FROM THE TREE TO THE CROSS

The Wind and Spirit blows where it wishes, and it blows the Savior north, through the forbidden territory of Samaria.         Typically a Jewish man like Jesus would have gone out of their way to avoid Samaria because this was the land of the Jewish imposters, the cultural counterfeits who claimed to be a mixed race of Jews and Assyrians.    They represented a gentile nation who had conquered them and taken their land and for it the Jews resented and despised the Samaritans.

It is high noon. The sun beats down on the dusty road.  Jesus, weary from His journey, sits by a well.  This is Jacob’s Well, dug by the Patriarch many centuries ago. It is deep, ancient, and filled with standing water.   A woman approaches. She comes at the sixth hour—the hour of man—because she is ashamed to come in the cool of the morning with the other women. She carries a water pot, the perpetual burden of her daily thirst. She has had five husbands—five broken covenants—and the man she now has is not her husband. She is the picture of the human soul: thirsty, broken and ashamed.

“Give Me a drink,” the Stranger asks her.

“You are a Jew,” said the woman. “How can You ask for a drink from me, a Samaritan woman?”

She is shocked. A Jew speaking to a Samaritan and a woman?      A Rabbi speaking to a sinner? 

But Jesus ignores the walls of gender and territorial prejudice to reach the heart of the outcast.    He uses the water in the well as an opportunity to offer her the Water of 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.”

If you had known that God would send the gift that is his son to provide life where there once was only death, you would have asked him for living water.

“Whoever drinks of this water will thirst again,”But whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst. But the water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life.”

The woman said to Him, “Sir, give me this water, that I may not thirst, nor come here to draw.”

This is yet another picture of Christ and his bride (the church). It recalls the events of Genesis chapter 24 when Abraham sent his servant to find a bride for his son, he was instructed to not take his son with him but to go by himself to the land of his kin to find her so that his Son would not take a wife from among the canaanite cults that infested the land.

Genesis Chapter 24:6-20. “Abraham said to him, “Beware that you do not take my son back there. 7. The Lord God of heaven, who took me from my father’s house and from the land of my family, and who spoke to me and swore to me, saying, ‘To your descendants I give this land,’ He will send His angel before you, and you shall take a wife for my son from there. 

When he arrived in the city of Nahor. 

11. he made his camels kneel down outside the city by a well of water at evening time, the time when women go out to draw water.  12. Then he said, “O Lord God of my master Abraham, please give me success this day, and show kindness to my master Abraham.  13. Behold, here I stand by the well of water, and the daughters of the men of the city are coming out to draw water.  14. Now let it be that the young woman to whom I say, ‘Please let down your pitcher that I may drink,’ and she says, ‘Drink, and I will also give your camels a drink’—let her be the one You have appointed for Your servant Isaac. And by this I will know that You have shown kindness to my master.”  15. And it happened, before he had finished speaking, that behold, Rebekah,who was born to Bethuel, son of Milcah, the wife of Nahor, Abraham’s brother, came out with her pitcher on her shoulder.  16. Now the young woman was very beautiful to behold, a virgin; no man had known her. And she went down to the well, filled her pitcher, and came up. 17. And the servant ran to meet her and said, “Please let me drink a little water from your pitcher.” 18. So she said, “Drink, my lord.” Then she quickly let her pitcher down to her hand, and gave him a drink.   19. And when she had finished giving him a drink, she said, “I will draw water for your camels also, until they have finished drinking.”   20. Then she quickly emptied her pitcher into the trough, ran back to the well to draw water, and drew for all his camels. 

In the time of Abraham God desired for the bride whose future offspring would bring the Messiah to be of a pure lineage and not contaminated with the curse of the canaanite cults of the land.

But now that Jesus has been born, his bride is the church, and he seeks them even from among the gentiles.

In the book of Genesis the woman provided the water,  in the book of John Jesus is the water !!!.

This is what the Samaritan woman who came to Jacobs well to get water but instead found Jesus represents.

The lost people seeking God, seeking life but barely surviving off of only stagnant water.         She had been coming to the well of Jacob (God’s people) but remained thirsty because only Jesus could give her the living water that she had been looking for.

The Samaritans were a gentile race that had clung to God’s people and traditions just like Ruth clung to Naomi.

Ruth 1:15-20  Naomi said to Ruth, “Look, your sister-in-law has gone back to her people and to her gods; return after your sister-in-law.”

But Ruth replied to Naomi    

“do not ask me to leave you,
Or to turn back from following after you;
For wherever you go, I will go;
And wherever you lodge, I will lodge;
Your people shall be my people,
And your God, my God.
Where you die, I will die,
And there I will be buried.       

when they had come to Bethlehem , ( The city of the birth of Jesus) all the city was excited because of them; and the women said, “Is this Naomi?”    But she said to them, “Do not call me Naomi; call me Mara, for the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me.

[TYPE: THE BITTER WATER]      Look back to the days of Moses, do you see the bitter water at Marah.  It is the prophetic example of the bitter water that is a life without Jesus but made sweet by putting in it his sacrifice on the cross.

Exodus 15:22-25 “So Moses brought Israel from the Red Sea; then they went out into the Wilderness of Shur. And they went three days in the wilderness and found no water. Now when they came to Marah, they could not drink the waters of Marah, for they were bitter. Therefore the name of it was called Marah. And the people complained against Moses, saying, “What shall we drink?” So he cried out to the Lord, and the Lord showed him a tree. When he cast it into the waters, the waters were made sweet.

The water remained bitter and undrinkable until the tree that is symbolic of the cross was cast down into it, only then was it made sweet and capable of sustaining life.

[TYPE: THE SMITTEN ROCK]       Do you recall the thirsty multitude at Rephidim?              The people cried again for water.   God commanded Moses to strike the Rock. The Rock was Christ! He was smitten by the Rod of Moses—the curse of the Law, the punishment of the cross—so that the river of grace might gush forth in the desert. Jacob’s well required a bucket and hard labor; the Well of Christ is an artesian spring, giving life from within him! all it required was simply to believe.

The Samaritans clung to the Holy land and God’s people like Ruth clung to Naomi, but instead of redeeming them like Boaz redeemed Ruth, the Jews rejected them. 

Jesus came not to destroy the Law or the Prophets but to fulfill.  (Matthew 5:17)   He came not to reject but to Redeem.

“The woman said to Him,             “Sir, I perceive that You are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, and you Jews say that in Jerusalem is the place where one ought to worship.”

Because the Jews refused to allow the Samaritans to help in rebuilding the temple or to worship and sacrifice there, they built their own temple on Mount Gerizim which caused even further disputes of religious division of how and where God was to be properly worshiped according to the law. 

Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe Me, the hour is coming when you will neither on this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, worship the Father.   You worship what you do not know; we know what we worship, for salvation is of the Jews.     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. God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.”

Jesus responded to her question by saying the place is irrelevant compared to the heart and intentions of the worshiper, because God is a Spirit not a place or a tradition, to worship him is not to go to a specific place or do a specific thing, but rather to seek and uphold truth, if your spirit is not seeking the truth and light that is the Father and the Son, then it matters not if you are in the temple at Jerusalem or the temple in Samaria.

The woman said to Him,                “I know that the Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ). “When He comes, He will tell us all things.” Jesus said to her,         “I who speak to you I AM He.”

The woman abandons her water pot—her old life, her shame, her empty efforts of never ending thirst—and runs into the city.    She has found the Messiah.      She came for a bucket of stagnant water, but she found the Living Ocean of Gods Grace. The harvest of the gentile Samaritans begins, not with the religious elite or rich, those who by societal standards appear to be blessed, but with a poor thirsty woman who dared to ask the Gift of God for the water of life.