Today, (actually, October 24 - I am doing these devotionals in advance because of my trip to Israel) we visited two important places in the Jezreel Valley area of Israel. First, we visited the spring where Gideon took 10,000 men to drink and God selected 300 of them to be his army. In the middle of this desert land, there is a spring that bubbles out of the ground. Right now, it is just a trickle. In the winter, when there is more rain in Israel, it has more water coming out.
We also saw a cistern dug into the hillside in Nazareth, one that likely dates to the time of Christ, at what is called the Nazareth Village - which replicates the world of Nazareth in the time of Jesus. A cistern is a deep hole in the ground designed to capture, purify and hold water.
When people live in a place like Israel, water is a most important commodity. No one can live without water but it is scarce and precious in the Holy Land. People need water to live, so they either live near springs or the dig deep cisterns. Cisterns do okay as long as there is rain, but in dry times, a spring is so much better.
Jeremiah 1-2 not only records God's call on Jeremiah's life, but also his complaint against the people of Israel. In Jeremiah 2, he laments (speaking for and under the guidance of God) that the people have done an unthinkable thing. Look at verse 13, where he identifies the evil they have done.
13 For My people have committed a double evil:They have abandoned Me,the fountain of living water,and dug cisterns for themselves,cracked cisterns that cannot hold water.
Israel has done two terrible things. First, they have abandoned the well, the spring of living water that would constantly sustain them and satisfy their thirst. Then, the went out and tried to replace the living water of God with their own idolatrous cisterns - but these cisterns were broken and held no water.
God is the source of living water - life, hope, joy, peace, forgiveness, salvation. He is the only source and has provided these things to use through Jesus Christ and his work on the cross. What follow it is when we fail to seek the living water he gives and we seek the cisterns of this world that attempt to provide us water, but cannot. Pleasure. Money. Power. Self. Knowledge. So many things offer life and hope to us, but they are cracked cisterns and can never satisfy.
Father, may I drink deeply of the living water that flows only from your Son, and may I never mimic the sin of the Israelites in seeking the water of life from anyone else.
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