Ezekiel Visions — Day 7 — Sabbath

Ezekiel preached to people who had run out of hope. Jerusalem had fallen, the temple was burned, and the survivors were scattered across the empire of Babylon. They were not asking hard theological questions anymore. They had stopped asking anything. Their own words come down to us in chapter 37: “Our bones are dried up, and our hope has perished; we are cut off.”

Into that flatness God speaks two of the strangest, most tender promises in the whole Old Testament. First, in chapter 36, He says He will reach into the chest of His people and perform surgery: “I will remove your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.” A stone heart is not a wicked heart so much as a dead one – hard, unresponsive, past feeling. God does not command the stone to soften. He says He will take it out and put in something alive.

Then, in chapter 37, God shows Ezekiel what that kind of resurrection looks like. He sets the prophet down in a valley scattered with bones, and not fresh bones – “very dry,” picked clean, the leftovers of an old defeat. He asks one question: “Son of man, can these bones come to life?” Ezekiel will not pretend. “O Lord GOD, only You know.” It is the most honest answer in the book. The valley is past human help. If anything lives here, God will have to do it.

A woman I know spent two years certain that her faith was over. She did not announce it. She simply went quiet – stopped praying, stopped opening the Bible that had once been marked up in three colors, stopped expecting anything to happen inside her when she sang. When people asked how she was doing spiritually, she would say, honestly, that there was nothing there. Not anger. Not even much sadness. Just stone.

What troubled her most was that she could not fix it. She tried the things that had worked before – more discipline, better books, a stricter schedule. Nothing took. You cannot will a dead nerve to feel. You cannot command a stone to be tender. She had run, in her own small valley, into the exact wall Ezekiel names: a heart you cannot soften from the inside.

Then, slowly and without a single dramatic moment, something began to come back. A line of a psalm caught in her throat. She found herself praying in the car before she had decided to. She could not point to what she had done, because she had not done it. Years later she described it the only way that fit: “It felt like being breathed back into.” She had not revived herself. Something had been put back in.

A priest carried into Babylon with the first wave of exiles around 597 BC, Ezekiel never served at the temple he was trained for; it lay in ruins back home. From beside the River Kebar he received some of the strangest and most vivid visions in Scripture. God repeatedly calls him ‘son of man,’ a title that keeps him human and small before the visions he is shown. To a people who said their hope had perished, Ezekiel was given the word that God Himself would put in new hearts and breathe new life.