The Living Waters - October 22, 2010

Good Friday morning! The morning is starting on a day of change for the weather. We have been warned about not one, but two low pressure systems arriving over the next few days. So, from here on out... there's no reason not to write the devotional! Whoo hoo! I wonder if we'll get any snow out of all this weather coming our way? Wednesday afternoon, the new business was born. Awaken the Dawn, LLC just bought all of my photography equipment and my PC; I hope the manager will let me use it. I had to sign pieces of paper that listed me as the manager, sole proprietor, and all manner of weird sounding titles. Several times I wanted to look around behind me for some more authoritarian-looking fellow to sign the papers. The even stranger part was to realize that legally-speaking, I'm like two or three different entities now as owner, manager, and employee of the business.


The good news is that now that I'm the boss of this writer and photographer, I can tell him to get to work! The slackin' thing has been making some good coffee lately though.


That boss fellow sounds pretty firm, I better get on with the devotional! I do appreciate him mentioning my coffee; compliments didn't come nearly often enough back in the day.

Today, we have a new verse. Hmm, seems like yesterday we read an interesting verse too. What does God's word have in store for us today?

Jesus replied, "Anyone who drinks this water will soon become thirsty again." John 4:13

The woman at the well was proud of the town's water, and she missed the point of living water that Jesus spoke about. She didn't have our advantage in reading the Gospels, but does the Bible, her scriptures, mention living water in what we call the Old Testament?

Song of Solomon, or Song of Songs, 4:15
A fountain of gardens, A well of living waters, and streams from Lebanon

Jeremiah 2:13
"For my people have committed two evils: They have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters..."

This one is very telling, combine this with the verse that comes before and you read:
"Be astonished, O heavens, at this, and be horribly afraid; be very desolate, " says the Lord, "For my people have committed two evils: They have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters..."

This is one of the few times, perhaps the only time, that some group, the heavens in this case, is told to be horribly afraid! The Lord has also called himself the fountain of living waters. Jesus' statement to the woman should not have been so surprising in light of what the prophet Jeremiah had said. I had wondered myself if this was the first time that living water was mentioned in relation to the Lord, but no, God had already told man about the living waters. Of course, God is referred to as the living God many times before this starting in Joshua according to my concordance. Let's continue on!

Jeremiah 17:13
O Lord, the hope of Israel, all who forsake You shall be ashamed.
"Those who depart from Me shall be written in the earth, because they have forsaken the Lord, the fountain of living waters."

Once more, the reference to living water should have set the woman's heart to leaping, but she is concentrating on her immediate need. We do much the same. I can recall many years before Jesus saved me that my life could only be referred to as, "The Me Show." This is not at all unusual! Certainly being saved as we like to say is not only getting saved from sin and the world, but getting saved from our selves. However, as many times as God was called, "the living God" in the scriptures, the living water shouldn't have been so surprising. Living and life are very important to God, if I can go by the many times I see Paul and the Old Testament use that same title for God. Certainly the living God stands in a different light than all those dead idols.

And finally, in a section where Zechariah speaks of the great day of the Lord just before the end of the Old Testament:

Zechariah 14:8
And in that day it shall be that living waters shall flow from Jerusalem, half of them toward the eastern sea and half of them toward the western sea; in both summer and winter it shall occur.

Notice that in the great day of the Lord, summer and winter will still happen. The next statement really brings it home though: And the Lord shall be King over all the earth. In that day it shall be - "The Lord is one" and His name is one. Zech 14:9

To God be the glory, that is a way to go into the weekend!

Bucky