Jesus, the Living Water

“In the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried, saying, If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink.  He that believeth on Me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of Living Water”.  John 7:37-38

Continuing from the last blog, when Jesus told the crowd that He would go but no matter how hard they looked for Him, they would not be able to find Him, they were perplexed at His statement.  They asked what he meant when He said that they would not be able to find Him.  They even wondered if He meant that He would go to the Gentiles.  If that is what Jesus meant, then for certain they wouldn’t find Him because they had no intention of going where the Gentiles lived.  To them, Gentiles were no better than mongrel dogs.  I am surely glad that Jesus didn’t see Gentiles like that.

As mentioned in the last blog, the time was the time of the Feast of Tabernacles.  Every day for seven days, the priest would pour out water from the pool of Siloam upon the altar in the temple.  These actions were symbolic of the water needed for crops and were done to ask God’s blessings on the land by the sending of rain for the coming year.  On the eighth day, these actions were not done, but instead, the people would recite a prayer for rain which to an agricultural community was a dire necessity.  Since water was vital to life, Jesus used water to illustrate to them about eternal life.  He told the people essentially the same thing that He told the woman at the well (John 4:10) who was in the process of collecting water for her daily needs.  He said that those who are thirsty to come to Him and drink, then they will have Living Water and will never thirst again.

Thirst is an internal need.  If you were really thirsty and stepped into the shower and let the water run over your head, but you didn’t drink any of it, you would still be thirsty.  You have to take the water internally in order to satisfy the need.  So it is with Christ.  You have to take Him internally to fill that spiritual thirst.  The physical belly is internal and so is the spiritual belly.  We can drink water and quench our thirst for a little while, but then we have to drink more.  We never exhaust the need for that good old H2O.  When Christ dwells within us, He supplies our needs for spiritual Water perpetually.  There is no need to fret and worry over things, because He supplies our spiritual needs from within.  Then we have the power to take this internal Living Water and share it with others.  We never run out because we receive a continual flow of that Living Water by way of the Holy Spirit, but the Holy Spirit had not yet been given because Jesus had not died, risen again, and ascended back to His Father at that time.

After Jesus made His statement about Living Water, a big argument began among the people.  Some called Him the Prophet, which was one of His titles, except the people didn’t realize the Prophet spoken of in Deuteronomy 18:15 was Christ.  They believed that God would send a prophet before the Messiah came, and they thought that prophet was Jesus, but not The Prophet.  Others claimed to believe that Jesus was indeed Christ, but some people spoke up and argued that Christ was to come from Bethlehem of the Seed of David, and all they knew was that Christ was from Galilee, many miles north of Bethlehem.  The people wanted to grab Jesus and take Him to the authorities, but God would not allow them.

Apparently there were officers present, but they returned to the chief priest and Pharisees emptyhanded.  When asked why they had not brought Him, they answered that no one had ever spoken like Jesus.  The Pharisees asked the officers if they had been deceived by this Man, and if any of the Pharisees had believed on Him.  They then said that only stupid people like the commoners fell for His words, thus they are cursed.  (The elites of today still believe that Christians are ignorant and uneducated.)  When the Pharisees asked, sarcastically, if any of them had been taken in by this Man, one of them who had come to believe in Jesus spoke up.  His name was Nicodemus.  He made the point that one shouldn’t be convicted of a crime unless he was permitted a trial or at least be allowed to defend himself.

The Pharisees gave a smart-aleck response by asking Nicodemus if he was also from Galilee, in effect, putting him down along with anyone who was from Galilee.  Apparently, the Pharisees, who prided themselves on their knowledge of the law and prophets, were not aware of the fact that Jesus had been born in Bethlehem.  Because He lived in Galilee prior to His ministry, they assumed that was His birthplace, and thus, it was impossible that He could be the Messiah.  They didn’t bother to do a background check on Jesus mostly because they didn’t want to know the truth.  Even if they had found out that He was born in Bethlehem, it probably wouldn’t have made any difference in the way that they treated Him since He didn’t fit their idea of the Messiah.

Most of the people that Jesus encountered, He didn’t condemn, except the religious leaders.  He called them “whited sepulchers” (Matthew 23:27)–all clean and shiny on the outside, but rotten to the core on the inside.  Many folks see the Lord as Someone who constantly condemns, just waiting to punish folks for their sins.  But He’s not like that.  He’s loving and merciful and long-suffering.  Had those religious leaders repented, He would have forgiven them and welcomed them into His family.  None of us are worthy of the sacrifice that Christ made for us, but He did it anyway.  As the saying goes, “Christians aren’t perfect, just forgiven”.  And that’s a pretty neat position to be in.