St. Luke’s Evangelical Lutheran Church -- Watertown, WI
Pastor Mark Gartner
Sermon for Lent 5 -- March 17^th, 2002

Dear children of God who have been given the breath of life,

I’ve always thought that the job of a paleontologist sounded like a intriguing job. A paleontologist is a person who has decided that he wants to study where dinosaurs came from and what they looked like by finding dinosaur bones and fossils. They dig until they find the right bones and then they painstakingly sometimes with little brushes and small hand-held tools dig up dinosaur bones. Sometimes they will just find some very small bones and other times they find larger bones. Their job is then to figure out what dinosaur these bones belonged to and what the dinosaur might have looked like. The easy part about this job is that no one can ever really tell if you are right or wrong. How does anyone really know exactly what a T-Rex looked like or what a triceratops looked like. They just try to piece together bones. They are working with dead bones, which they never saw together alive in one piece.

Today we are also going to use the picture of bones. We want to study what the prophet Ezekiel was led by the Holy Sprit to write down from a vision he saw. But unlike a paleontologist, we can know exactly what the bones in our text are like, because God has led our hearts to understand the beautiful picture that Ezekiel is using. So this morning let’s take a look at the valley of bones and we will use a question as our theme:

If you remember anything at all about the prophet Ezekiel and his ministry, you might remember that God led Ezekiel to use a number of pictures in his ministry to physically and visibly let the people of Israel know that God was not pleased with their wicked way of life. On one occasion he was to depict the siege of Jerusalem, which was going to happen at the hands of the Babylonians, on a tablet of clay showing exactly how Jerusalem would fall to Babylon. In fact much of the first 24 chapters of Ezekiel deal with God’s harsh judgment being announced to the people of Israel. He was warning them that something terrible was going to happen, if they didn’t change their ways. The words of our text today are spoken after the God’s judgment had come at the hands of the Babylonians and the people of Israel had been carried off into exile. Now the people of Israel were worried that they and their homeland of Israel would be lost forever – never to be heard from again. God in his love used the prophet Ezekiel and the last part of this book to bring words of comfort that this exile wasn’t going to be permanent – that a remnant or portion of Israel would return to Israel.

Part of these words of comfort that Ezekiel spoke to the exiled Israelites are found in our text for this morning. God allows Ezekiel to see a vision of a valley of bones, ^"The hand of the LORD was upon me, and he brought me out by the Spirit of the LORD and set me in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. ²He led me back and forth among them, and I saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very dry. ³He asked me, "Son of man, can these bones live?" I said, "O Sovereign LORD, you alone know." Sometimes we need strong pictures to help drive home a point. I remember my father-in-law taking our boys out for a walk on a road by their home in Texas. He wanted to show them the skeleton of a armadillo that had been flatten right into the asphalt, almost like a fossil. The point he wanted to make was look what can happen when you play in the street. Bad things could happen. You could get hit by a car and be dead.

The words of our text are words that were meant to drive home some points for the people of Israel and Christians of all ages. The immediate context of these words were for the people of Israel. This valley of bones aptly describes the people of Israel’s condition. Outwardly speaking they had no life as they were defeated and led into exile. They were in a country far from their homeland and it didn’t look good for ever returning home. God’s judgment was upon them

These words also describe very fittingly the hearts of those who don’t know Christ – a heart of someone who is filled with unbelief. A person like this is most certainly lost, or as Ezekiel says that person is a "very dry bone." When someone is not filled with the Holy Sprit, there can be no spiritual life. A person is not alive in God’s eyes without having the Holy Spirit enter and change our hearts that are full of sin. This picture with its vivid depiction of a valley of bones describes all of us sitting here before God came into our hearts. We were lost in our sin – doomed to die eternally. This picture also describes the hearts of so many lost souls out in the world that need to hear that they are lost in sin. Think of how many people’s souls are lost eternally. This picture is a very clear preaching of God’s law as we realize that there is nothing in us that makes us right with our God.

As Ezekiel sat and looked at this valley of bones, God asked him a question, "Son of man, can these bones live?" At first glance a person would be led to say no, they can’t live. That’s the obvious answer. But Ezekiel was one who trusted in the Lord as he gave his answer, "I said, "O Sovereign LORD, you alone know." Ezekiel knew that with the LORD nothing is impossible. If God wanted to bring these bones to life, he could and would. This is very important to remember as we think about the miracle of people’s hearts being brought from unbelief to trusting in Jesus for salvation. The miracle by which God can breath into people the breath of life. This is also important as we reach out to the many lost souls of this world. We need to trust that the Word of the Lord and Baptism are strong enough to change people’s hearts and make them new and alive.

Ezekiel was given the rather odd sounding command to prophesy to these very dry bones, "Then he said to me, "Prophesy to these bones and say to them, ‘Dry bones, hear the word of the LORD! ⁵This is what the Sovereign LORD says to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life. ⁶I will attach tendons to you and make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you, and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the LORD.’" ⁷So I prophesied as I was commanded. And as I was prophesying, there was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone. ⁸I looked, and tendons and flesh appeared on them and skin covered them, but there was no breath in them. ⁹Then he said to me, "Prophesy to the breath; prophesy, son of man, and say to it, ‘This is what the Sovereign LORD says: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe into these slain, that they may live.’" ¹⁰So I prophesied as he commanded me, and breath entered them; they came to life and stood up on their feet—a vast army.

In the immediate context of these words, God was reassuring the people of Israel through the preaching of Ezekiel that a remnant or small portion of Israel would return to settle in Israel again, "This is what the Sovereign LORD says: O my people, I am going to open your graves and bring you up from them; I will bring you back to the land of Israel...., and I will settle you in your own land. Why would God be so kind and merciful to the wicked people of Israel? Why would he even give them the time of day? Because our God is a God of love and forgiveness. He still loves us, even when we fall into sin. He doesn’t condone our sin, but he still offers his forgiveness to us all. We can look in the Old Testament and see that God’s love and mercy was there for the people of Israel over and over for thousands of years.

He also shows this love and mercy to us living in the world today. Through God’s pastors, teachers and faithful laypeople God’s Word is prophesied to the world. We are living proof that the tools that the Holy Spirit uses to breath eternal life works. Through the gospel message of Jesus’ perfect life and perfect death which is found in Baptism and the powerful Word of God, our dry bones were turned into full living bodies that are given breath and life. We are living proof of God’s "vast army." through faith. We are changed through and through because our God loved us enough to send the Holy Spirit to work in our hearts. We are talking a major change – a change as drastic as the picture of the dry bones that Ezekiel saw which took on flesh.

I used to watch the popular TV show ER, which is a series that takes place in a Hospital Emergency Room. In almost every episode someone would be wheeled into the ER who had stopped breathing and was flat-lined on the little monitor. In almost every series the Doctor would get out those little electric shock pads and would proceed to try to shock the heart back into beating. Many times the heart would start beating again. The person was literally brought back to life. As we hear these words this morning, we have had a greater miracle than having our earthly hearts revived. We have heard how the Holy Spirit through the power of the Gospel has breathed into us the breath of eternal life through the faith that he has worked in our hearts. May we now take this wonderful truth out into the world so that the Holy Spirit’s powerful tools might bring to life the lost souls of people we speak to about our Savior.

Can Jesus give life to dead dry bones? The answer is a most definite YES!. All thanks and praise to our God for coming into our hearts and filling it with the saving message of Jesus as our one and only Savior. Amen