Archive #31-36
All materials copyright (c) 1998, Ken Wade
"A Fresh Look at Jesus" is a weekly devotional based on the life of Jesus Christ that was sent out by e-mail from 1998-2001.
Devotionals #31-40 are on this page. Use the following links to go to pages with other devotionals: #1-10 #11-20 #21-30
A Fresh Look at Jesus, #31
Resting Savior
Now Jacob's well was there. Jesus therefore, being wearied from His journey, sat thus by the well. It was about the sixth hour. . . . For His disciples had gone away into the city to buy food (John 4:6,8 NKJV).
A look at the map* of the vicinity where these events took place reveals that Jacob’s well lay very close to an important crossroads, where travelers on the road between Jerusalem and Galilee would cross paths with those journeying between the Jordan and Caesarea, where Herod the Great had built an immense artificial harbor. If Jesus was coming from the south, which seems quite likely, the village of Sychar would have been less than a mile farther along the road. Why would He stop at the well to rest?
Jesus was certainly no weakling. He had already walked many miles, up the steep ascent from the Jordan, and along the mountainous north-south road. Couldn’t He have made it as far as the village? Why send the disciples on ahead to buy food. That would only add to the distance of their journey. And couldn’t He perhaps have sent just a couple of them ahead, allowing the rest to rest with Him?
Or better yet, shouldn’t He who said of Himself that He "did not come to be served, but to serve" (Matthew 20:28) have been the one to encourage His disciples to sit down and take a break while He would go into the city, buy food, and bring it back to them?
The text says that Jesus was wearied with His journey, and apparently He sat down by the well to rest. But I can’t help but wonder—was Jesus really all that tired? Or was there another motive in His resting?
There’s another account in the Bible, of God "sitting down" to rest. It’s found in Genesis 2:2. "And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done."
Do you suppose God was tired after finishing the creation of the earth? It hardly seems like the type of task that would weary the One who sustains all of the universe on a daily basis. There was another purpose for His resting at that time. It was to set the time aside as holy: "Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made" (Genesis 2:3).
To sanctify something means to set it aside as special. For whom did God make this day special? For Himself?
Yes, but also for others. For, you see, the evidence that God had finished His work of creating was that He had created Adam and Eve.
Even in our highly secularized world, most companies will allow a woman to take a few days off after giving birth to a baby. A few days to rest, but more importantly, a few days to get acquainted with this new creation. To bond, as we say.
And so, at the end of creation week, we can see God sitting down to rest. Not because He was wearied with His labors, but because He wanted to have the time to meet and bond with the man and woman He had made. That’s why He created the Sabbath as the final act of creation week.
It seems like God never changes, doesn’t it? For in the story we’ve been looking at, He once again sits down to rest. Is it because He’s weary? Or is it because He wants to take the time to get acquainted with, to bond with, one of His children?
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A Fresh Look at Jesus, #32
Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said to the woman, "Has God indeed said, 'You shall not eat of every tree of the garden'?"
A woman of Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, "Give Me a drink" (Genesis 3:1; John 4:7, NKJV).
It happened in the middle of the day. A woman, walking alone, in search of fulfillment of a need (real or imagined), was caught by surprise by a voice. How could this be happening? Snakes were not supposed to speak to women. What could be going on?
It happened in the middle of the day. A woman, walking alone, knowing where to find fulfillment of her need, was caught by surprise by a voice. How could this be happening? Men—especially Jewish men—were not supposed to speak to Samaritan women. What could be going on?
What was the woman seeking when she came to the tree? Was it knowledge? Then knowledge she would receive. But first of all she was presented with a request—a simple request for information, or knowledge. It got her attention.
What was the woman seeking when she came to the well? The answer is elementary: water. And water she would find there. But first of all she was presented with a request—a simple request for water. It got her attention.
I was struck this week with the parallels between Eve’s encounter with a speaking snake in Eden and the Samaritan woman’s encounter with a speaking Saviour at Jacob’s well, and I’d like to challenge you to engage in some study and reading yourself. Take the two stories. Read them side by side, the one in Genesis 3 and the other in John 4.
Several parallels come immediately to mind. The one-on-one conversation of a woman with an unexpected speaker, the inspiration to reach higher (or lower) for something beyond the natural. The response, the sharing with others, the coming of God into the city of the people, the casting of Adam and Eve out of the garden of God—the list goes on and on, with parallels and contrasts.
It’s almost as though Jesus planned this interview in Samaria to play out the antithesis to the events in Eden. To bring salvation and inclusion to the outcasts by using the same tactics Satan used to turn Adam and Eve into history’s first outcasts.
There’s a wealth of ideas to be generated by reading these two stories together, but I don’t want to take all the joy of discovery for myself. So I’ve decided to make this week’s devotional interactive. That’s one of the great things about this Internet "pulpit" I share from each week. Each of you who reads has the opportunity to react and interact, so I’d like to challenge you:
Read the stories together, and send me your thoughts. I’ll share some of the reactions I get in upcoming weeks, and will no doubt end up posting some of them on the SpiritQuest web page.
Happy studying!
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A Fresh Look at Jesus, #33
Putting God in His Place
"Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, and you Jews say that in Jerusalem is the place where one ought to worship" (John 4:20, NKJV).
Where do you like to go to worship God? Where do you feel closest to Him? On a mountain top? In a humble church? In a grand cathedral?
Where does God live today, for you? What does it take to bring you into His presence? Would a pilgrimage to the Holy Land help? How about a trip to Mecca, or a dip in the river Ganges? Perhaps a visit to Lourdes or Fatima or Medjugorge would be your ideal. It would be nice, wouldn’t it, to be able to go to one place and be assured of finding God there?
When God first called His people out of Egypt, He had them build a tabernacle so that He could dwell among them. Wherever they went, the pillar of smoke by day and fire by night went with them, and they could know that God was there, watching them and watching over them.
After God’s people were established in the promised land, the tabernacle was kept at Shiloh, and Samuel’s mother knew that this was the place to go to present special petitions to God. When the ark of the covenant was taken out of the tabernacle and subsequently captured by the Philistines at the battle of Aphek, it seemed evident that the presence of God went with the ark, and the Philistines’ chief god was found to be falling on his face before the Lord (see 1 Samuel 5).
It must have been comforting to the people to know that they always knew where to find their God. After Solomon built his temple and put the ark inside, the Jews could go to Jerusalem and know that the God’s presence was there—in the form of the Shekinah glory.
But in the days of Jeremiah, they seem to have taken too much comfort in this idea, feeling secure in their homes, believing that God would never allow His holy city to be captured by foreigners, no matter how far they wandered from His standards of truth, justice, and righteousness. "The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord," they would say in justification of their beliefs (see Jeremiah 7).
When the Babylonians captured and destroyed Jerusalem, the ark of the covenant disappeared and God would never again allow Himself to be confined to a box or even a single building. There is no record of the Shekinah glory being seen in the temples built after the return from Babylon.
Still, people wanted to know where to find their God, and the dispute about where to find Him was one of the chief issues standing between the Jews and Samaritans. The Jews knew God lived in Jerusalem, but the Samaritans insisted that His address was at the ruins of their temple on Mt. Gerizim.
The Samaritan woman’s query is almost funny, when you consider that she was standing in the presence of God, talking with God Himself, when she posited the age-old question of where to go to find God.
Jesus’ response, which we’ll look at next time, is one of the most challenging aspects of Christianity, for it takes God out of His box and puts Him where He really wanted to be all along.
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A Fresh Look at Jesus, #34
Letting God Out of His Box
Jesus said to her, "Woman, believe Me, the hour is coming when you will neither on this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, worship the Father. . . . But the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for the Father is seeking such to worship Him" (John 4:21, 23, NKJV).
Putting God in a box has its advantages.
You always know where to find Him when you need Him.
You can leave Him behind when you don’t really want Him around.
I’ve lived and visited in parts of the world where people literally have boxes for their gods. In their stores, in their homes, on trees beside the road, there are boxes with gods inside, and food offerings laid out before them.
Most Christians don’t keep their God in a box like that. But is it possible we find other ways to conveniently contain God? To keep Him in His place, so that we know where to find Him, but He doesn’t get out and interfere with our lives?
Some Christians confine God to a certain time in the morning—devotions—a little part of our lives where God is allowed to live, as long as He doesn’t interfere with what we do the rest of the day. Others have a certain day that they give to God, and having done that, feel that the other six days are theirs to do with as they please. Don’t get me wrong. It is good to have special times and places for God. He did, after all, set aside the Sabbath for that purpose from the beginning of history. Pope John Paul II has recently called the members of his church to remember Sunday as a special day for God. But these special times and places were never meant to be containers that kept God segregated from the rest of life.
I’ve spent quite a lot of time in prison in my life—fortunately always as a visitor so far. I became good friends with the chaplain, a Roman Catholic priest, at one federal prison in the Midwest. One Sunday morning I was there when the faithful were flocking into the chapel for mass. Father K. told me that his most faithful parishioners were the Mafia lords from Chicago who were doing time. These men were experts at keeping God in a box—they could meet Him at mass every week, perhaps every day, and then go on about their business, having left God behind at the chapel.
In His conversation with the woman at the well, Jesus broke God out of His box once and for all, with one of the most challenging statements in all of His teaching.
To worship God in spirit and in truth—what does that mean?
Surely it speaks of the transformation of the spirit, true conversion, letting the Spirit move "where it wills" (as Jesus had described it to Nicodemus) in our lives. Whenever and wherever He wishes. It precludes keeping God in only one part of our lives. It precludes keeping a little corner of our lives for ourselves.
To worship in spirit and absolute truth means that God’s testing of my sincere devotion to Him goes far beyond what He sees me do when I visit Him at church. Truth is a standard for all time, not just for when the cameras are rolling, or when I’ve been backed into a corner and can’t lie my way out.
Worship in truth is letting God get down into the very insides of my life and peer around and examine the sincerity of every sinew’s and every nerve’s and every thought’s devotion to Him.
What a challenge Jesus laid out before that woman who was accustomed to keeping God up on top of the mountain. But what a difference it made in her life. And what a difference it can make in ours as well.
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A Fresh Look at Jesus, #35
Water and life
"Jesus answered and said to her, ‘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’" (John 4:10, NKJV).
Water plays an extremely important role in the gospel as John records it. The gospel begins with John baptizing in water in the wilderness, continues to the story of the water turned to wine at Cana, then to Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus in which He says we must be born again of water and spirit, then to the conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well, and next to the pool of Bethesda, where water was supposed to come to life and bring miraculous healings. In John 13, Jesus used a basin of water to wash the disciples’ feet and teach them an important lesson about humility and unity, and John alone records that when Jesus died both blood and water flowed from the wound inflicted by the Roman soldier’s spear.
It was only natural that water would come to symbolize life in an arid region like Palestine. For when the streams flow with water, they are surrounded by greenery and abundant life, but only a few feet from the stream bed everything is arid and lifeless for much of the year.
So Jesus took a natural route to a spiritual conversation when He asked the woman for water. Something I learned this week helped me understand the level of His condescension in doing this. The current issue of Biblical Archaeology Review has an article about stone water vessels. You may remember from John 2 that the vessels Jesus filled with wine in Cana were stone water vessels.
The natural question is, why would people have water containers made out of stone? Pottery vessels are much easier to make, and of course much cheaper. But the Jews in Jesus’ day were very particular about purity. The Old Testament laws stated that if a clay vessel was made unclean through contact with a dead animal, it had to be broken, lest it contaminate anything stored in it and thus pollute the one who would drink from it. There was no such law for stone vessels, so in Jesus’ day a large industry had grown up, manufacturing limestone jugs and drinking glasses. A Jew could drink from these vessels without fear of being made unclean.
The author of the BAR article makes a comment that is highly significant in the context of John 4: "In fact, stone vessels have been unearthed at more than 60 sites, as shown on the map on page 48. Almost no stone vessels have been found in Samaria or the Hebron hill country, however." (Biblical Archaeology Review, September/October 1998, p. 50.)
In other words, the Samaritans didn’t bother with the Jewish laws of purity. This means that the vessel the woman was using to draw her water hadn’t been certified as pure. Jesus was taking the risk of being made unclean by drinking from it.
But that wasn’t an unusual risk for Jesus to take. He was the One who reached out and touched the lepers. When the woman with an issue of blood touched Him, she committed a sin by the Old Testament standards, for she passed her uncleanness onto a man. No wonder she came trembling to Him when He asked who had touched His clothes. But Jesus did not scold her, He simply told her that her faith had made her well (Mark 5:25-34).
Once again we find in this story a Savior who was willing to get down and dirty with the down and out in order to save them. He did not build walls around Himself to keep Himself from being sullied by contact with the real world. He walked and talked wherever His Father led, unafraid, and unpolluted, for He daily filled Himself with the fullness of the Spirit, that it might flow out from Him and touch the world.
We too can touch the world, but rest assured, it will sully us if we are not daily filled with the Holy Spirit as Jesus was.
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A Fresh Look at Jesus, #36
Where do you want to go today?
"So when the Samaritans had come to Him, they urged Him to stay with them; and He stayed there two days" (John 4:40, NKJV).
What’s on your agenda for today? Do you sit down every morning and map out what you want to accomplish, where you need to be at what time; what you want to have accomplished by when? That’s what time management gurus suggest.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve never read any of the "One Minute Manager" books. The title itself is enough to make my skin crawl—to think that I have to carefully manage every minute of my day. Some people are obviously more comfortable with that concept than I am. I’ve known people who even planned their vacations that way—getting out the maps and charting exactly where they wanted to be at what time of each day of their trip.
Was Jesus that way?
I enjoy trying to fit myself back into the mindset of the people who lived in Jesus’ day. Think of what it was like to make a trip back then. You couldn’t go down to the local scroll store and buy a highway map. There were very few visual representations of how to get from Point A to Point B. You simply went from junction to junction and took the proper road at each point. You could lay plans based on about how long you expected it to take between points, but the only map you could take along was the one in your head.
When Jesus left Judea, His announced goal was to go to Galilee (John 4:3). His stop at the well and His conversation with the woman may have been a part of His original plan, but those traveling with Him weren’t aware of it. They were surprised, when they returned from their shopping trip to Sychar, to find Him talking to her. How do you suppose the disciples reacted when the woman’s neighbors came out and invited Jesus to come into their city and teach them?
I can almost hear Peter, whose home was in Galilee, saying, "But Jesus, weren’t we on our way to Galilee? I thought you wanted to get there by tomorrow!"
But Jesus’ plans were not constrained by maps or clocks. Rather, He was driven by the will of His heavenly Father: "Then Jesus answered and said to them, ‘Most assuredly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He sees the Father do; for whatever He does, the Son also does in like manner’ (John 5:19, NKJV).
Jesus was more interested in the salvation of souls than in meeting a time schedule. He was more interested in doing His Father’s will than even in meeting His body’s demand for food (see John 4:31, 32).
Could I take two whole days out of my busy schedule to go and share the gospel with heathens—well, maybe if I planned it far enough in advance and cleared my appointment book and got caught up on . . . . But with Jesus, the invitation was no sooner given than accepted.
Time management by the Father’s will.
Hmmm…. The idea probably won’t sell a million books. But it worked for Jesus.
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