Exiled in Babylon, Ezekiel receives news that Jerusalem has fallen (Ezekiel 33). It’s the last gasp of a nation that is no more. Assyria had taken most of the land, and Babylon has taken what remained. There is no house where God is present in the world. There’s no anointed king representing heaven’s reign on earth. The bodies of those who tried to defend it lie unburied in what people were calling the Valley of Slaughter (Jeremiah 7:32; 19:6). What God intended to be his Holy Land lay defiled with their dead bones.
“Can these bones live?” God asked Ezekiel (37:3). The man has no answer. Death is so final. Ezekiel has already been lamenting, “The end! The end has come upon the four corners of the land!” (Ezekiel 7:2). Who could argue? Speaking as a human, who could overturn death?
But Ezekiel is not speaking as a human. He’s speaking for his Master, the Sovereign Lord who breathed his breath into the human in the beginning, raising a human from the dust as a living being (Genesis 2:7).
Can this Valley of Slaughter become a new Eden? Is the Lord to breathe his breath into these bones, raising a body of people from the dust to stand as a great force under him? (Ezekiel 37:10)
Seeking the kingdom 