Terrible scene! A valley full of dead, dry bones! This is the whole house of Israel! A sad and hopeless state is the state of the sinner under the wrath of God. The sinner is guilty before the Lord his God. So then the sinner’s condition is also a condition of death from which he cannot lift himself.

Wonderful and marvelous work of grace! A powerful Word and Wind from Jehovah! God gives life to those dead bones! A mighty army—the church of God—is formed from the heaps of those dead bones!

What the prophet writes he saw in a vision that is similar to the visions of the book of Revelation that were seen by the apostle John. Those visions show in a figure many profound, spiritual realities about the coming of the kingdom of God. So in Ezekiel 37 we have a deep, mysterious, and ineffable wonder of grace shown to us in a figure of a valley full of dead, dry bones that God causes to live.

In his vision the prophet is lifted up by the Spirit of God. Carried on the Breath of God, the prophet takes a flight across a great valley. God calls the scene below in the valley “your graves.” “I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves…And ye shall know that I am the Lord, when I have opened your graves…and brought you up out of your graves” (vv. 12–13).

The valley is an enormous, mass grave of those who have been slain. The graves are open, so that the prophet can look into death’s insatiable maw and see its grotesque content. The valley is full of bones, great piles of human bones. Oh, and the bones are very dry!

Can these bones live?

Important question!

A question of salvation!

Can the bones live? Is living in their power?

Impossible!

The bones are the remains of dead men, and the bones are very dry. There is no life, no willing, no desiring, no choosing, and no working in those dead, dry bones. There is no willing and no power in those dry bones to raise themselves from their grave. The bones are in the grip of the fearsome power of death—death that is the word of Jehovah too. It was death as a word of the Lord that stripped the men of their lives, that brought them into their graves, and that gnawed at their skin, flesh, and sinews until there was nothing left but a heap of bones.

Total depravity! The words do not convey completely the awfulness of the condition that they describe. Death! Rottenness! Decay! And but a picture—and an entrance—of the most terrible grave of all: hell, where the worm does not die, where the fire is not quenched, where there is darkness far darker than the darkness of the coldest grave, and where there is weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth in the eternal wasting of the place of God’s wrath.

The words are so easy to say: total depravity. But what do these words mean?

These words mean that we with all men are incapable of doing any good by nature. The words mean that the wickedness of man is not only a corruption of his deeds but also a corruption of his whole nature. From that nature as a wicked root come all man’s evil deeds as weeds spring from their evil roots. Man’s depravity consists not only in the fact that he does not do any good deeds or perform any virtuous actions, but he is also incapable of such. In the garden of Eden, Adam was a whole man, capable in all things to will agreeably to the will of God. After the fall Adam lost all the powers of his nature with which God had adorned man in his creation, and Adam became nothing but a dry and dead skeleton with the loathsome smell of death lingering in the air around his grave.

Man’s total depravity means that man does not bear the image of God. Oh, yes, once it could be seen on man’s face and in all his actions that he was a son of God. But now that beautiful image is gone, and man is but an ugly pile of bones that you cannot recognize, and he bears the image of death and of extreme wickedness.

His depraved nature means also that man does not have a free will to choose God and the good. Man’s will is his faculty to choose and desire. Adam in Eden had a free will. His free will was not the highest freedom, for the highest freedom is the inability to sin. That freedom belongs to the new man and to the perfection of heaven. The new man is perfect: he loves God, loves God’s law, and cannot sin. Now we have that new man in an old vessel. Adam was free to serve God, and Adam was capable of turning away from God. Adam could by an act of his will depart from God, disobey God, and ally himself with Satan. Adam was not absolutely free. Man is never absolutely free. He is free within the counsel of God. In the providence of God, Adam abused the freedom of his will and turned from God, who was his life, to the devil, who was the death of Adam. Now man’s will is bound. It is still a will and is still active. The will chooses this or that. But that will is under the power of sin and death. Man as a pile of dead bones always chooses sin; and whatever he chooses, he chooses sinfully and over against God. Man is bound under the power of death, and there is no willing and desiring in death. Yes, with death all the desires of man perish, and so the dead man has no spiritual power to choose the good.

Man’s depravity consists in and is inclined to all wickedness. Man is an active and willing sinner who sins with a will and with all his being. It is not that he merely tends to wickedness that he can from time to time overcome; but because he is corrupt in nature and wills the evil, he is also bent toward that evil with his whole being, and all his deeds are wicked. He not only does not will or do the good, but also he is opposed to the good.

And man is such a loathsome creature from his conception and birth.

He does not become evil throughout the course of his life or because of bad influences in his environment.

He is born evil.

“Yes,” the believer says, “I am evil, born in sin!”

The prophet sees this in the picture of a valley full of human remains that are very dry! Historically, the prophet sees the ruin of the human race in Adam and the ruin of the nation of Israel under the law.

The humans had been “slain” (v. 9)!

The law massacred these people. The law is the ministry of death. Through the coming of the law to the nation of Israel, it became perfectly obvious that man cannot live by the law. The whole house of Israel is in the valley. God instructs the prophet: “These bones are the whole house of Israel” (v. 11). In the death of the sinner, we are not dealing with a random consequence for sin or a karmic relationship between sin and death. But in death we have to do with the holy and righteous God, who said, “Cursed is every one that continueth not in all things which are written in the book of the law to do them” (Gal. 3:10). The issue in man’s total depravity is not only that he cannot return to God, that he will not return to God, or that he cannot will to return to God; but the death of the sinner is also God’s judgment and work according to his strictest justice to reward sin with death. The greatest issue in considering the death of man is God—what God did to man and that before this God, man only daily increases his debt.

That we have to do with God’s justice in the text is clear in that the prophet on his flight over the valley sees graves. Dead people do not bury themselves. Dead people are buried, and the undertaker is God himself. The valley is a great grave of many graves! They are the graves of those who had been slain under the sentence of the law. God put all the bones there. God in his judgment upon the human race in Eden killed man, put him under the curse, and cast him into a spiritual grave. The issue in man’s total depravity and salvation is not only man’s great wickedness and spiritual inability but also God’s will, justice, and power. God judged all men guilty in Adam; God consigned all men to death, and he cast all men from his presence and fellowship into spiritual graves. Until God releases a man from his guilt, opens that man’s grave, and brings him out of that grave, that man stays there, wrapped in the corruption of death.

This is the believer’s confession about himself by nature. This was Israel’s confession: “They say, Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost: we are cut off for our parts” (v. 11). This is a reference to the historical circumstances of Israel’s captivity—a kind of death of the nation—and thus to the historical background to the vision. Israel speaks in captivity from their graves in Babylon of their dry bones. The word bone means strength. When Israel says that their bones are dried, they say that in themselves there is no strength, no power, and no ability to realize their salvation and the covenant promises of God or to free themselves from their graves in Babylon. Their hope was gone as far as man is concerned, as gone as the hope of life is gone from a man in the grave. That confession refers also to the church as she is by nature fallen in sin and lying under the curse.

Can these bones live?

Impossible with man!

Wonderwork of God!

God opened the graves, caused the people to come out of their graves, and formed them into a mighty army to be brought again to the land of Israel.

Note well! When God says “Therefore prophesy and say unto them, Thus saith the Lord God: Behold, O my people, I will open your graves” (v. 12), then God does not command the prophet to prophesy in response to the people’s confession. Rather, God says, as it were, “The circumstances being such, prophesy to them and proclaim the name of Jehovah as the one who opens their graves.” Their confession of their condition was exactly right. That condition was the occasion for the revelation of Jehovah’s marvelous work of grace. Jehovah regenerates totally depraved sinners. He does not regenerate good people, willing people, working people, or desiring people. He regenerates those whose bones are very dry and whose hope is cut off.

Our hope cut off is Adam. That hope on a far more glorious and eternal scale is announced in Jesus Christ. He is the first begotten from the dead! He is the firstfruits, and we are the increase. Oh, yes, to open his people’s graves and to bring them alive from the grave, God must first enter the grave. For it is only God who can pay the debt to God for man’s sins. Only God can accomplish a righteousness that is worthy of life from the dead. Because of God’s righteousness in Christ, in which he fulfilled the law, he ended that ministry of death. Because of Christ’s righteousness, we must also be made alive—regenerated.

In the valley of dry bones, we have a picture of regeneration. The whole salvation of the elect sinner can be summed up in one word: regeneration. There is essentially nothing more that must be done to the elect sinner or that he must do. Regeneration will be perfected; that is true. Regeneration will come to its highest expression in the new heaven and the new earth, but being regenerated the elect sinner is saved.

This regeneration—so highly celebrated—of the elect but in himself dead sinner God reveals to Ezekiel in the vision. Scripture uses the term regeneration, which means to be born again. In Ezekiel’s vision that wonderwork is described as life from the dead. Regeneration is to make the dead sinner alive, to make a heap of bones a person, and out of living people to form a church.

Thus regeneration is God’s work of resurrection. This is why God says that he opens graves and brings living people out of their graves. God says that he not only opens their graves but that he also takes the people out. Doctrine that teaches that the salvation of the sinner consists in the sinner’s accepting God’s offer of grace or availing himself of God’s work of grace is similar to saying that God opens the grave but man has to climb out. God says that he opens the graves, and he takes the people out, and by his work they stand up. He does everything.

This work of making alive is a new creation, making the elect sinner a new man by a wonder no less great and glorious—indeed more glorious—than Adam’s formation out of the dust of the ground. God says that he will give the bones sinews, bring flesh on them, spread skin over the sinews, give the people a Spirit, and they shall live. The old man died in Adam; but as God brought Adam out of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, so God forms a new man and breathes into him a new Spirit. Regeneration makes a new creature. Regeneration takes man as he is spiritually dead, wholly incapable of any good, and inclined to all wickedness, and makes him a new man. He is a man as Adam was—in the image of God—who loves God and is righteous and holy.

And God forms his church in the world! God creates an army! Up out of the ground, bone touches bone and sinews join them together, flesh forms on them, skin covers them, and men form into a great army. As when the nation of Israel came out of Egypt and was a great army, so regeneration forms a new Israel, the church, into a great army. What the prophet sees in the vision under the type of the regeneration of captive Israel is not merely the regeneration of any person or of any one time in history but of the entirety of God’s elect church in all of history, which in the end forms the great and innumerable throng that overcomes sin, Satan, and the world and has the victory forever in heaven.

God spoke this wonder!

He does all things by his Word. God created by his Word. God recreates by his Word. Not now by the preaching but by the voice of God, that Word who lives and abides forever. Oh, yes, in the closest connection with the preaching. For the prophet was commanded, “Prophesy upon these bones, and say unto them, O ye dry bones, hear the word of the Lord” (v. 4). But listen to verse 7: “So I prophesied as I was commanded: and as I prophesied, there was a noise.” It is not an inarticulate noise, but a voice comes as Ezekiel is prophesying. That voice is the living, creative, omnipotent, and irresistible voice of God. That same voice had told the prophet before what would happen when he prophesied:

5. Thus saith the Lord God unto these bones; Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live: 

6. And I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live; and ye shall know that I am the Lord. (vv. 5–6)

The power of the regeneration of man and of his spiritual recreation is the Word of God. The very same power that made all things in the beginning operates in the vision to recreate man from dry bones. As Jehovah had promised, so it was: “Behold a shaking, and the bones came together, bone to his bone. And when I beheld, lo, the sinews and the flesh came up upon them, and the skin covered them above” (vv. 7–8).

But there was no spirit in the body. A body without a spirit is an inanimate shell. There is no life in the body until a spirit is breathed into the body. Just as God made Adam in the beginning out of the dust of the ground and breathed into him the spirit of life, so this recreated man must have a spirit.

And what a spirit comes there!

The spirit that animates this new man is the Spirit of the living God!

8. But there was no breath in them.

9. Then said he unto me, Prophesy unto the wind, prophesy, son of man, and say to the wind, Thus saith the Lord God; Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.

10. So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army. (vv. 8–10)

The Spirit is a wind. He is the divine wind. He was present in the creation of the world, brooding upon the face of the deep as a hen broods her eggs. The Spirit makes life to abound! And he is the Spirit in the vision who animates the recreated men. So God says, “Ye shall know that I am the Lord, when I have opened your graves, O my people, and brought you up out of your graves, and shall put my spirit in you, and ye shall live” (vv. 13–14).

God is teaching the work of the Holy Spirit in regeneration and that regeneration consists in receiving the Spirit of grace. With the Spirit the men stand, and by the Spirit they live and walk. They walk after a new law, the law of the Spirit of life in Christ, being freed from the law of sin and death. No longer do they mind the things of the flesh, but they mind the things of the Spirit.

The Spirit is the Spirit of the Word, so that the action of the Word is made effectual by the Spirit, and the men live. God says to the prophet, “Prophesy unto the wind, prophesy, son of man, and say to the wind, Thus saith the Lord God; Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live” (v. 9). “So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army” (v. 10).

That wind is the Spirit of God, and he is God. Yet he obeys the voice of a man! Then the man was Ezekiel—but only in type. Now the man is Christ. The Spirit of regeneration is the Spirit of Christ, who obeys Christ and does what Christ wills as he speaks in the name of God and performs all God’s will and good pleasure. By Spirit and Word God recreates for himself and calls to himself and into his fellowship a living people.

Wonderwork of grace!

The very deadness and dryness of those who are raised and recreated testify to this fact. It is one thing—and a work of God’s great power—to cause a man to stand up out of the dust of the ground. God calls the things that are not as though they were. But in the vision God raises the dead who are dead because they transgressed God’s law. To raise them God must be satisfied. To make satisfaction God must provide for their righteousness. The power of God’s work to save them is grace. Grace is the power of God to take the whole of creation, fallen in sin and lying under the curse, and to raise that creation to the height of heavenly glory in Christ Jesus. Regeneration is that aspect of the wonder of grace whereby the life of the new heaven and the new earth breaks in upon a man, lays hold upon him, and makes a dead sinner live with the life of the new heaven and the new earth. Grace not only restores what Adam lost, but grace also brings to a higher state of development and perfection in Christ. Grace does that sovereignly, irresistibly, and efficaciously. Grace does not offer a proposition. Grace does not ask the sinner to come in. Grace does not invite the sinner to come to God. Grace is no weak and impotent thing. But grace is the glorious and eternal favor of the living God, whose purpose is the eternal blessedness of his creatures with him in his covenant. Grace brings that work to pass without the will or the works of the sinner. Grace opens the grave, brings the sinner out of the grave, makes the sinner alive, causes the sinner to know Jehovah, and brings the sinner ultimately into the land of Canaan on the other side of Jordan in the new heaven and the new earth. Grace leaves nothing to man, for man has nothing but his guilt and depravity and is nothing but a dead, damnworthy, and wretched creature.

Flowing from election! Jehovah speaks and expresses his purpose. He has no other purpose than what he has purposed in himself from all eternity.

5. Thus saith the Lord God unto these bones; Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live:

6. And I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live; and ye shall know that I am the Lord. (vv. 5–6)

Intimately and inseparably connected to the confession that it is the totally depraved sinner who is regenerated is the confession that it is the elect, totally depraved sinner who is regenerated. The question regarding fallen man is the same as Jehovah’s question to Ezekiel in verse 3: “Can these bones live?”

Live they must!

To live is their salvation!

Can they live?

And the answer is the same as Ezekiel’s: “O Lord God, thou knowest” (v. 3). Jehovah is the one who speaks. He is the absolute Lord over all. He possesses all sovereignty and power. He is the sovereign potter who has power over the clay to make of one lump one vessel to honor and another to dishonor. It is impossible that those bones live on their own. To live is wholly impossible for them. They cannot, they will not, and they cannot will to live. There is in them no power! Jehovah knows! He knew from eternity the dry bones that he would recreate in his own image. He knew them in love. He alone is both able and willing to make those bones live.

Because of God’s covenant purpose!

Oh, Jehovah calls them his people! This is his term of endearment and love toward his Israel whom he had chosen to bring near to him. They are the house of Israel. They are not all Israel that are of Israel. The house of Israel are those who are Israel by election. This election of Israel stands in distinction from Esau, who was also of Isaac and Rebekah, who was born into the sphere of the covenant, but who was rejected by God and hated of him. And God promises to bring Israel into the land of Canaan where he will place them in their own land. The land of promise. The land of God’s covenant fellowship—the new heaven and the new earth—where every one has his own inheritance appointed by the Lord and where Israel will dwell with God forever.

That life Jehovah God explains as “ye shall know that I am the Lord” (vv. 6, 13). Regeneration makes a dead sinner—whose death consisted in his being far from God—alive, which life is to know Jehovah his God. That regeneration brings a man back into fellowship with God is also the point of God’s promising to bring Israel back into the land of Canaan. That was the land of God’s fellowship and friendship with his people as the type of the new heaven and the new earth where there is the perfection of God’s covenant. Covenant fellowship is what Adam’s life in the garden was. That was the purpose of his creation: to know the living God. To be made alive is to be alive to God. Life is to know him as Jehovah, to know him as the God of one’s salvation, to know him in his saving fellowship and friendship, and to know his gracious word and will.

The confession of the living church! Yes, now we know it! Listen to true faith speak! There is no credit to us. Jehovah our God has opened our graves! Jehovah our God has spoken it, for there is no power in the word of man to perform it! Jehovah our God has performed it! We know this now. The salvation of the church is wholly the work of Jehovah by his Word and Spirit.