Many times in the midst of despair and depression God will bring Hope to His people, as it was with His blessed Judah as they had reached the end of their rope.
As with Judah's future, God is still reaching out and telling His people today that there still remains a future of hope. What had happened to Judah was the same thing that happens with God's people today. Judah had lost hope. The reason that they had lost hope was not because of the judgement that had come upon them from their grievous sins against God, but because they had sinned and broken fellowship with their God.
While their sin had brought broken relationships, alienation and slavery to Israel, their hearts remained hard against God as he was taking His children to the woodshed to correct their sinful behavior.
Sin always causes division. Division between God and man as well as division between man and man. In Ezekiel 37:11, the primary purpose for Ezekiel's vision was to encourage the children of Israel,for they had loss hope and was living in despair as pessimism filled the air according to verse11, "Then he said unto me, Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel: behold, they say, Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost: we are cut off for our parts."
Many of the people of God who were in captivity at that point were thinking and saying it's all over, there's no hope, God can't do anything for us.
Yet, even in their doubt,fears and worry, God gave Ezekiel the vision of the valley of dry bones to let the people know that there was hope and that there was a future for God's people.
God wanted the seriousness and hopelessness of Israel's situation to really settle into the mind and spirit of Ezekiel. He wanted him to get a first-hand view of the current serious condition of the hearts of .His people.
If you remember, God took Nehemiah outside at nighttime and let him get a vision of the wall that was torn down and let Nehemiah see the serious condition they were in before he was ready to do anything about rebuilding the wall.
You also may remember that as Paul walked through the marketplace of Athens and saw all of the false gods that the people were worshiping, God used that situation to stir his soul to preach the great sermon about the resurrection of Jesus.
God will always stir in us, the very things that we need to know and be aware of for ourselves first in order to be used to bring hope to others.
We need a fresh vision today sweet friend, of ourselves, our homes and for those who claim and bare the names of Jesus. We need to look again at the dry bones and see the deadness and the dryness of the situation and realize that we may be in the same dry spiritual desert that those bones were in.
We can get so desensitized with sin that wrong, unclean and vile things just pass us by and we dare even notice them any more as they are pouring in like open sewers as they are being allowed into our homes, on our phones and in our lives as well as our children. We watch programs that mock God and curse His name and we simply block it out and make excuses for them in order to feel comfortable enough to allow it. These are the sins that cause us to have a spiritual body of dry bones.
Ezekiel in that valley with stacks of dry, dead bones all around says in verse 4, "Again he (God) said unto me (Ezekiel), prophesy upon these bones (preach to these bones), and say unto them, O ye dry bones, hear the word of the Lord...."
It is the preaching of God's Word as it brings back breath's life to that which seems to have no hope. Things that are dry and dead. God's very Word can and will restore what once was and bring revival to a dead and dry yard of bones.
May we cry out to God today sweet friend for God to bring back in us what may seem to be asleep or even dead!
Hold Fast,
-Bren
