Hey Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble, and I'm your host for the Bible Recap.

Today we open with a valley vision and a stick sign act.

Ezekiel's vision in the Valley of Dry Bones is probably his 20 minutes of fame.

This is what he's most known for.

In fact, I've heard probably half a dozen sermons preached on this, using it to illustrate a variety of different things, like God making dead people into a powerful army, or how people have the power to speak life into things.

But lots of them have nothing to do with what the text is actually teaching here,

and some of them are even biblically inaccurate.

So today we're going to make sure we keep our eyes on the text and the context

to see what God is actually communicating to us about himself and his plan.

Ezekiel has a vision of a bunch of dry bones in a valley.

As far as the eye can see, there's nothing but femurs and fibulas.

Then, through Ezekiel, God commands the bones to live. This is God's command, not Ezekiel's.

We can hear it in verses 4 through 6, where God says, prophesy over these bones and say to them,

O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God to these bones,

Behold, I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live, and I will lay sinews upon you,

and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall

live, and you shall know that I am the Lord. So we can see that God is the one who issued the command,

and God is the one who breathed life into them.

And yes, of course, we know God could have done it without Ezekiel.

God doesn't need Ezekiel for this, but he loves him and he's using him.

So Ezekiel gets the joy of being part of God's process in this vision.

God says this vision represents the 12 tribes, the people of both

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