JOHN193 - The Water Keeps Getting Deeper

Hey my friends, it's Matt. This is the 10-Minute Bible Hour Podcast. I got a quiz for you today. I've put together, it's it's fun. It's a participation exercise. I like it when we do this. This is the way this is gonna work. I have assembled a list of motion pictures that all have at least two things in common, two things that I'm thinking of.

And I'm gonna reel these off to you right now, and then you see if you can see the pattern. Okay, here we go. This is my list. The Sixth Sense, Fight Club, Memento, The Prestige, The Usual Suspects, Shudder Island, The Others, and Knives Out. What do you got? I'm just gonna stall for a second so you can think five, four, three.

I'm just over here. Two one. Okay, here are the two things I think they have in common. Number one, they're all bad, and no one should watch any of these movies or any movie ever. And the only reason I watched them was to better understand and relate to bad people who would watch movies. If this is your first day, here we joke about me never recommending movies at all.

I don't recommend any of these. The second thing that they have in common is that they're all breadcrumb movies, where throughout the course of the show, you just got these little nuggets, these little hints along the way that maybe as you're going along, you're like, I don't totally understand why that's there, whatever, but that was on screen.

Okay, fine. I don't understand why that character made that remark, but fine, whatever. And there's a bunch of those that kind of add up. But then when the time is exactly right, toward the end of the movie, boom! There's this payoff moment where all of those little themes and nuggets and breadcrumbs along the way suddenly come into focus and are reframed.

And you as a viewer, you go, Whoa, what incredible craftsmanship! That was so well done. You led me right there, and now the payoff moment is so much more rich because of that groundwork. I maybe didn't totally understand as I was watching through the movie the first time around. I should probably go watch this again or never watch anything.

Likewise, the Bible is the book that is it's just the master of that particular storytelling technique. The way the Bible raises up images and drops these little breadcrumbs and nuggets along the way and then pays it off at the perfect time is one of the things that, as you become more familiar with the Bible, more causes you to say, wow, there's like God is behind this.

The through lines are all there. And then by God's providence and ordination, these little themes, these nuggets, and there's so many of them, they all pay off at just the right time. John chapter four is one of those payoff moments for a lot of reasons, but the one the reason that we're focusing on right now is this theme of living water woven into the whole Bible, the whole all of redemptive history.

That's the scene we get. Jesus draws, pun intended, on the imagery of the well and the water that comes out of it to pay off this theme, this motif, this breadcrumb trail that has been scattered throughout the Old Testament leading up to this moment. We started working on it yesterday as we looked at the origins of the idea of purifying water, cleansing water from deep in the Old Testament.

And that stuff that we looked at yesterday in Genesis and Numbers, in part would seem to be a contributor to the very recent practice of immersion baptism that came to exist somewhere between the Old Testament and the New Testament. It looks like some of the more deeply committed, communal, poverty-embracing followers of God at that time, who often lived out in the desert.

Looks like they started to latch on to this imagery of ceremonial washing and ceremonial cleaning. And then it looks like under the direct influence of God, John the Baptist latches on to some of these sensibilities that have been percolating for a couple of millennia about ritual cleansing and washing.

And he kind of captures that imagery and flips it into this baptism of repentance. The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and be baptized. And Jesus picks up where John the Baptist left off and runs with it. So it is no coincidence that the previous passage, John 3, that we just finished, is a passage about water and baptism and cleansing and the spiritual side of all of that.

And then we immediately pivot over to more stuff about living water and this well that God provided to his people way back in the day, all very, very on purpose. But in the same way that the type of movie that we were talking about earlier gains imagery intensity as it rolls along. The what is a little hint at first, it takes on more character and flavor, more meaning as it goes along.

It's kind of like a meaning snowball in a story that works this way. And with every revolution, it picks up more meaning snow, and the meaning snowball gets bigger. And the payoff then, you know, gets real big when it gets to finally to the bottom of the hill to where it all pays off. So in John 4, when a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, Will you give me a drink?

His disciples had gone into town to buy food. And the Samaritan woman said to him, You're a Jew, and I'm a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink? The Jews don't associate with Samaritans. And 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.

Okay, so once again, we looked at the super Old Testament stuff where the little nugget of meaning gets deposited and flicked downhill. But then that nugget of meaning picks up a ton of momentum by the time we get toward the end of the narrative, the timeline of the Old Testament, particularly in the writings of the prophet Jeremiah.

Check out Jeremiah 2, 11 through 13. This is not a happy passage, but it's one that points to what's happening in John 4. Has a nation ever changed its gods? Yet they're not gods at all, lowercase g. But my people have exchanged their glory, capital G, for worthless idols. Be appalled at this, O heavens, and shudder with great horror, declares the Lord.

My people have committed two sins, they've forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns, that cannot hold water. So the imagery here is being employed to talk about idolatry. There's no living water with these lowercase fake G gods that you people have chased after instead of the god of Abraham, the god of your ancestors.

Yet you insist on doing it. Seems real to you, but it's a joke because not only will you not get the living water, but you imagine that you have stored up living water with these fake gods. And the cruel joke is that you've been putting it into a cistern in the ground, imagining, yeah, it's down there.

We got a pretty good supply of living water. We've been saving it up. I mean, we've not doing it like you know in the way of our ancestors. We've been just kind of doing it our own way. But the cruel joke is the cistern is broken, it's cracked, and all of that is just leaking into nothing. So it's a it's a farce.

Jeremiah continues with this theme in Jeremiah 17, starting in verse 12. A glorious throne exalted from the beginning is the place of our sanctuary. O Lord, the hope of Israel, all who forsake you will be put to shame. Those who turn away from you will be written in the dust, because they've forsaken the Lord, the spring of living water.

Jeremiah is written on the front end of a desert time in the history of God's people, in the history of redemption. They're headed toward a period of exile and suffering a metaphorical drought, if you will, a time when you would really want life-giving water, clean water, and they're not going to have it because they tried to store up fake water and broken cisterns, and they have forsaken the Lord, the spring of living water.

Then in my Bible, about 150 or so pages down the line, in Ezekiel 47, we hear from a prophet who's writing around the same time as Jeremiah and dealing with a whole lot of the same circumstances, a whole lot of the same issues, and he also invokes this language of water that, you know, back when we first encountered wells and water, just in the form of a story back in Genesis, and you know, there was a nugget, a hint of an idea there.

But now it's really picked up momentum through Jeremiah and here into Ezekiel, Ezekiel 47, 1. The man brought me back to the entrance of the temple, and I saw water coming out from under the threshold of the temple toward the east, for the temple faced east. So this is a vision of things that are to come that Ezekiel is being shown.

He then brought me out through the north gate and led me around the outside of the outer gate, facing east, and the water was flowing from the south side. As the man went eastward with a measuring line in his hand, he measured off a thousand cubits, and then led me through water that was ankle deep. He measured off another thousand cubits, and led me through water that was knee deep.

He measured off another thousand and led me through water that was up to the waist. He measured off another thousand, but now it was a river that I could not cross because the water had risen up and was deep enough to swim in, a river that no one could cross. He asked me, Son of man, do you see this?

Then he led me back to the bank of the river, and when I arrived there, I saw a great number of trees on each side of the river. He said to me, This water flows toward the eastern region and goes down to the Araba, where it enters the sea, when it empties into the sea, the water there becomes fresh. Swarms of living creature will live wherever the river flows.

There will be large numbers of fish because this water flows there and makes the salt water fresh. So where the river flows, everything will live. And then the rest of the prophecy fleshes out all the ways that life is going to happen and flow from this. Okay, so now we're really getting a picture. I mean, it's very explicit now.

Living water flows from the throne of God that brings life to things that were dead. Remember, that's strong imagery throughout Ezekiel. That's the book that gives us the Valley of Dry Bones scene where God brings all of the completely dead, dried-out corpses back to life. Well, now we're seeing a picture of the place where God lives and the throne on which he sits, and there's water flowing from the throne in all directions.

And unlike most water where it gets shallower the further away it gets from its source here, it's stacking up and stacking up so much that it flips the script. It doesn't just flow into the sea and that's the end. That's how freshwater usually works. The fresh water goes into the salt water and flips the salt water to living water.

Do you see how this imagery is setting up for the payoff that we're getting in John chapter 4? It's about life, life that only God can give, life that through the ages foolish people have ascribed to other sources, but it's all from God. Remember John 1:4, in him was life, and that life was the light of men.

Jesus is life. He's the author of it, he's the sustainer of it, he's the giver and distributor of it. God makes life where there is death. And now Jesus is here talking with this Samaritan woman who understandably, we can give her a pass for this, just doesn't get all the layers of what's happening. I mean, the conversation comes at her really quick, but in retrospect, it becomes clear to us and clear to her that what Jesus is saying about living water and what it is that he can give her is not just some new religious innovation that Jesus is making up or that some bad writer is like throwing together at the end, like, oh no, let's have something in here about water to try to make this last scene

kind of good. So maybe people forget about how bad and unprepared we were with the rest of the book. No, it's a master stroke. It's a payoff of something that has been building, an image that has been building momentum so that when it hits and it pays off, it pays off that much harder. And we will continue to plumb the depths of that tomorrow.

I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.

JOHN193 - The Water Keeps Getting Deeper

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