DRY BONES DESERT GOD
Ezekiel 37 | Exodus 16:1-36 | 1 Kings 19 | Matthew 4:1-11, 27:32-28:10
The hand of the Lord was on me, and He brought me out by the Spirit of the Lord.
I am 27, and I am six feet tall. I have just dropped to 120 pounds, muscle evaporated because of four unruly vertebrae and a relentless twisting in my stomach. I am all bones. It is January, and there is less between the wind and me, less fat or fortitude to keep frost from seeping into organs like my heart, which is broken again with nobody to blame but myself. I should have known Z would break it. I should have never given it away.
We are shooting in the desert today. It is bone dry, fewer trees to block out the brightness and wind. I can see far into the horizon, and I have needed the perspective for a long time. I wanted to shoot photos in the desert. I wanted them to say what I can’t. Look at my weak wrists now, hair stood on end in this gale. Look at the hollows of my thighs. When did my shoulders become so sharp and downturned? When did I stop looking up?
He brought me out by the Spirit of the Lord and set me in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones.
The God I follow is familiar with deserts. He is at home here in His wild authority, in the gusts and the expanse. He does nothing to avoid the desolation. In fact, He takes His people there a lot, and He seems unbothered by the fact that it makes them uncomfortable or that they think it’s a strange thing to do. This is His home. It is where He lives.
In this way He presents Himself in sharp contrast with the other more metropolitan gods of the ancient world. In The Epic of Gilgamesh, Mesopotamian gods center their lives around a great city built by men to conquer the chaos of nature. The Assyrian fish-god Dagon is etched into the walls of Nineveh, a metropolis so large it took three days to cross. Even the Greek and Roman pantheons, for all their sending heroes off to discover lands, are filled with gentrified gods who prefer to dwell in civilized Olympus, a step above and away from the mess.
And though He often works in His city Jerusalem, there is no denying that the God I know is famous for His work outside of human civilization. He is a wilderness God. We see it when He takes the Israelites away from the cities of Egypt and into the Canaanite desert, to wander and complain for forty years. We see it centuries later in the prophet Elijah, when Queen Jezebel slaughters Hebrew prophets, and God meets the surviving Elijah where he lays: under a shrub, praying for death. We see it again in the Christ. Before He performs any miracles or preaches any sermons, before He rises from the dead, He spends forty days with nothing but Himself in the same desert through which He’d dragged his grumbling Israelites. I wonder if it felt familiar.
I, having grumbled and complained for just under 30 years, see no divine cloud today. No fire. Just me and the photographer making art together in the wilderness. My four unruly vertebrae are stiff, and I know it will show in the photos. Betrayed by my bones. My heart doesn’t feel as broken as I want it to because Z has just texted me “I love you” again, which makes me believe it again, which makes me an idiot again. It occurs to me that he’ll return to screaming at me in a matter of days. I am somehow aware that he might be messaging me, even now, from her arms and her bed. But he’s told me he loves me, and it is enough that I can’t cry on camera like I’d planned to. My ribs are prominent. My vertebrae protrude. The photographer does not make comments, but other people have. Eating feels bad, and not eating feels bad. I wish I could tell Z. Feel the edges of me, my love. Are you startled at the sharpness of these bones?
He led me back and forth among them, and I saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very dry. He asked me, “Son of man, can these bones live?”
I said, “O Lord God, you know.”
According to the Temptation story, the Christ doesn’t eat for forty days out here. It’s a pivotal moment, immediately preceding Jesus’s life-changing work among the people. He is about thirty years old. He is hungry. The devil, knowing this, slithers into the desert to offer Him something to eat. “If you are who you say you are,” says the devil, “turn these stones into bread.” In response, Jesus quotes the Torah: “Man cannot live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.”
The devil makes a compelling offer. Jesus is hungry and weak, and He is offered the chance to combat the natural harshness with a convenient trick. That promise seems exactly what Jesus needs in a difficult time of testing and a difficult land. After all, Satan suggests, isn’t ending the discomfort what God would want? But when Jesus speaks, it is not only as starving human but also as Desert God. The passage He quotes is made from His own words, in His own desert, two millennia before. He says, “what you’re offering seems like it will satisfy me, but it won’t. The point is not to end the discomfort. The point is to meet with God.” Jesus beats the Deceiver twice more before beginning the most formative ministry in the history of the world.
What Z was offering seemed like it would satisfy me. All that warmth and energy seemed exactly what I needed in a string of years that felt chilly and dark. Z is all light and motion. He is waves of heat. He promised a chance to combat the loneliness, a relief in a difficult time of testing and a difficult land. A “good morning” each day. Stolen kisses in crowded rooms. Always the understanding that it was the real thing. This feeling is warm bread after forty days of starving. It is being the first to spot the Promised Land over a dry, crumbling hill. Anyone who has ever felt like this already knows it’s an addicting high, worth chasing forever. Anyone who hasn’t experienced it is almost better off. I know because I am here, in the aftermath of something I thought was a healing flood, but was actually a sand storm. Full of clouds without moisture. A deluge that left me drier. Feel these pointy hips protrude as I fail to push Z’s message from my mind. Hear my stomach growl and lurch. Look at my eyes, dry as bones.
This is what the Sovereign LORD says to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life. I will attach tendons to you and make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you, and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the LORD.
The God I follow often brings His people into the desert, but we are always surprised about it. We cannot believe that our good father could take us someplace so difficult for us. We are shocked, offended when He lets the wilderness be as harsh as it is. “We were better off as slaves in Egypt,” cry the Israelites early in their forty-year journey to nowhere, “at least there we had food. How could the Lord leave us here with nothing?” But God is at home here in the wild. He is unbothered by the starkness, unfazed that the elements seem out of control. None of it makes Him afraid.
God does not take the Israelites back to Egypt or hasten their journey in the Promised Land, but He doesn’t let them starve, either. Instead, the Lord creates a new kind of sustenance for His nation when He hears their cries. It comes from heaven every day in exactly the amount they need and lasts until the next morning. Exodus says it appeared with the morning dew, and it looked like “thin flakes, like frost” on the desert floor. It remains an unexplained mystery. It’s considered a true miracle. And the Israelites groan. They grow weary of the food and of depending on God for it. They hoard the manna and hide it away, and cry again when it has spoiled and rotted in their tents.
“I was better off with Z,” I cry to Him now, hollow in the cheeks, posing for photos, wasted by heartbreak, “At least then I had someone. How could you leave me here with nobody?” I wonder how long it will be before He tires of me, holding on to something dead, letting rot linger on my skin. What will it take for me, stomach in knots, unrecognizable, to stop pining for my own slavery? How dry, how dead will I have to become, before He can no longer bring me back?
So I prophesied as I was commanded. And as I was prophesying, there was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone. I looked, and tendons and flesh appeared on them and skin covered them, but there was no breath in them.
The God I follow is a wild God. He brings His people into harsh lands, exposes them to dryness and death, and expects us to trust Him. It is a terrifying command, but it is one He never asks us to obey on our own. His Israelites live on heavenly food, exactly enough, every day for four decades. They murmur and complain and walk in circles until Moses has died. I think about them now, as I murmur and complain from my desert floor. He was there to meet them each morning, even though He should have been tired of them. Oh Lord, shouldn’t you be tired of me?
And then, as promised, the wandering ends. The Lord comes to Moses’s second-in-command and bellows one of the most-quoted speeches of the Bible. “Have I not commanded you?” He booms, “Be strong and courageous!” It is time to leave the desert and enter the new land. The very next chapter shows God’s people crossing the Jordan River into the Promised Land. After a generation of waiting, wilderness, and death, the Lord’s words are the rattling sound of a new age.
Then He said to me, “Prophesy to the breath; prophesy, son of man, and say to the breath, Thus says the Lord GOD: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe on these slain, that they may live.” So I prophesied as He commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived and stood on their feet, an exceedingly great army.
The God I follow is a kind God. He is aware that we are afraid of deserts. He does not delight in our pain. The prophet Elijah, in his desert, runs until he collapses under a shrub and asks to die. “I have had enough, Lord,” he says from the ground, “take away my life.” God does not let him die under the bush, nor does He urge His devastated servant to continue running on his own. Instead, the Lord lets Elijah stay where he is for two days, sleeping in his desert misery. God only wakes him when it is time to eat, baking bread for Elijah with His own miraculous hands. I think about Elijah as I lie in the dead grass, camera flashing around me. Did betrayal fill his stomach like it fills mine? Did he also find it hard to eat?
But the two miserable, sleepy days end, and the next chapter brings Elijah out of the desert and into one of the greatest prophetic moments of the Old Testament. “What are you doing here, Elijah?” God asks. Elijah weeps back, “I have been so zealous for you, God, but all my friends have been killed, and now I will be killed, too.” I was so zealous for him, God, but all my hopes have been killed. In response, God brings Elijah to the top of the mountain. And as the Lord passes by, He shows Elijah a ferocious wind, then a furious earthquake, then a terrible fire. But surprisingly, God is not in these. This time, the Desert God reveals Himself to Elijah as a soft, low whisper. A sound like a breath. And the breath tells Elijah, “Go.”
Then He said to me: “Son of man, these bones are the people of Israel. They say, “Our bones are dried up and our hope is gone; we are cut off.” Therefore prophesy and say to them: “This is what the Sovereign Lord says: My people, I am going to open your graves and bring you up from them; I will bring you back to the land of Israel. Then you, my people, will know that I am the LORD, when I open your graves and bring you up.”
The God I follow is a resurrecting God. Just three years after rebuffing the devil in the desert, The Lord in human form was beaten and betrayed and killed by people He loved. And in the agonizing hours before His death, He may have looked out over the same desert through which He’d led His people in fire and cloud centuries before. There was no one to meet Him in the agony this time. No bread or manna provided. No one to quench the dryness or the loneliness of His soul. This time, the Desert God took the weight of His own wrath, and let it consume Him, and did not complain. And for three days, things were empty and bleak as a scorching desert sky. I wonder, gazing into my own sky, how Jesus’s friends felt during these three days, when the Person they’d put all their hopes in had died. Did three days seem like forty years? Did they feel as dead as I feel when they had buried His bones?
And then, filled with new breath, the stone over the tomb removed with a rattling sound, He was alive again. Once more inserting Himself into His people’s misery, He shocked His devastated friends, victorious after what must have been the driest and emptiest days of their lives.
I will put my Spirit in you and you will live, and I will settle you in your own land. Then you will know that I the LORD have spoken, and I have done it, declares the LORD.
These have been the driest and emptiest days of my life. My heart is broken. My back is broken. And the person I trusted has shown me exactly how little worth I have to him. I am a pile of dusty bones and a dimmed, ruined spirit. And I am here, in a desert, exactly where God has done some of His best work. In the dryness I am fighting to turn my suffering into something I can offer the Lord, who has not pushed me as I cry under shrubs or yearn for enslavement. An offering, in the desert, to my Desert God. Listen with me to this wilderness wind for a rattling sound, for a breath. What do you think, Z? Can these bones live?
The God I follow is a Desert God, and to follow Him is to become a Desert person. Perhaps, like Elijah, it happens because of circumstances beyond our control. Perhaps, like the Israelites and I, we’ve stubbornly run here ourselves. In both cases, He is unafraid of letting us feel the harshness of the elements. And in both cases, He does not leave us to despair. The great desert stories are about transitions and beginnings. They precede the stories of great revelation. The Israelites cross the river into the land God promised them. Elijah stands up and finds that he is not alone. Jesus leaves the devil and begins His ministry. He leaves the grave and the world is never the same. What will it be for me, this bony woman in dry grass? What will He say to me in this wilderness, when He has finished wresting my heart from my deceiver with a breath and a rattle? What would you say about me now, son of man? Can these bones live?
Hear that on the four winds? A rattling sound. Feel that beneath my bones? A breath.