God Knows That You can Live!

“And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord GOD, thou knowest.” (Eze 37:3 AV)

 

Ezekiel chapter thirty-seven is a vision given to the prophet concerning the restoration of Israel and the maturing of God’s covenants with them.  The vision is a valley of dry human bones left from a great battle.  The question is posed to the prophet as he considers the impossible.  The answer, humanly speaking, is no.  It would be one thing if a heart stopped beating just a few minutes earlier.  It would be one thing if they called a code and resuscitated a soul.  However, in this vision, there are weathered and dried bones with no tissue at all.  Sun-bleached bones that had been laying in the desert for centuries.  If I were the prophet, I would think it impossible for life to come to those bones.  But it did.  God assembled the bones into single skeletons.  He added tissue and sinew.  Then the LORD told the prophet to prophesy to the wind that the breath of life may come upon these warriors.  And it did.  And they did.  They lived again.  As the bleached-white bones turned into living human beings, God will restore life to a lifeless nation.  Israel will live again.  What is true of Israel is also true of the most hopeless of the rest.  In fact, hope is the theme of this chapter.  The bones represent a situation that seems hopeless.  Yet God can resurrect the improbably.  He can rescue the impossible.  If we are down and out, as long as God lives, there is hope.

The following is from an article written by Laura Clarke of the Smithsonian on March 26, 2015, entitled Tree Grown from 2,000-year-old seed has Reproduced.  “Age doesn’t have much on this rare piece of greenery sprouted from a seed discovered in an ancient Israeli site.  Get out the cigars—Methuselah, a Judean date palm tree that was grown from a 2,000-year-old seed, has become a papa plant.   Elaine Solowey, of the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies at Kibbutz Ketura in Israel, recently broke the good news to National Geographic:  “He is over three meters [ten feet] tall, he's got a few offshoots, he has flowers, and his pollen is good," she says. "We pollinated a female with his pollen, a wild [modern] female, and yeah, he can make dates."  Methuselah sprouted back in 2005 when agriculture expert Solowey germinated his antique seed. It had been pulled from the remains of Masada, an ancient fortification perched on a rock plateau in southern Israel, and at the time, no one could be sure that the plant would thrive. But he has, and his recent reproductive feat helps prove just how well he’s doing.  For a while, the Judean date palm was the sole representative of his kind: Methuselah’s variety was reportedly wiped out around 500 A.D. But Solowey has continued to grow date palms from ancient seeds discovered in the region, and she tells National Geographic that she is “trying to figure out how to plant an ancient date grove.” Doing so would allow researchers to better understand exactly what earlier peoples of the region were eating and how it tasted.  At 2,000 years old, Methuselah’s seed isn’t the most aged to be used to grow a plant—not by a long shot. Back in 2012, a team of Russian scientists unearthed a cache of seeds from a prehistoric squirrel burrow that had been covered in ice. They eventually succeeded in germinating the 32,000-year-old specimens, which grew into an arctic plant closely resembling the modern narrow-leafed campion.”

Sometimes, we feel like that fig.  We are all worn out.  There is no hope.  We cannot get up in the morning.  We pray for the rapture and when the sun rises the next day, we are terribly disappointed.  Life has many stressors.  It can sap the joy and life from our souls.  Anxieties mount and it doesn’t seem like there is any end to it.  We take one hit after another.  Just when we think we cannot take one more hit, it comes in hard.  It takes a major miracle to simply put one foot in front of the other and keep moving in a forward direction.  Life can be like those weather forecasters who are covering a hurricane as it makes landfall.  They lean into the wind so as not to be taken away in it, but they really cannot move against it.  Life can seem hopeless.  However, we have a God who can resurrect dry bones and recreate a living breathing human being from them.  He can and will resurrect a dead nation into the greatest nation on Earth.  Israel will thrive again.  If God can resurrect the impossible, He can restore life and joy to your weary soul.  No matter how bad life may get, it will never be as bad as a valley of dry bones.  If the LORD can make them live again, He can give you hope beyond your comprehension.  You will live again.  Life will get better.  You will grow.  God will use you.  You will have that bounce in your step restored.  If the dry bones can live again, so can you!