Imagine a sin so terrible the stars shake in horror. Imagine a transgression that appalls the planets. Imagine evil that astonishes the angels, shocks the sun, and makes the moon shudder. What could be so bad that the Judge of all the earth calls the cosmos into the courtroom to testify against it?
Be appalled, O heavens, at this; be shocked, be utterly desolate, declares the Lord, for my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water. (Jeremiah 2:12–13)
God names two great evils: first, not drinking from the fountain of living water and, second, trying to drink from broken tanks that cannot hold water. According to God, evil — that appalls angels and shocks the heavens — is refusing to be satisfied in God and seeking to be satisfied anywhere else. Where we seek to be satisfied is a matter that concerns the highest heavens.
Parched Hearts
Jesus exposes the same arid evil in his gracious pursuit of a Samaritan woman. He has set his sovereign sights on making her a worshiper of the Father. He offers her living water, but she is wary (John 4:10, 13–14). Uninterested, incredulous, imperceptive, and, yes, a touch sarcastic, this woman will not surrender easily.
He identifies her broken cistern: “Go, call your husband, and come here” (verse 16). After she denies having a husband, Jesus replies, “You are right . . . you have had five husbands [literally, you have had five men], and the one you now have is not your husband” (verses 17–18). The love of our Lord here is surgical, exposing this woman’s parade of sexual encounters and her parched soul.
Like every other person, like God’s people in Jeremiah 2, this woman has an ocean-sized thirst, a pining deep as the soul, a yearning yawning wide as the human heart. And she has been trying to fill that abyss with men. She moves from man to man, cistern to cistern, trying to sate a longing only God can satisfy.
That is like trying to fill an ocean with a thimble. You might as well attempt to top off the Grand Canyon with a teaspoon. Don’t we all know the futility of this attempt? If you are an unbeliever, you live in this parched place. If you are a believer, oh, how tragically often we stray here.
“Our thirsty hearts are so prone to wander from the fount of every blessing.”
We each have our thimbles and our teaspoons. If honest, don’t you know what it’s like to scurry from mudhole to mudhole, thinking the next dirty mouthful will satisfy? The next drink, the next meal, the next partner, the next child, the next date, the next dollar, the next show, the next scroll, the next click — on and on. No stability of desire. Endlessly digging cisterns that can hold no water. Friend, these thimbles can never fill an ocean.
But Jesus offers us something to satisfy our soul-thirst.
His Ocean
Jesus uses three images to capture what he offers this woman and anyone else who will come:
If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, “Give me a drink,” you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water. . . . The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life. (John 4:10, 13–14)
The gift of God, eternal life, and living water — three images help us imagine what Jesus offers us — namely, enjoying the Father through the Son by the Spirit. In the immediate context, we know that God’s gift is the gift that is God, the Father’s gift of the Son. “God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son” (John 3:16). Elsewhere in the New Testament, the gift of God most often refers to the gift of the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:38; 8:20; 10:45; 11:17; Hebrews 6:4; Ephesians 4:7).
Jesus later defines eternal life as knowing the Father and the Son (John 17:3), and from the rest of John, we learn that this knowledge comes by the witness of the Spirit (14:26; 15:26).
When we look at the image of living water, we find the same reality. A few chapters later, in John 7:37–38, Jesus says, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.’” Immediately, John comments that the living water here is the Spirit (7:39). And to come to the Son is to come to the Father (John 1:18; 14:7–9). They are inseparable (1:1; 10:30; 17:11). By inviting us to come, Jesus beckons us to swim in the ocean of Trinitarian fullness (15:11; 17:26)!
He means to satisfy her soul — and ours — by giving her God. He invites us into the infinite life and joy of the Trinity. But he does not merely beckon us to come to the fountain. No, he puts the fountain within us. We never need to run to empty cisterns again. By giving us his Spirit, Jesus gives us an internal waterfall of leaping life. He increasingly turns our desert heart into Eden with a spring that will never go dry.
Come, Come, Come
Why, then, do we still feel thirsty? How often — with dry tongues — do we echo the cry of the poets, “My soul thirsts for God!” (Psalm 42:1–2; 63:1)? Our joy is not always full. The garden sometimes wilts. We still say with this woman, “Give me this water.”
To answer, we must circle back to Jesus’s surprising words: “Go, call your husband” (John 4:16). Remember, to woo her to his well, Jesus shows her cisterns cracked and empty. By exposing her ocean-sized thirst, Jesus leaves her only two paths to take: return to the dry places or “come to the waters” (Isaiah 55:1). He leaves no other route open. She cannot continue to wallow in the mud and plunge into the ocean at the same time.
And neither can we. Our thirsty hearts are so prone to wander from the fount of every blessing. We often stray back to the mudholes Christ freed us from. Even after we believe, the drinking is not automatic. We must continually abandon waterless sins and come back to the fountain.
After all, Jesus does not eliminate our thirst. When he says, “Whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again” (John 4:14), he means, “You will need never go to another fountain. No more empty cisterns. You have unlimited, eternal access to the ocean.” After first tasting and seeing that the Lord is good, no one says, “That was enough for me. I’ve had my fill. Farewell, thirst.” God abhors that kind of stagnant religion. No, the desire of the saints is increased. But we must constantly bring that thirst back to the only one who can satisfy it.
We — like the Samaritan woman — have uninterrupted admission to the ocean. But we still must come. Living water is an already–not yet reality. We already have access to the fountain, but we have not yet drunk nearly enough. So come. Come each Sunday to savor the heady brew of Christian communion. Come each morning to drink down God’s word and make your soul happy in him. Come each minute in prayer “that your joy may be full” (John 16:24). Come, come, come, and keep coming!
The Spirit and the Bride say, “Come.” And let the one who hears say, “Come.” And let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who desires take the water of life without price. (Revelation 22:17)