JOHN192 - Living Water in the Old Testament

0:18 Hello, my friends. It's Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour podcast. And years ago, I told you that I play tennis. And I've learned a lot about it. And I'd like to think I'm getting better. I also think that I get really into it when I am in the middle of playing. Last week I played for two hours, just nonstop, no breaks.

0:35 I don't know why we didn't take more breaks. I know we should. We didn't. The guy's a good player. He it's super long rallies when I play with this dude. He just hits in forever. He's really stoic. He doesn't get upset. He was playing better than me and he he did outplay me. He got me the other day. And then I'm driving home and I'm like, huh, I'm a little thirsty.

0:52 It's probably because I didn't drink much water during tennis. And then I got home and I got myself a little drink, and that first drop of water hit my tongue. I was like, dang, I'm not a little thirsty. I'm a lot thirsty. And I just guzzled water at the sink for I don't know how long, but it was probably an unsafe amount of water that I drank.

1:14 And then I went and stood around for a few minutes. I was like, you know what I could go for? More water. It is the thing I need, even though I wasn't aware of how much I needed it. Likewise, this lady at the well just does not realize how much she needs this living water that Jesus is talking about in John 4.

1:31 Maybe cognitively she knows. At worst, this lady appears to have been average in her understanding of theological stuff. And she's got no idea what Jesus is talking about when he says to 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.

1:51 But then, you know, I get to think about myself. And I'm like, all right, I'm gonna do a podcast, and people are gonna listen to it. It's gonna be about the Bible, it's got Bible verses and stuff in it. And obviously I know what living water means because I do this for a living. I I even went to college for it.

2:09 And then I got to thinking, man, I don't think I know where all the living water stuff is in the Old Testament, huh? That is, I, me, Matt W, am not positioned to understand this the way the original audience would have when the phrase, the key phrase, living water, happens here from Jesus. I'm like, well, I should probably go learn all of that.

2:28 And then after I take some time to brush up on it, I should probably go tell all my friends from the internet about what Jesus was probably referencing or invoking here when he said living water. And maybe the Samaritan lady would have known all the things that Jesus was invoking with this imagery and with this language, all the ways this was a callback to Bible stuff.

2:46 Maybe she wouldn't have. Maybe the original Jewish audience who was reading John's gospel, written a few decades after the incident here at the well that's being described, maybe they would have known all of these callbacks. Maybe all of you know all of these callbacks, and I'm the only one who doesn't.

3:01 But whatever the case, we're gonna get up to speed on this, and as we do, I think what we're going to find is that much like I really didn't understand how much I needed that water after that two hours of poorly hydrated tennis, so it is entirely conceivable that anybody, even religious people, even people who have a cursory knowledge of the issues and the stuff of scripture, might not really understand just how big a deal the living water that Jesus is talking about is and how thirsty for it we actually are, whether we detect it or not.

3:34 Genesis 26. Abraham has died. His son Isaac is in the prime of his life. He's married to a lady named Rebecca, and there's a famine in the land, and God tells Isaac, All right, you gotta go live among the Philistines under the rule of a guy named King Abimelech. And Abimelech seems okay, but Isaac's concerned that Abimelech and the other Philistines are gonna have eyes for his wife, Rebecca.

4:00 So he's like, That's my sister. I don't know exactly how he thought that would help, but he takes a page out of his dad's playbook, Abraham did that to mixed effect, when he was in the prime of his life. And so Isaac tries it with Rebecca. And then at one point, Abimelech is looking down from his palace window, and he quote, saw Isaac caressing his wife Rebecca.

4:22 That is a Bible euphemism. So Abimelech summoned Isaac and said, She's really your wife. Why'd you say she's my sister? And Isaac answered, Well, I mean, because I thought I might lose my life on account of her. Then Abimelech said, What is this you've done to us? One of the men might well have slept with your wife, and then you would have brought guilt upon us.

4:42 So Abimelech gave orders to all the people. Anyone who blessed this man or his wife shall surely be put to death. So I don't know. I mean, was this a good idea for Isaac to do this or not? I mean, he sort of lands on his feet. There were no doubt rumors floating around about what happens if you mess with Abraham from similar earlier situations.

5:00 So Isaac gets put under the protection of the king. I mean, that's pretty cool. So he plants crops and he gets rich, and then the Philistines start to envy him. And this is where we pick it up with the living water theme that we're talking about right now. Verse uh 15 of Genesis 26. So all the wells that his father's servants had dug in the time of his father Abraham, the Philistines stopped up, filling them with earth.

5:25 What are we doing? Then Abimelech said to Isaac, Move away from us, you've become too powerful for us. So Isaac moved away from there and encamped in the valley of Gerar and settled there. Isaac reopened the wells that had been dug in the time of his father Abraham, which the Philistines had stopped up after Abraham died, and he gave them the same names his father had given them.

5:45 Isaac's servants dug wells in the valley and discovered a well of fresh water there. But the herdsmen of Gerar quarreled with Isaac's herdsmen and said, This water is ours. So he named the well Esek because they disputed with him. I guess Esek just means dispute. Then they dug another well, but they quarreled over that one also.

6:05 So he named it Sitna, which means opposition, apparently. He moved on from there and dug another well, which is now like another, another, another, another well, and he named it Rehobath, which means like room, like space. He named it Reobath, saying, Now the Lord has given us room and we will flourish in the land.

6:26 So step one on our journey of understanding this concept of living water, which I think will be a two-day process, has us up to the point where we are understanding that water, going all the way back to really the earliest times in the Bible, all the way back to Genesis, is a picture of God's blessing.

6:44 It's also something people can quarrel and squabble over. And we also know Isaac's son Jacob is the guy who lends his name to the very well that Jesus and the Samaritan woman are sitting at. The well that Jesus sort of uses as an initiating event to describe the idea of living water. But with the time we have left, let's flip ahead to Numbers 19, where we see a little bit more of this ancient theme of living water or cleansing water being introduced in the Old Testament.

7:20 Now, this story is even weirder than the last one that I gave you. Here we're getting the account of the sacrifice of a special kind of cow, a special offering, a red heifer without defect or blemish. Sometimes you'll see stuff about the red heifer coming up and end times-y conspiracy-ish YouTube videos that are vaguely about the Bible or Israel or things like that.

7:42 And it's kind of a reference back to all of this stuff here. There's a really, by modern terms, very strange-sounding ritual or cleansing rite that goes along with this thing. If you can set aside some of the super ancient, we don't think this way anymore, kind of weirdness of it, you can see the larger biblical theme of cleansing here that is in play, starting in verse 17 of Numbers 19.

8:07 For the unclean person, put some ashes from the burned purification offering into a jar and pour fresh water over them. Then a man who is ceremonially clean is to take some hyssop, dip it in the water, and sprinkle the tent and all the furnishings and the people who were there. He must also sprinkle anyone who has touched a human bone or a grave or someone who's been killed or someone who's died a natural death.

8:34 The man who is clean is to sprinkle the unclean person on the third and seventh days, and on the seventh day he is to purify him. The person being cleansed must wash his clothes and bathe with water, and then everything will be clean. And then interestingly, right after that is when we get the quarrel over water, like, oh, that's how we're supposed to do stuff.

8:53 Yeah, but there's not even any water. And then Moses gets mad and he strikes the rock, and that's and the water flows. He does that in disobedience to God. And so there's just a whole bunch of water imagery here again in Numbers 19 and 20 out in the desert. You got imagery here that points to God being the provider of water.

9:14 Both stories in Genesis and Numbers have people behaving poorly over the pressure that comes with having a limited amount of this very precious resource. But also you've got the idea of cleansing and the consistency of God being attached to the idea of this clean water, this purifying water. Now, look, at this point, we're kind of two examples into our journey through the Old Testament of things having to do with living water.

9:42 And you might be like, well, I don't really know how much we have to go on there. Seems like this has got a ways to go before it takes shape. And to that, I would say, bingo. Yeah, the imagery is going to mature and flourish and be fleshed out the further through the Old Testament we go, so that by the time we get to the New Testament, this image is actually teed up, just on a T, ready to swing at for Jesus to tap into this metaphor in a way that's going to make sense to the original audience, and I think makes sense eventually to the Samaritan woman at the well, but definitely to make sense to us.

10:15 Somehow the idea of living water has to do with scarcity in the desert, the provision of God, the timeless provision of God. Jacob's well is still flowing, but also it has to do with stuff that a little bit has undertones of baptism, and also has undertones of the sacrifice and the forgiveness of sins.

10:36 I mean, there's a lot going on here, and we'll keep unpacking it tomorrow. In the same way that after two hours of tennis, I should have known how thirsty I was and how much water would hit the spot, but I didn't. So this Samaritan woman, and you and I, dear reader of the Bible, should probably know how much we need, whatever this living water is that Jesus is talking about.

10:58 But hey, sometimes you just don't notice your thirst right away. But hopefully, here today and tomorrow, we'll uh have that more in focus and better understand how much we all need and yearn for this living water that Jesus is talking about. All right, that's good for now. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast.

11:15 Let's do this again soon.