Our Hope Has Perished?

Then he said to me, “Son of man, these bones are all the house of Israel. Look, they are saying, ‘Our bones our dry, our hope has perished; we are cut off’.” – Ezekiel 37:11 (NET)

The words of this text are lifted from the familiar and dramatic scene generally referred to as the “Valley of Dry Bones.” For our purposes, we now take these words so as to utilize them as a lens through which we view the disciples of Jesus following His crucifixion. Can we not imagine those fearful men? Whether it was now only eleven or more, what was certain was that there was a group of individuals that represented the close compatriots of the Man that had just been crucified, effectively, as a challenger to the authority of Rome. In similar situations, as the disciples of Jesus would have well known, the followers of such an individual would be rounded up so as to suffer the same fate as their leader, thereby serving to quell any additional uprising. So we can understand their fear. We can hear them saying, “Our bones are dry. We are dead men walking. Indeed, our hope, the one we thought was our Messiah and Savior has perished, and we are soon to follow in His footsteps, being cut off as well.”

These disciples, who had shown flashes of recognition of Who Jesus actually was, and who had basically come to believe, during the course of His ministry, that He was God’s messianic agent for the deliverance and liberation of Israel, could be said to have been the first ones to be in union with Christ (confessing Him as Messiah). Naturally, the fullness of that union would come about later. At the least, in a quasi-union with Christ, because their hopes concerning the promises of the covenant God towards Israel were bound up in Jesus, it could be said that they had been crucified with Christ. We can hear the Apostle Paul saying the same type of thing in his letter to the Galatians (2:20).

So in the midst of their despair, and their fear, and the perishing of their hope, we can hear it being said to them, “This is what the sovereign Lord says: ‘Look, I am about to raise you from your graves, My people’.” (37:12b) This pushes us, again, to the words of the Apostle Paul and his understanding of the implications of Christ’s Resurrection. In his letter to the Colossians, after reading “If you have died with Christ” (2:20a), we go on to read, “Therefore, if you have been raised with Christ, keep seeking the things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God…for you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ (Who is your life) appears, then you too will be revealed in glory with Him” (3:1, 3-4). As was said, their hope had perished along with the One Who had been their hope.

That hope was the great hope of all of Israel, and without that hope of God’s miraculous intervention on behalf of His covenant people, Israel would not be able to endure the seemingly endless oppression. We can surmise that the band of disciples felt the same. Paul’s exhortation to the Colossians echoes these words from Ezekiel. As Ezekiel delivers the words of prophesy in regards to God raising His people from their graves, so Paul’s words, in urging believers to hold on to what is truly an un-perished hope by proclaiming “When Christ (Who is your life) appears, then you too will be revealed in glory with Him,” would have found great welcome in the ears of Jesus’ disciples.

Ezekiel wrote, “Then you will know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves and raise you from your graves, My people” (37:13). This, of course, is what Jesus’ disciples experienced. When His grave had been opened and He had been raised---with their hopes raised right along with Him---that is when the dimly-flickering light of belief finally burned forth in its world-illuminating brightness. After a bit of hesitancy, we find a confession of “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28b)

Ezekiel follows up on the words of the thirteenth verse, reporting God’s intentions by writing, “I will place My breath in you and you will live” (37:14a). One more time, we find this echoed in the experience of the disciples of our Lord, when, upon His appearance to them on the first day of the week following His Resurrection, “He breathed on them and said, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit’.” (John 20:22b) Those disciples (and all of Christ’s disciples from that day to this) share in the eternal life of salvation that was sealed by the Resurrection through the life-sustaining power of the Holy Spirit. By the Spirit, God speaks to the disciples of Christ and says, “I will give you rest in your own land” (Ezekiel 37:14b), in the renewed creation which has been inaugurated by the establishment of the kingdom of heaven on earth; and it is by the active presence of this Spirit, sent forth for and with the power of Resurrection (and renewal and restoration and re-creation), that disciples are told “Then you will know that I am the Lord” (37:14c).