Transcript
This morning I’d like to guide you on a very brief and concise Bible study. I have called the Bible study “Water Producing Water.”
One of the disadvantages of being human is that you make mistakes. One of the disadvantages of being a writer is that you write them down and send them out for other people to read. So this morning I want to talk about a mistake that I made in writing my very first book. Please do not draw the conclusion from this that I haven’t made any mistakes in my subsequent books. I’m very sure that I have.
But the one that I made in my very first book involves an important truth which we need to keep in focus. My first book was The Hungry Inherit, published originally by Moody Press, then published by Multnomah Press, and finally by Regency Viva. Only this last edition, the Regency Viva edition, corrected the mistake.
The Hungry Inherit, of course, begins by narrating the biblical story of the interview between Jesus and the Samaritan woman. It’s an extremely familiar story, so I will not repeat the details of the story this morning.
As I point out in the book, the statement of Jesus in John 4:10 unlocks the presentation that He makes to this woman. You will recall that Jesus said,
If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who says to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water.
This statement is fundamental to the discussion that follows. There are two basic facts that the woman needs to know. She needed to know, number one, the gift of God. And she needed to know, number two, who was speaking to her.
The exchange in verses 11–15 focuses on the gift of God. Verses 16–26 focus on who He, that is Jesus, actually is. Jesus’ final words to this woman are in verse 26. And they are these: “I who speak to you am He,” meaning, of course, the Christ.
I should have known better. How could a carefully constructed passage like this one have failed to present the climax that it obviously called for? I correctly concluded at last that I had missed something.
Another factor also played into this final decision. The words of Jesus in John 4:14 state,
But the water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life.
When looked at carefully, this statement implies that the water of life is not exactly equivalent to eternal life. Jesus does not say the water that I shall give him is everlasting life. Instead, what He really says is this: the water that I shall give him shall become a source of everlasting life. After all, that is exactly what a fountain is.
More precisely, the Greek word here is pēgē, which refers basically to a spring. But a spring is the source of water. Furthermore, Jesus says that this spring will leap up into everlasting life. Clearly Jesus does not precisely identify the water He gives as everlasting life. Instead He identifies it as the source of everlasting life.
The distinction I have just mentioned to you has certainly not always escaped the commentators. Sometimes yes, it has escaped them. But not always. For example, Raymond Brown, whose two-volume commentary on John is one of the major technical works on this book, states precisely the following:
The living water is not eternal life but leads to it.
Brown goes on to point out that many suggestions have been made about the meaning of living water. But then He adds this. Within the scope of Johannine theology there are really two possibilities. Living water means the revelation which Jesus gives to men, or it means the Spirit which Jesus gives to men.
Brown does not think that it is necessary to choose between these two options. I would say, however, that we have to reject the second option categorically. And we have to revise the first one.
The second of these options is wrong in the light of John 7:39. In that text we learn that the Spirit was not given until Jesus was glorified. This means, of course, He was not given until Pentecost. Therefore Jesus could not be offering the woman the gift of the Spirit.
Whatever He is offering, He is offering it right now. As John 4:10 states, “you would have asked and He would have given.” The woman understood that fact even if not the real nature of the gift. When she says in verse 15, “Sir, give me this water, that I may not thirst, nor come here to draw.”
The first option, however, is very close to the actual solution that I want to give to you. It is not quite right because Brown has not paid close enough attention to the design of the discourse.
The question is this: What could Jesus give the Samaritan woman that would in fact produce everlasting life? Let me repeat that question. That’s the question of this paper. What could Jesus give the Samaritan woman that would in fact produce everlasting life?
The answer is surprisingly simple. He could give her the fundamental truth that He Himself was the Christ. Does this truth produce everlasting life? You bet it does. Listen again to the famous words of John 20:31:
But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name.
The basic truth presented by the Gospel of John that Jesus is the Christ was precisely what this woman needed to hear. To believe it was to have life in His name. Thus this truth itself was the source of everlasting life.
The entire interview climaxes, therefore, when Jesus gives her this truth. In fact, in a very real sense she asks for it. Notice the climactic verses of our passage.
The woman hears Jesus describe her immoral life, marked by marriage after marriage. This leads to a new perception that she states in verse 19. She says, “Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet.” He was a prophet, of course. But that was not enough. This identification made Him only one of many.
But the woman is uncomfortable with the unexpected knowledge of her life. So she throws out that good old diversion: a religious debate, Jerusalem versus Mount Gerizim, verse 20.
But Jesus’ response to her question about worship in verses 21–24 is so impressive that a new thought occurs to her. Diplomatically she replies in verse 25, “I know that Messiah is coming, who is called Christ. When He comes, He will tell us all things.”
From a formal grammatical standpoint this is not a question or a request. From a functional standpoint it certainly is. Later she will say to the Samaritan men in verse 29, “Come, see a man who told me all things that I ever did. Could this be the Christ?”
In short, Jesus’ exposé of her life had Messianic implications for her. Messiah was going to tell us all things. And Jesus had told her all things about herself. Her statement to Jesus about the Messiah was therefore an indirect, cautious way of asking, “Are you by any chance the Christ? Please tell me.” In other words, it was a request for knowledge of His person.
Jesus’ answer is simple, direct, and categorical. Verse 26: “I who speak to you am He.”
Did she believe it? Certainly. As the Samaritan men could tell. For later they say to her in verse 42, “Now we believe, not because of what you said, for we ourselves have heard Him and we know that this is indeed the Christ, the Savior of the world.”
So when Jesus says, “I who speak to you am He,” He was giving her the living water that produces eternal life. When she received this truth in faith, that water became in her a source of water springing up into everlasting life. In short, it was water that produced water.
As a matter of fact, the word “springing up” translates the Greek verb hallomai, to leap up. The word suggests the tremendous resources of the spring from which it came. In the arid Middle East there was a qualitative difference between a spring from which water merely ran forth and one from which it leaped forth. This latter type of spring was one whose hidden supply of water was impressive and powerful. Once given an outlet, it surged out of the ground.
This understanding of the climax of the narrative pushes us back to John 4:10. After a closer look we discover that our Lord’s statement contains an element of ambiguity. Looked at carefully, His words can mean one of two things.
Option number one: If you knew, you would ask.
Option number two: If you had known, you would have asked.
The exact time frame for the asking is left ambiguous. Forgive me if I bore you momentarily with a grammar lesson. Once a teacher, always a teacher. You can take the teacher out of the seminary, but you can’t take the seminary out of the teacher.
It has been claimed that in contrary-to-fact conditions like the one we have here, the reference to present time is if both clauses contain an imperfect tense. If both clauses contain an aorist or pluperfect tense, the reference is to past time. The famous grammar Dana and Mantey maintains this rule. However, this rule is of doubtful validity. And it has been challenged, notably, for example, by Zerwick.
The hearer or reader of such statements would probably have had to deduce the time being referred to by the speaker or the writer. It is plausible that the woman herself initially heard Jesus’ words as referring to what she would do here and now. If she knew these facts, she may have understood it that way at first.
On later reflection, however, she could decide that what He really meant was this: she would already have asked if she had possessed this information. In other words, if she already had this knowledge, the asking and the giving would already have occurred. That, in fact, is what actually took place. She had asked indirectly if He was the Christ. He had given her the living water: “I am the Christ.” And now she knew the two things He specified. They were, one, the gift of God which opened the inward fountain of life. And two, who He was, namely the Christ.
To know the latter was to receive the former. Let me repeat this. The possession of the knowledge Jesus wants her to have would mean that the exchange was already completed. She would already have asked and He would already have given the living water.
Let me give you a comparable example of this in English. I might say to someone, particularly a host, something like this: “If you knew how hungry we are, you would have gone to the store, come back and cooked, and we would have eaten and been full.” I mean by that, if you had knowledge of our hunger, you would already have done all these things. You would have been to the store. You would have cooked. We would have eaten. And we would have been full.
Jesus’ words in John 4:10 are ambiguous. They are ambiguous, I would contend, about the time frame. I would also contend that Jesus’ ambiguity here is deliberate and intentional. In the fourth gospel Jesus more than once employs ambiguity as a teaching tool.
Some of these instances you will easily recall. John 2:19: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up,” misunderstood of Herod’s temple. John 3:3: “Unless one is born again, He cannot see the kingdom of God,” misunderstood as physical rebirth. John 6:53: “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you,” misunderstood of physically eating His physical flesh.
John 11:11: “Our friend Lazarus sleeps, but I go that I may wake Him up,” misunderstood of literal sleep. John 11:23: “Your brother will rise again,” misunderstood of the future resurrection. John 13:27: “What you do, do quickly,” misunderstood as asking Judas to buy something or to give alms.
Now listen very closely. Jesus employs ambiguity in John 4:10 as a way of providing later additional confirmation of His Messianic claim. Before the woman even considers asking Him, even indirectly, whether He was the Messiah, Jesus had predicted that she would. His words say, “You are going to ask for something and I’m going to give it to you.” And it was only after she had believed in Him that she could realize that she had asked for the truth about who He was. And He had given her the living water of that truth.
Messiah had already told her about her past, her repeated marriages. But in His first words to her He had said something about her immediate and eternal future. “You will ask,” very soon He says, “and I will give you the water that never ceases to flow.”
If the Christ was the one who was going to tell us all things, He had surely manifested that ability in His words to this woman. Both about her past and about what she was soon to do and to receive. Therefore she had every reason to be sure that His promise of an inner spring leaping up into everlasting life was equally true.
In the process of dealing so skillfully with this sinful lady, Jesus has set before us the awesome power of a simple truth. As even the Samaritan men later confessed, He is the Christ, the Savior of the world. And the salvation He gave when that truth was believed was drawn from the measureless reservoir of God’s infinite and unending life.
May I repeat that? And the salvation that He gave when that truth was believed was drawn from the measureless reservoir of God’s infinite and unending life.
Since the day Jesus opened a spring for this life in the soul of this woman, He has opened the same kind of spring in the hearts of literally millions and millions of people. But every time He does this, everlasting life gushes forth and leaps up with all the dynamic energy of the infinite reservoir from which it comes. That reservoir is never drained. It is never depleted. It still remains infinitely and eternally full.
The woman at the well is your prototype and mine if we are believers. The truth that Jesus is the Christ, the giver of life, has never lost even the smallest scintilla of its immeasurable power. It has worked in you. It has worked in me. And before this day is over, who knows how many more people it will have worked in.
In fact, the water that produces water continues to perform its amazing miracle in human hearts right up until this very day, March 6th, 2007.
Thank you.
One of the disadvantages of being human is that you make mistakes, and one of the disadvantages of being a writer is that you write them down. So this morning I want to talk about a mistake that I made in writing my very first book.
Not all questions amuse me, but this one does. Play the part of Haddon Robinson, distill the encounter at the well to a homiletical idea. I would never dream of playing the part of Haddon Robinson. He’s a great preacher, and furthermore we’re not talking about distilled water, right?
However, the homiletical idea is that Jesus shares the truth of who He is with a needy woman. Something like that. Haddon might do much better. I’m sure He would. But I don’t have any more time on that.
In what sense was the woman a believer in Jesus Christ? In what sense was the woman, did the woman believe in Jesus Christ? Gives everlasting life. Did she? Because she was eternal? No, she was eternally secure at that point. Whence cometh this question?
The one thing that the woman gets first in this discourse is whatever this gift is, it’s permanent. I won’t have to come back here and I won’t have to draw water. When she finally realized that it was what Messiah gave, she obviously knew it was permanent. Draw your own conclusions.
Thank you. To disbelieve that He is the Christ is to reject Him as the spring of life. To believe that He is the Christ, to believe that He is the spring of life. Right? Yes.
In what first did the woman believe in Jesus for eternal life? That was my problem when I wrote The Hungry Inherit. There is no statement in the text that she believed, right? But we know that she did believe by the response to her testimony on the part of the Samaritan men.
Since there is no statement of her belief, there’s no verse in which the statement is found, right? But we should draw the conclusion that when Jesus said to her, “I who speak to you am He,” that she believed it. And when she believed it, even if it’s between verses, she got everlasting life.
So this is not a question that really pertains to the point here. We have a tendency in evangelical circles to want some articulation of belief, some expression of belief. We want to raise hand or somebody come down forward or, you know, the whole ball of wax.
We have forgotten that people get saved by just hearing the gospel and believing it right where they sit, right where they stand. The sooner we get back to that realization, the better off we will be.
Let’s see, next question. Do you believe that the requirements of what must be believed for salvation was different before after the cross? I think the question means were they different before Jesus died on the cross, during His lifetime before He died on the cross, and then after He died on the cross. Of course not.
The gospel of the New Testament is the gospel preached by Jesus. Nobody changed it. And anybody who changes it now is not preaching the gospel that Jesus preached.
There’s an i.e. on here. Could the woman at the well simply believe that Jesus was the Christ and be saved now? Be saved. And now must people believe that He paid for their sins?
The woman believed in Jesus as the giver and guarantor of everlasting life. That’s what it takes to be saved now. If the question implies would I preach the cross to people, I certainly would. Because what I find in preaching to people is that they don’t really understand why it should be so easy until they hear that Jesus Christ died on the cross for them, paid for their sins, and rose again from the dead.
So that’s a part of the message that I preach. But basically the gospel of John shows us that people are regenerated when they believe that Jesus is the one who guarantees everlasting life through that.
What does scintilla mean? That is the cleverest question of the day. I’m almost willing to give my trophy away for that. Thank you, but not quite. Scintilla means the smallest, tiniest thing you can imagine.
All right. Does the fact that Jesus suggests that the woman would ask Jesus for living water imply that salvation can be involved in a person choosing to believe in Jesus? I.e., we ask Jesus to save us.
On its face the answer to that is no. However, it is very clear in the New Testament, it seems to me, that the will is involved in terms of my willingness to receive the truth or to consider it or to hear it again or to search the scriptures.
Now there we’re not talking about the act of faith. We’re talking about the decision to look for whether this is true or not. The Bereans searched the scriptures daily to see whether these things were so. That was an act of volition.
But when they saw they were so, they believed it. And that is not an act of volition. So it depends on what the questioner meant exactly by that.
“He will tell us all things.” Is that an explicit scriptural statement, an implication of scriptural truth, or a Samaritan teaching from whatever source that Jesus exploited and is true?
Well, I would say that obviously this involved the Samaritan doctrine of the Messiah. And that it is deducible from the Old Testament testimony about Messiah. It may, there may not be an explicit verse on it. But I don’t see anything basically wrong with that.
The Messiah, after all, even in the Old Testament, was God. Who else can tell us all things? So I think whatever her frame of reference was, it was technically correct. Even though if we had explored her theology at the moment we might have found fault with it.
But what potential convert doesn’t bring flawed theology to the moment of saving faith? And the important thing is that they get the basic truth that Jesus is the Christ and guarantees the permanent gift of life. That’s all, folks. Thank you for your attention and for your questions.