Only God Can Give Life

My wife and I travel quite a bit, and we have driven through different deserts a number of times. A lot of times deserts can be lovely places indeed. They can even change from desolate to beautiful depending on time of day, weather, and so on. Generally speaking, deserts are dry and seem devoid of life. Have you ever seen a picture of a desert with a pile of bones that aren’t connected anymore. When I was little, I had a cowboy set with figures, like a sheriff, a gunslinger, and a couple of warriors, a stagecoach, and other things. I remember there was a bare, vacant tree with three or four buzzards sitting in it. When I think of the desert, the dead, and skeletons, I think about that buzzard tree.

In stark contrast, there is someplace verdant. I think of Kodiak, Alaska. It is a temperate jungle. Every limb of every tree is covered with moss and greenery. The streams are full of salmon, and, of course, there are the Kodiak bears. Everything is green and verdant, just full of life. What is the difference between a green, verdant place with lots of animal and plant life and a desert with bones? The answer is life.

A nation needs life. In Ezekiel 37 God is talking about His people and how He was going to restore life and unity to a divided and dead people. Life makes the difference to a nation, a church, and to an individual believer. So many times, we settle on things we think are the answer to life. God says, “No, I am the source of life.” In verse 14, speaking about the future of His people Israel, God says, “And shall put my spirit in you, and ye shall live, and I shall place you in your own land.” This was in a vision God had given Ezekiel, a vision of a valley full of dry bones. God asked Ezekiel, “Can these bones live?” All these dry bones were disconnected one from another. Ezekiel answered, “O LORD God, thou knowest.” Only God can give life. He can even give life to dead bones.

It is not organization that gives life. A lot of good people think that if they can just organize, then they will have power. Organization is important, but organization is not life. What we need is God. We don’t need human enthusiasm. Sometimes I am in a church on a Sunday morning where people are kind of quiet and the song leader is desperately trying to get some enthusiasm going. I’ve been in churches where I feel like the life being drained out of me by the slow pace we sang some songs. The speed with which we sing a song or conduct a service, human enthusiasm, is not life.

When we talk about life, we are not talking about money. Jesus said, “For what should it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” We are talking about life, not merely political power or esteem. The point of the vision of dry bones in Ezekiel 37 is that only God can give life. “Son of man, can these bones live?” The reply, “God, you are the only one that knows.” Only God can give life.

If that is true, there are two things we ought to do. First, we should hear the Word of the Lord. Verse 4 says just that. “O ye dry bones, hear the word of the LORD.” God is the life-giver. God’s Word gives life. Sometimes we think that if we say the right things, that somehow we can produce life in a body of believers or our own lives when only God’s truth can give us the life we need. Jesus famously said in John 6:63, “It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.” No great idea, enthusiasm, or organization will take the place of the life only the life-giver can give. So, hear the Word.

Second, acknowledge the Lord, acknowledge His place. In verse 6 God says, “Ye shall live; and ye shall know that I am the LORD.” He is talking about Israel, who was detached from her source of life. He is saying, “Hear my word and acknowledge my presence.” Skeletons don’t have a leg to stand on literally, so we need more than bones to animate a great army. In verse 10 the vision that God had given was that they lived. God breathed life into the dry bones and they stood upon their feet as a great army. So, we need more than bones to animate a great army and more than bones to join us to our body. We need God to animate the bones.

Verse 11 says, “Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost: we are cut off for our parts.” In this vision God is talking about Israel. In verses 15 and following he prophesied of a time when the divided kingdom of Israel would be joined together. The Lord talks about His church. In I Corinthians 12:12, 14-15 it says, “For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ. For the body is not one member, but many. If the foot shall say, Because I am not the hand, I am not of the body; is it therefore not of the body? And if the ear shall say, Because I am not the eye, I am not of the body; is it therefore not of the body?” No, the body of Christ is many members. We all have different functions, but we all serve the body. We all serve Christ. It is Christ alone that can give life to that body.

If there is a living, breathing person who breaks a bone, that bone needs to be set, but there is no point in setting the bones of a skeleton. What we need is not more structure, organization, enthusiasm, money, or politics. What we need is God. We need the life of the body. Only God can give life, eternal life and life to animate us to make a difference in this world in the here and now.