Question:

Some have used the Valley of Dry Bones passage in Ezekiel 37:12-14 as a proof that God will offer salvation to people at some future time, after they have died and have been resurrected. "Thus says the Lord God: O my people, I will open your graves and have you rise from them, and bring you back to the land of Israel. Then you will know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves and have you rise from them O my people! I will put my spirit in you that you may live, and I will settle you open your land; thus you shall know that I am the Lord. I have promised, and I will do it, says the Lord" (Confraternity Version).

Doesn't this passage seem seem to support the idea of post-mortem salvation?

Answer:

A fundamental rule of understanding the Bible concerns the immediate context of the passage in question – failure to understand the context can lead to prooftexting – reading ideas into the Bible, and the immediate passage, that are not there.

Another rule concerns the audience and application – in order to have a meaning for us (which the Bible certainly has!) the text must have had a meaning in its original setting. The meaning we derive should spring from, and build upon, the meaning that God inspired for the original audience.

With these two thoughts in mind, we take a look at Ezekiel 37. Is this an Old Testament teaching about the bodily resurrection? The context of the book shows us that, under God’s inspiration, Ezekiel had been promising his people a change – a restored land, rebuilt cities, new leadership. These promises were met with disbelief, given the fall of Jerusalem, and its obvious centrality to the Jewish people. They looked at the shattered remains of their people in exile (Diaspora) and decided that their bones were dried up, that all hope was lost. They asked rhetorically, "Can these bones live?"

The answer for them was an obvious "no," but for Ezekiel that answer was not so obvious. With God all things are possible. The vision of God turning a host of skeletons into an army had to do with the spiritual renewal and rebirth that was possible. Of course, the vision not only spoke of what was possible, but never happened with the Jews under the old covenant, but it looked to the spiritual rebirth that would be given and made available through the Messiah, Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God. This is the birth that Jesus told Nicodemus about (see John 3). This is the new life in Christ – wherein we pass over from death to life (see John 5). The original audience to whom Ezekiel gave this message did not understand the bodily resurrection – for indeed, no one did until Jesus came, died and rose from the tomb – showing us that our hope is in him, that death does not hold power over those who accept Christ (see 1 Corinthians 15).

To import the idea of a bodily resurrection to this text in Ezekiel does violence to all accepted and basic rules of understanding the Bible. To import further implications about when and how salvation is offered and given, with future dispensations of grace, is to go even further into misunderstanding the Bible in general – and this text specifically.