"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." John 4:13-14
Caution: Sarcasm Alert
If I didn't know any better I would think that the author of John is trying to get some kind of idea about everlasting life across real hard. Luckily I know better, the idea that the gospel writers wrote in a certain way to try to get certain points across is ridiculous.
End of Sarcasm
In other news I would like to talk a little about water. Quite a few days ago I wrote a devotion that ended with the information that every single person who is reading this blog is among the wealthy. Water is a prime example of why that statement is true. 780 million people, 1 in 9 people in the world, do not have access to clean water. That is a big number, but it is even bigger when we consider that in the massively developed countries of the world there are a mere 10 million of that 780 million.
We can flush the toilet multiple times a day and inevitably it will once again fill up. We have machines that fill up with water in order to wash our underwear. We have other machines that will warm up our water so we can take comfortable baths and use more clean water to wash our dirty dishes. We use water in our yards to water our grass or our flowers or our tomato plants. We use an untold amount of water to fill our pools and power our sprinklers just so our children can run through them. We can turn on the spigot at any time yet many of us buy bottled water to rid ourselves of the minor impurities that is in our water after it has been cleaned in water plants. In other words, when Jesus talks about water it kinda goes over our head.
Sure, when we drink from our bottles of water we thirst again, but we didn't have to walk miles to get that water in the first place.
I say all of that to say this next thing:
Jesus did not spend time in Rome, among the elite.
Jesus did spend time in Jerusalem and surrounding areas, among the poor and outcasts.
When Jesus talks we have to understand the context of his community.
This goes not just for the red letters but also for Paul and Peter and John.
If we are not cognizant of the context we might as well not read the Bible in the first place.
Thus Endeth the Sermon.
+ Have you ever been without water? What were the circumstances?
+ Do you understand the contexts of the Bible? If you do, how has it changed the way you read and incorporate scripture into your life? If not do you think that if you did it would help your understanding of scripture?
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