The vision given to Ezekiel of the ‘Valley of Dry Bones’ is confronting on many levels. Can these bones live? God alone knows! (Ezekiel 37:3). This raises the reality of God’s utter sovereignty and humanity’s total inability when it comes to life-giving salvation. This truth was as true for the house of Israel as it is for people today. All people are bone-dry dead in a spiritual sense. Our hearts are rock-hard toward God (Ezekiel 36:26). We need God to work to give us new life.

We saw this in Ephesians 2:1-5, which makes it clear that regeneration must precede saving faith. Paul, under divine inspiration, used the word “dead” in these verses for a reason. There is no middle ground between being alive and being dead. Unregenerate men are not just sick, handicapped or impaired but dead.

W. E. Best (in Regeneration and Conversion) writes:

The Bible in many places tells sinners that they are dead and must be resurrected. Obviously, one who is spiritually dead can no more see spiritual truth or choose Christ than a rotting corpse can play tennis or debate philosophy. A Christian can quote Scripture and speak the gospel to an unsaved person from morning until late in the evening. But if the gospel message is not accompanied by the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit that person will not believe. You may use all human persuasion possible, but you cannot give spiritual life where death reigns. God alone, by a creative act, can bring life out of death. Spiritual arguments to an unregenerate man are only warm clothes to a corpse. Man can no more turn to God than the dead can sit up in their coffins. He can no more originate a right desire than he can create a universe. God and God the Holy Ghost alone, by sovereignty, special interference, calls dead sinners to life, and ‘creates’ within them the desires of their hearts”

As the man who is born blind has no power to see, the unregenerate man whose mind is spiritually darkened (Ephesians 4:18; 5:8), whose heart is made of stone and devoid of spiritual sense (Ezekiel 36:26), cannot know spiritual truth or do anything spiritually good. Therefore, Paul could declare, “But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Corinthians 2:14). The apostle tells us plainly that the natural man (that is the unregenerate person who is devoid of the Spirit of God) does not receive any spiritual truths from God at all because he regards such things as foolish, stupid, even ridiculous.

The Lord Jesus Christ taught us that human nature is so thoroughly corrupted by the fall that the Holy Spirit must first radically change it before a person can understand and embrace spiritual truths. In words that echo the promises found in Ezekiel 36-37, He said to the Pharisee Nicodemus “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see [comprehend, perceive] the kingdom of God” (John 3:3).

Let’s praise God for His life-giving sovereign ability that overcomes our desperate inability!