and grave disappointment. ’Cause God is under no obligation at all to follow through with what they’re claiming for themselves. They’ll never prosper in the way they expect.

The result is they’ll wind up doing one of these three things:

SPIN. When the prophecy doesn’t come true for them, they’ll stretch its meaning till it fits their circumstances. If they expect God will give them a child and he doesn’t, they’ll claim the prophecy actually meant spiritual children, and the kids in Sunday School count as their own. If they expect God’ll give them money and he doesn’t, they’ll claim he meant spiritually wealthy—or that God makes them comfortable despite their monthly struggle to keep ahead of their bills. The Jehovah’s Witnesses claimed Jesus’s second coming would happen in 1914, and when it didn’t they claimed they really meant he took on a new heavenly position that year. Not that anything on earth really changed any. Or at all.

Such people will claim, “God has fulfilled his every promise to me!” And they’re right; he has; he fulfilled his legitimate promises to them. But he didn’t fulfill any of his imaginary promises to them, and they’re totally lying to themselves about that.

It may be misplaced faith. But their denial is actually damaging all their faith, both misplaced and well-placed. And when other Christians realize they’re claiming God fulfilled stuff when he didn’t really, it’s gonna ding their faith. (As for people who don’t believe in prophecy and God’s promises, it’s just gonna give them something more to mock.)

STAGGER. When the prophecy doesn’t come true for them, they’ll back up, look at what they’ve done, and realize they were wrong. “Wait: That verse wasn’t for me. Well, don’t I feel silly.”

Which is great! But the reason I say they’re staggering, is because most of them don’t learn their lesson and never do this again. They totally do it again. Many times. Hey, everybody else they know is doing it.

I once had a pastor who’d regularly claim God wanted him to do some huge project… only for him to backtrack a few years later because nothing would come of it. I gotta give him props for admitting he got God wrong. Problem is, in the beginning, he was so sure he was right, he’d nudge people out of leadership—even the church—because he was so insistent the project was God’s will, and must go through. And he never did learn his lesson: Get confirmation before you run amok with “God’s plan.” (And get it from real prophets, not yes-men.)

QUIT. Worst-case scenario: Their faith not only takes a massive hit, but they give up altogether. They quit God.

After all, the only reason they glommed onto these promises, and insisted God was gonna come through for them, was because they wanted the stuff in those promises. They didn’t want God so much; just the stuff. They wanted God to grant them a worry-free life, riches, good health, the usual. God promises none of those things. Mammon will, but it can’t raise the dead, y’know.

This is why we gotta steer people away from faith-damaging misinterpretations of out-of-context scriptures.

Our takeaway from Ezekiel’s vision is to remember: God can restore anything. You may think it’s dead and gone forever, but if God gets involved, he can always bring it back. The catch is, he’s gotta say he’s bringing it back, like he told Ezekiel and the Israelis he was bringing their nation back. If he doesn’t, we can’t hold him to the stuff he never promised.