Year 6, Day 163: Ezekiel 37

Theological Commentary: Click Here

Discipleship Focus: Father

• Father: This is the pinnacle of the Covenant Triangle.  God is the Father.  He is the creator.  He is love.  Our relationship with the Father is rooted in His love for us.  We get our identity through Him.  When the Father is in our life, obedience becomes clear.

Ezekiel 37 is one of the more famous chapters in an otherwise obscure book. Here we have the famous “Valley of the Dry Bones” prophecy.  Ezekiel sees a vision of a valley with dry bones.  Through God’s power, he sees those bones come to life.  The grow flesh.  They gain breath.  They get new life.

This is the perfect picture of the Father who loves us.  God knows we are sinners.  God knows that we deserve condemnation.  But God doesn’t want us to stay in the dried up judgment.  He wants us to have new life.  He wants us to know life after the death we deserve.  He wants us to know restoration.  He wants us to live again with Him as our God.

That’s what the second half of this chapter is all about.  Once more God gives Ezekiel a prophecy.  He is to take two sticks and bind them together.  On a very literal level, this is God promising to bind Judah and Israel into one unified nation after the exile is over.  That occurs.  On a deeper level, one could interpret this passage as a unification of the Jews and the Gentiles into a spiritual kingdom with Jesus as its king.  That also happened.  On a third level, we can also think of this as God uniting our fallen flesh with His righteous spirit and allowing us to live eternally with Him as our Father.

In any case, we have evidence of the Father’s love.  God gives new life where lie has died.  God restores when we choose exile.  God promises a future when all we can see is the valley of death before us.

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