Living Water {Part III}

This concept of En Gedi just won’t shake off me. For the last couple of weeks I see things and go, “Yep, that’s a dead sea,” or “Why am I trying to draw water out of this cistern?! What in the world was I thinking??!”
That last quote especially rang true last week. I tried to do one of those health “cleanse” things. Yeah right. You know, the ones where you eat only fruit for days on end? Anyway, what it appears to me to be is really just glorified starvation. Grody.
Needless to say, I was on track to do a seven day cleanse when on day three I saw my parents and was just….annoyed. I would need to put money in the nasty jar, let’s just put it that way.
“What in the world is your problem?” my mother asked me, to which, in my hunger-induced delirium, I shouted at her, “I’m starving! Back off!”

Well. That was it. I wasn’t going to be THAT nasty anymore.

So I broke down.
Give.Me.Real.Food.Now.
I was ravenous.
And I knew I would be that way. The whole time I was on this cleanse I was thinking “How good is a cleanse if all I am doing the whole time is planning my post-cleanse binge??! ‘First it’s going to be scrambled eggs and toast with loads of butter, then I am going to have peanut butter and jelly, puppy chow, sausage with maple syrup, a whole block of cheese, a loaded pork tenderloin, and top it off with a whole quart of heavy cream, chased with eggnog.’”
I will happily confess to that.

But I will tell you one serious thing that occurred to me while doing this. I have not hidden from any of you that earlier in my life I had some eating issues. And this cleanse reminded me a lot of those. I was strongly reminded of those hunger feelings.

And the whole time this “cleanse” was going on (when I wasn’t thinking about my post-cleanse feast) I was thinking, “WHAT IN THE WORLD WAS I THINKING ALL THOSE YEARS AGO????? How crazy was I??! THIS IS MISERABLE.”
And I was absolutely right. It>was>miserable.
I must have been crazy.

Ha.

Do you know anything about sailing or ocean travel? Pretty much Rule Number One to sailing and ocean life is DON’T EVER, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, DRINK SALT WATER.
Why?
Because it makes you go crazy.

How many of you have ever felt like you must have been crazy to have done something?

If you raised your hand, let me ask you this: How many of you have ever thought that the reason you were crazy enough to do that is because you were drinking salt water?
As in, you were drinking from a Dead Sea.

Did you ever put that connection together? Salt water, dead seas, cisterns….drinking out of those will make you go crazy. Sometimes crazy enough to do something that afterwards you think, “What in the world was my problem?!”

In Jeremiah there is a passage that talks about this. Chapter 2, verses 2-3.

“Go and cry in the hearing of Jerusalem, saying, ‘Thus says the Lord: “I remember you and the devotion of your youth, how as a bride you loved me, and you followed after Me through the wilderness, through a land not sown. Israel was holiness to the LORD, the firstfruits of his harvest.”

Wow-ee. This is young love. Do you remember feeling this way about Jesus, maybe from the early years, maybe from recent? It’s this kindness, this head-over-heels, “I will follow you anywhere—I would live in a desert with you,” kind of love.

And I wonder, “Then how does it change? How does it become kind of scared and totally not a “I would live in the desert with you” but more like a “I won’t trust you unless you give me a nice house and a well-paying job”?

When did we start demanding? When did we start going crazy? What made us to all of those salt water-induced things?

Like any relationship, our daily relationship (as opposed to our eternal relationship) with the Lord will have one of three ends:

1.       The end can be a stronger love

       2.       The end can be something miserable, stagnant, indifferent, unhealthy, and all that can    be said about it is that “It’s there.”
      3.       The end can be broken. Non-existent.

 If the beginning starts with the willingness, this kindness, and the end can look like the above, then I wonder, “What happened in the middle?” For, as the Bible says, He doesn’t change (Malachi 3:6). It’s US who change.

 Verses 5-7 Thus says the LORD: “What injustice have your fathers found in me, that they have gone far from Me, have followed idols, and have become idolaters? Neither did they say, ‘Where is the Lord, who brought us up out the land of Egypt, who led us through the wilderness, through a land of deserts and pits, through a land of drought and the shadow of death, through a land that no one crossed and where no one dwelt?’ I brought you into a bountiful country, to eat its fruit and its goodness.”

What happened in the middle? How did they, how do we, get to this point….to this idolatry, to this craziness, to this drinking out of the Dead Sea? Because I don’t ever want to go there again! I’ve had enough of this hunger/thirst induced craziness. This passage says that he brought us into this bountiful country where we can eat goodness. Think about it! How grand! Him walking us through those deserts (the ones we said we would go through, btw) was to give us GOODNESS! So what was OUR deal?  

How do we get to the point where the Lord asks us “What injustice have you found in me?” Where do we get off thinking HE is the bad guy, that he has, in fact, done some injustice to us?

This passage gives me, what I think, are a few answers.

Verse 8a,c The prophets did not say, “Where is  the Lord?” And those who handle the law did not know me…and [they] walked after things that did not profit.

Ah, I see. We forget. We forget and therefore forsake the “I would live in a desert with you” kind of love; we forget to ask “Where is the Lord?” resulting in us not knowing him anymore. We stop asking and we start not knowing him anymore, which leads us to…..

 Verse 11 Has a nation changed its gods, which are not gods? But my people have changed their Glory for what does not profit.

We change our God. Since we stopped inquiring of where he is, we started thinking that he is like the new god, the smaller god we changed our Glory for, that we went and took hold of. We thought he was something we possessed, not remembering that—no no. The true Glory possesses US. And what happens then, when we think we possess him and he doesn’t do exactly what we think he should? What happens when he doesn’t conform to the mold we are trying to push him into? Well, then we feel as if an injustice has been done to us (“What injustice have you found in me?” verse 5).

Verse 13 For my people have committed two evils: They have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and have hewn themselves cisterns—broken cisterns that hold no water.

Since we then feel an injustice (because he wouldn’t do JUST what we wanted him to do. We found out he wasn’t a genie), and since we have forgotten that he is our oasis in the desert, we forsake him and go looking for another water source. Thereby we find Dead Seas, things that look like they will profit us, for surely all of that water has to be thirst-quenching, it has to be refreshing, doesn’t it? But, alas, after drinking all of that salt water finally makes us go crazy, and do things we never would have done in our right mind we go and, well, we try to build our own cistern.

Our Glory, the one who led us through the desert, maybe he didn’t do just what we wanted, so we classified that as an injustice, which led us to drink from a dead sea.

And then we went crazy.

And now, well…now in this state we will take matters into our hands and build for ourselves a well that is just the exact shape we want. We can mold this water source, this cistern, we think, forgetting the whole time that any time we try to build a water source all we are ever going to get it something broken. Something that holds no Living Water. We are creating our own god, and nobody in the history of the world has ever had satisfactory results in doing THAT.

But all this really means is that we don’t understand the shape of the hole in our hearts, Wolfies! We tried to mold God into a little vase-sized God, thinking he only needs to fill us with some little amount of living water, for surely, our need isn’t that big. But we never realize that our need is actually the size of an oversized swimming pool—much bigger than we thought, much bigger than a vase, much bigger than what a broken cistern can hold!

In thinking that we possess God (because we stop asking him where he is), we become further disillusioned when we realize that we can’t form, calm down, and hold in our hand the Living Water.

Molding an oasis, the En Gedi, THE Living Water, into what we want? We really are crazy, aren’t we? We cannot tame a jungle waterfall. And let’s not consider that as an injustice. I don’t want us to be a people who willing followed him through a desert and then desert him so we can go crazy. I want us to be those who refuse to drink anything that isn’t Living Water, because, while Living Water might not be just what we want, I promise you that it will be exactly what we need.