Living Water {Part One}

In all of my travels I have, surprisingly, never been to Israel. My parents and I had a trip planned to go there when I was in high school, but then my dad was helping some friends shingle their roof….and fell off. Which means that he broke his ribs, which means a cancelled trip.
Alas.
He was able to go a few years later and had a really incredible time. My father is the kind of man who has never met a stranger, which led him to have impromptu conversations with people from all over the world simply by him asking, “Do you speak English?”
At one point I believe this question led him to the caretaker of some holy site who gave them a personal tour of something apparently no one gets a tour of.
Neat-o.

Anyway. I don’t know why I told you that, other than to say that a few nights ago I was watching one of those “Walk through Israel” videos. You know the ones I mean? The videos of that Bible teacher on location in Israel who has an amazing way of bringing everything to life and making all of it seem just…so…real. Because he is where it all took place, suddenly making sense of all these eastern traditions those of us in the west are sometimes befuddled by (because as Ravi Zacharias would say, “Christianity is an eastern religion, don’t ever think it is not.”).

This particular video took place at a site called En Gedi. My father said that he had been there, but had no pictures.

(Google has pictures, though…yes)

Apparently in the middle of the desert, (which looks like this) :

there is a little oasis, if you will. A place of refreshing. En Gedi. I believe I have heard the term coined, “Streams in the desert” before and think this is aptly used here.

Isn’t that miraculous and enchanting? Right in the middle of the desert you have this! I think I need to go to Israel just to see it.

So the professor guy on the video starts talking and he says, “This is what they call Living Water.”
Ah yes. I have heard that phrase before, too.
And he said that when Jesus started using language like that everyone would have known what he was talking about. There is Living Water, like En Gedi, implying that it is fresh, clean, life-giving, and then there is what they called “Dead Water.” Water that didn’t move, water you had to pull out of a well, places that were called cisterns (which apparently are these rooms that had stagnant water in it where bugs would land and sometimes animals would die in. It was dusty water and dirty water, definitely not suitable for drinking).

It makes perfect sense then when Jesus says to the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4, “Will you give me a drink?” (verse 8) she replies with “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans).

His answer is what is interesting. Imagine if you will, there they are at a place of dead water, no movement, not fresh but it can be treated, and he is a Jewish man asking her for a drink.
“Jesus answered her ‘If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.’”

Do you see what he did there? At a place of dead water he made her mind go to En Gedi. To a stream in the desert. To something refreshing. To something not where she was drawing her water from. And undoubtedly he made her very confused. This was the wrong place to be talking about living water. Where in the world would he get it from?

“Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw from and the water is deep. Where can you get this living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his flocks and herds?”

Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

She had in her mind that even though the water she was drinking from was dead, it was the best kind of water since Jacob had been there. He was the founder of this well. But Jesus finds a problem with it.

Jesus almost disregards that Jacob founded this well because what was in it was dead water, and those who drink of it will thirst again.
This was no En Gedi.
En Gedi is water from the rock, not water from a stagnant source like this was. Man builds places to collect dead water, but God produces living water.
It comes from no well, man cannot conjure it up.
And here he was claiming that he could give her living water, even though he had nothing to carry it in! It’s not like he had it in his water bottle in his back pack and was going to pour it into her canteen! He was nuts. Who did he think he was?!!? she must have wondered.

*Breath catches in your throat over the realization*

Oh…

See, He KNEW who he was.

I just said it, and I will say it again: God produces living water; it comes from no well.

And there he stood saying that he could give it to her, even though he had nothing to carry it in.

Do you see? He wasn’t claiming he that he was like the channel to give it to her, meaning that he would have gotten it from the desert and brought it to her, he was claiming he was its source.
He was claiming he was the rock in the wilderness, he was claiming he was the stream in the desert, he was claiming he was the source of refreshing, of life, of purity. He was claiming he was better than her well, he was better than her dead water.

In the Psalms (63) David claims, “Oh God, you are my God, earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you, my body longs for you, in a dry and thirsty land where there is no water.”

Here David equates God to something you thirst for, and parallels this world to a dry land, a thirsty land…one in which there is no water. David says that the world is a desert, and God is…well…God is an En Gedi.
Not only a place, but a source, of living water in the desert.

Isn’t that crazy?! It all makes sense now! 

Are you drinking from the Living Water this morning? Or are you trying to satiate yourself with dead water? Dusty, dirty, not refreshing, and from a source built by human hands?

 And have you maybe fallen into the thinking of the woman at the well? Do you think your water source is good because, well….Jacob built it? Is he not one of the fathers of the faith, you might say? For years and years and years he has been revered, you might yell at me! I will say you are right on both accounts: there are fathers of the faith, yes, even fathers of your personal faith, and yes they are to be treated with some semblance of respect, you can like their preaching and teaching, but don’t ever confuse a “father of the faith” and what he says with the Founder of the faith. This may be harsh, but I don’t care whether Jacob himself built the well you are drinking of, I don’t care at all whether your faith lines up with the standards of some “father” to the nth degree and you have toed the line perfectly, if you are drinking out of a well built by any Jacob, you are drinking dead water.

Yeah, I know I just stepped on some toes.

But so did Jesus.
“Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst…”