Jesus Leaves Judea, Encounter With the Samaritan Woman

Wonderful voice today! That sounded so good! So lovely there! Today we will be continuing along with our study of the Gospels. We've been doing this for a little over a year now, and we're almost a tenth of the way through the harmonies. That tells you a little bit about the pace we're going here and how much we're covering. But good to see all of you here. Last time we talked about Jesus' discussion with Nicodemus, one of the great teachers of Israel there at the Passover in Jerusalem during the first Passover of Christ's ministry. When Jesus told him that he needed to be born again to see the kingdom of God. So we talked about what that means to be born again.

And then it's been quite a bit of time covering John 3.16, one of the most famous verses of the Bible. So today we'll pick up and continue the story on after that in John 3, verses 22 through 26. And then hopefully we've got a lot of ground to cover today, but we'll do what we can to cover on up. Yeah, page 14 of the harmony there, if you have that open. And so we'll get right into the story here. John 3, verse 22. After these things, Jesus and His disciples came into the land of Judea. Judea was the province there, of which Jerusalem was the center and the capital. And there He remained with them and baptized. Now John, this is talking about John the Baptist, or John the Baptizer, as I prefer to call him, also was baptizing in Aenon near Salim, because there was much water there, and they came and were baptized, for John had not yet been thrown into prison. And as I've mentioned before, this place, Aenon that's mentioned here, was an Elijah place. We've talked about how John, being the Elijah to come before Jesus Christ, was doing things that paralleled Elijah's ministry, to convey this message. It's part of the concept of Rimes there, a hint or clue or look back. So John, the two places in the Gospels where it mentions that he is baptizing people are places that were significant in the ministry of Elijah. We talked earlier, spent quite a bit of time when Jesus is baptized, just north of the Dead Sea, that is where Elijah was taken up into the chariot, into the sky. This place Aenon is near where, if you remember the story, Elijah, during the drought in Israel, was fed by the ravens at a brook. So John the Baptizer is making a conscious effort to conduct his ministry in places that were significant in the ministry of Elijah. So let's take a look at that on a map and see where this is to orient ourselves. Here's the Dead Sea, here's Judea. This Aenon is up here, part way up the Jordan River Valley. This map, incidentally, you can see one very similar to it on the back of your your harmony. But this is the location where John is baptizing there in the Jordan River.

And another thing is John is baptizing because there was much water there, as it states. And this tells us something about the proper method of baptism. If baptism is done by just sprinkling a few drops or pouring water on a person, all you need is a cup full of water. You don't need much water if you're going to baptize by sprinkling or pouring. But if you're going to baptize someone by immersion, and that's what the Greek word baptize means, it means to submerge, to completely immerse in water. Contemporary writings of the time talk about ships in naval battles being baptized. That means they were sunk. They went down in the sea. So that's what the word means, to totally sink in the water there. So if you're going to baptize by immersion, you need much water, enough to completely submerge a person. So this is just a brief mention in passing, but it does show what the proper method of baptism is. Otherwise, this mention just makes no sense. You wouldn't have needed much water to baptize there. So continuing on, verse 20-25, down here at the bottom, then there arose a dispute between some of John's disciples and the Jews about purification. And we'll see this come up several times, this issue of purification, and ritual washings, and so on. We actually already covered it a time or two ago, in talking about the miracle of converting the water into wine at the wedding there in Kanaah, in Galilee, where there were stone vessels there that were used, as it says in John 2, in verse 6, according to the manner of the purification of the Jews. It's water they used for ritually washing their hands before certain actions there. We won't have time to go through this right now, but you might write down Mark 7, verses 1-13. There's a big long discussion there where Jesus takes the Jews to task for their traditions, specifically their ritual washings, while rejecting some of the commandments of God. We'll cover that in more detail when we get there.

We do see this issue does come up from time to time, and this is the first mention of it here, where it's a dispute between the followers of John the Baptist and some of the others there.

Continuing on, verse 26, I might mention too, I'll occasionally give you scriptural references to jot down in your nose. There's actually so many that if I gave them all, we'd really only be covering a very small portion during this time. I'll just give you some that are key to write down and include in your notes there as we go through this.

Verse 26, and they, referring to John's disciples, came to John and said to him, Rabbi, who was with you beyond the Jordan, to whom you have testified, Behold, he is baptizing, and all are coming to him. And, of course, this is referring to Jesus Christ. John answered and said, verse 27, A man can receive nothing unless it has been given to him from heaven. And I might mention that the Jews of that time would not say God or God's name. So they would typically use synonyms like heaven or the powers or things like that. So when we see something like that, unless it was given from heaven, what John is saying is, unless it was given to him from God, is the way we would say it today. Verse 28, You yourselves bear me witness that I said, I am not the Christ, but I have been sent before him.

This is referring back to John 1 and verses 20 through 23. Continuing on with what John says, verse 29, He who has the bride is the bridegroom. But the friend of the bridegroom who stands and hears him rejoices greatly because of the bridegroom's voice. Therefore this joy of mine is fulfilled. He must increase, but I must decrease.

So what's going on here? Let's analyze, take a look at this, understand why some of these things are being said. Basically some of John's disciples have come to him and they're concerned because now Jesus, whom John has baptized several months earlier, probably six, eight months earlier, something like that, Jesus now has disciples and he is baptizing. And as we've seen earlier, John, the one who is writing this, is actually one of John's disciples who has left John and is now following Jesus. So if you're a disciple of John as the rabbi, as John's disciples were, you're not going to want to see this. You're not going to want to see people leaving your rabbi to go follow another rabbi because, after all, you wouldn't be following this rabbi unless you thought he was a godly man and the best teacher. So you don't want to see people flocking to follow another rabbi instead of your rabbi. This is what is motivating John's disciples coming to him you might say, complaining that people are now going to be baptized by Jesus and his disciples rather than John. And John, of course, could have been upset by this or had his feelings hurt, could have felt slighted, something like that. After all, who is John? John knows that he is a teacher chosen by God for a special purpose. But it's not John's way to feel slighted or upset. John had a wonderful attitude, the kind of attitude that we should all have. And that's reflected in what he tells his followers there. He tells his disciples that he never expected anything different. That he, meaning Jesus, must increase and I must decrease. So John knew that Jesus was always to be the one who is greater. John is not to be the great one, Jesus is. John is just the messenger, the herald, who is coming before with the announcement that somebody greater is coming. John always knew that he was going to be the subordinate one.

And he knew that if people were flocking to Jesus, that's because God was sending them to Jesus. And not that Jesus is stealing followers away from John.

So it's a matter of perspective there. And that's the point that he makes here back in verse 27, when he said, a man can receive nothing unless it has been given to him from heaven or from God.

There he knew that God is the one sending people to Jesus. Not that Jesus is stealing people from John there. So why should John, if God is sending people to Jesus, why should John complain about that? So he realizes there's no basis for that. And then John uses the metaphor of the bridegroom and what we today would call the best man. They didn't use that term then, but it was the same essential role. And he uses that to illustrate the point about Jesus Christ being the one who's most important because Jesus is the bridegroom. And John compares himself to what we would call the best man. The one who's most important is the bridegroom, not the best man. And the bottom line is that John has a humble servant's attitude. Here he knows that it's not about him, just as with us. It's not about us. It's all about God. It's all about Jesus Christ. And John realizes that his job is to point the people to Jesus, the Messiah, this other rabbi. And that's what I'm trying to do in this series of studies on the Gospels, is to point all of us to Jesus Christ and to God the Father. That is what is most important. And now we come to a section here that continues on in the New King James Version, as though this is a continuation of what John the Baptizer is saying. And I set this out as a study question or comment last night to read through this portion and see who you think is talking, whose words are these that we're looking about. As we talked about last time, to some extent, in the original Greek in Hebrew, in which the scriptures were written, there are no quotation marks. For that matter, there's no punctuation at all. There's no question marks. There's no exclamation marks. There's no periods. There's no punctuation. That didn't come along in writing until a number of centuries later from this.

So in reading through these next few verses, it strikes me that this is more likely the words of John, John the writer of this Gospel, rather than the words of John the Baptizer. Where we've just read the words of John the Baptizer, they're very straightforward. They're very blunt, very clear, very clearly, simply stated. But what we see now is a bit of a different tone that sounds much more like, to me, what we read about in the first chapter of John, where John is talking about Jesus Christ's pre-existence there. Just as an FYI, I checked, tried to get a better handle on this, I checked about 15 different Bible translations, and they broke down roughly that about a third of them have the kind of quotation marks that we see here indicating this is John the Baptist speaking. About a third take out the quotation marks indicating that it is John, the Apostle John, giving these words. And about a third don't use quotation marks at all for any quotes. They're following more or less the original Greek, you might say, which didn't use any quotation marks. So let's look at this then and see if we can figure out what's being said here and why.

So verse 31, He who comes from above is above all. He who is of the earth is earthly and speaks of the earth. He who comes from heaven, or again from God, you might say, is above all. So the point's made here that Jesus is above all because he came from heaven or from God. And thus he is far greater than anyone who just came from the earth, just a physical human being, in other words. In verse 32, And what he, Jesus, has seen and heard, that he testifies, and no one receives his testimony. So the point here is that if you want to know about somebody, you go to the source.

So if you want to know about God, you go to the source. You go to somebody who came from God, which is Jesus Christ, Jesus the Messiah, the one who came directly from God, and who can therefore tell us directly about God the Father because he was there. He was there with God there. And that he says, And no one receives his testimony. Now this is why I think this is probably the words of the Apostle John, not John the Baptizer. Because if you think about it, what's the whole discussion here? The whole discussion is prompted because people are going to Jesus to be baptized by him because they are receiving his testimony, and because they do believe him.

So if this is John the Baptist saying this, it makes no sense because it directly contradicts what we've just read, that people are going to Jesus and believing in him. However, if this is the Apostle John looking back from when he wrote his gospel in the late 80s, probably AD, about 60 years in the future now, if he's looking back and seeing it's evident that most people never received, never believed Jesus's words, they didn't receive his testimony, then I think it makes perfect sense. So that's why I think these are probably the words of the Apostle John, who's writing this. And this is not a direct quote from John the Baptizer here.

Any questions about that? Does that pretty clear make sense? Okay, we'll go on then to the next verse 33, continuing on. And again, I think these are the words of the Apostle John. He who has received his testimony has certified that God is true. So in other words, those who do accept Jesus Christ's testimony or teachings, they are certifying that they are true and that they do come from God, who also is true. So this is in contrast to the previous verse of those who don't accept that testimony, and in so doing, they essentially deny God, is what is being said here.

Verse 34, for he whom God has sent speaks the words of God, for God does not give the Spirit by measure. And that's a little bit awkward. The NIV translates this as, for God gives the Spirit without limit. Above, this does not give the Spirit by measure, means essentially you're measuring out, like a measuring cup or measuring spoon or something like that. And God doesn't operate that way in the case of Jesus Christ. He has given Jesus Christ the Holy Spirit without measure, is what is being said here. So essentially, it says that Jesus is the one that God has sent, that he speaks the words of God since he came from God. And coming from God, he had the Holy Spirit without measure, completely and totally. And then verse 35, the Father loves the Son and has given all things into his hand. And as we talked about last time, discussing John 3.16, quite a bit, we talked about how both God the Father and Jesus Christ the Son gave up what was most valuable, most precious to them for us, for our sakes, so that we could receive that gift of salvation. And this is continuing on with that same theme. And this again is another indicator why I think these are the words of the Apostle John, not John the Baptist, that God's loved the Son so much that he has given everything to the Son. You might also write down here Philippians 2, verses 9 through 11, I'll project it for you up here on screen. And in context, the first few verses of Philippians 2 talk about how Jesus Christ, even though he was God, did not consider that divinity, that power, that greatness that he had with God as something to be held on to.

But he surrendered all of that. He emptied himself, we quoted it in full last time, and became a human being and humbled himself to the point of death on a cross. And then right after this we see these words here. And because Jesus did this, verse 9, therefore God also is highly exalted him and given him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow of those in heaven and of those on earth and of those under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. So this just emphasizes again what we read there in verse 35, that the Father has given everything to the Son there because of his attitude, his approach there. And again, we see this echoed in verse 36. As we talked about last time, God is a God of love. That is what motivates him and everything he does toward us. But he's also a God of judgment, as we see reflected here again. That same theme, he who believes in the Son has everlasting life, and he who does not believe the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him. So ultimately, every human being is going to have to make a choice. Either they will believe in Jesus as the Son of God and accept the implications of that in terms of how we live, or we will choose not to believe that, and then accept the consequences of that lack of belief there. Every human being basically will have to choose, choose life or choose death. Either choose Jesus Christ as our Lord, as our Master, as our Rabbi, or choose not to. And in so doing, we choose death as a result of that. Any questions?

Comments there? Again, I have a lot of material. I don't want to get into a long discussion, but if you have questions, feel free to bring them up as we go through this.

Now we'll continue on. We come to several verses, transition points here, that talk about Jesus leaving Judea and heading north to Galilee. He's transferring. He's moving his headquarters, you might say, his base of operations from Judea. This is probably eight, nine, ten months into his ministry here. He's been in Judea for much this time. Now he's moving up to Galilee. Let's see what's going on and what we're being told here in these few verses down at the bottom of the page. So picking up the story here in John 4, verses 1-4. Therefore, when the Lord knew that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus made and baptized more disciples than John, though Jesus himself did not baptize, but his disciples did, he left Judea and departed again to Galilee. But he needed to go through some area. So, of course, Jesus grew up in Galilee, grew up at Nazareth, about 15 to 20 miles basically due east of the Sea of Galilee.

So he's familiar with that area there. So he departs here, as it says here, again to Galilee, but he needed to go through some area. There are several interesting things to pick up on what is stated here. First of all, Jesus and his disciples are obviously having a lot of success. They're in Judea. They're drawing a lot of attention. People are flocking to them to be baptized.

They're baptizing a lot of people more than John is. So if they're having a lot of success, why pack up and leave and go 60, 70, 80 miles north to Galilee? What's going on here?

Some of the story we're not being told. Or we are, but maybe we don't recognize what's going on.

Also, as stated here in verse 1, it says that Jesus knows the Pharisees are aware that he's having a lot of success and drawing a lot of attention. And if the Pharisees knew, then you can bet that other people are going to know as well.

Now, we saw earlier when we talked about the ministry of John the Baptizer that the Sadducees and the Pharisees sent people down from Jerusalem to the Jordan River across from Jericho to basically check him out, to spy on him, you might say, to see what this guy is up to.

Drawing these huge crowds out here along the Jordan River. So when people start sending out spies to check up on you, that's never a good thing. It's not going to come to a good end when that happens. Notice also here, verse 4, how this puts it here, but he needed to go through Samaria. He needed to. There's a conveying sense of urgency there. Why did he need to go through Samaria? This is a shortcut. It's the fastest way to get from where he is in Judea up to Galilee, but he needed to go through Samaria. Why? Why did he need to do this? What's going on here? Well, let's set that aside for a minute. Read something else here. John 3, verses 19-20.

But Herod the Tetrarch, being rebuked by him, talking about John the Baptizer, concerning Herodias, his brother Philip's wife, and for all the evils which Herod had done, also added this above all, that he shut John the Baptizer up in prison. Here we see a strong clue as to what's going on and why Jesus does some of the things that he does. This Herod that's mentioned here is Herod the Tetrarch. This is not Herod the Great.

Herod the Great has been dead for about 30 years now. He's the one who had the children of Bethlehem, the baby boy slaughtered, trying to eliminate the Messiah when he learned that a new king was to be born there. This Herod the Tetrarch is one of his sons. When Herod the Great died, his kingdom was divided up into four pieces, and it was assigned to individuals called Tetrarchs, meaning a ruler over a fourth part. So this is one of his sons. His name is Herod Antipas, one of Herod's sons. Herod Antipas has married Herodias, who previously had been married to Herod Antipas' own half-brother, Philip. It's his brother here, but that didn't use terms like half-brother. It was considered a brother. So he has married his half-brother's wife, which is an adulterous marriage there. And John the Baptizer has called Herod on this with the result that he gets thrown into prison, because you don't cross the boss like that.

Now let's look at something else, Matthew 4 and verse 12. Now, when Jesus heard that John had been put in prison, he departed to Galilee.

Now, we've covered all these different perspectives from John, from Luke, from Matthew. And let's look at this on a map now and get a better understanding of what's going on. This is the map that's on the back of your harmony. I'm just showing it here, the color version of it.

So you can look there and follow along, and we'll put together some of these pieces.

So John the Baptizer gets thrown into prison. The Gospels don't tell us where, but Josephus the Jewish historian tells us that John was in prison at Makiras, down here on the eastern side of the Dead Sea. I've shown you in previous studies photos of Masada. You probably remember what this is like, this big fortress out on this butte, Mesa out in the desert on this side of the Dead Sea. Makiras is very much like that.

It's a mountaintop fortress, also built by Herod the Great, who was paranoid, as we talked about before, and built all these various fortresses throughout his kingdom. So because he's paranoid and wants to have a place he can easily get to when the people try to overthrow him. So Makiras is one of these fortresses. It's part of the territory that Herod Antipas has inherited when his father dies. So this is where John the Baptizer is imprisoned, presumably because John has been baptizing here along the Jordan and Herod's soldiers or guards take John and imprison him down here in this fortress. So now Jesus, let's see, we're not told in the Gospels exactly where Jesus is, where he and his disciples are baptizing, other than he's somewhere in Judea. This area around here, here's Jerusalem to orient ourselves. So he's baptizing somewhere here in Judea. And he needs to get up to Galilee up here. Now the normal way a Jew would have done that, we'll talk about this why in a few minutes, they would have avoided Samaria. Normally the route you would have gone is from Jerusalem. You would have taken the road down to Jericho and then crossed over the Jordan River and gone up on the east side of the Jordan River in this area that's labeled Perea here. And the reason you did that would be to avoid going through Samaria. And then you would follow that on up here and then on up to Galilee there to avoid the land of the Samaritans. But Jesus doesn't do that.

He heads straight north from Judea through Samaria on his way up to Galilee, which is quite unusual. So why does he do that instead of taking the normal route down to Jericho and up alongside the Jordan River? Well, where is John imprisoned? Down here at Makirus. Makirus, this is probably about 10-15 miles from the major crossing route here, from Jericho to go across the Jordan River and go up here. This is where Herod Antipas, actually Herod Antipas is probably down here at his fortress in Makirus there. Because this is where he's imprisoned John. As we read later, the circumstances of that. You remember the story Salome is dancing and she asks for John the Baptist's head there. And this is where these events take place. So presumably Herod Antipas is down here at Makirus. And Jesus knows about that. He knows he has imprisoned John. And Jesus knows what happens when you get thrown into Herod's prison.

You don't come out alive. So we put together these different pieces and what do we see?

We see that Jesus is somewhere over here. He gets word that John has been thrown in prison down here. So Jesus makes a beeline in the opposite direction from Makirus. He doesn't go down here close to Makirus to go up the normal route. He makes a beeline up through Samaria to head to Galilee. The Gospels don't tell us that. But you put Josephus' history together and combine it with what Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John each give us little clues, little pieces of the puzzle, and you understand what's going on.

Jesus knows that people are becoming aware of him. We just read about how the Pharisees have learned that he's baptizing more people than John. And the Pharisees know than the authorities there in the temple at Jerusalem are going to know, the Romans are going to know, and Herod Antipas is going to know. And he's just... the last thing Herod Antipas wants is another troublemaker, like John, getting a popular following. So Jesus realizes the heat is getting on.

And if he hangs around here, probably the same thing is going to happen to him as happened to John.

Does that make Jesus a coward? No! Because Jesus knows some of the circumstances, the prophecies about his death. He knows he's going to be killed at Passover, as the Passover lambs are going to be killed. He knows his ministry is going to last several more years. And he knows if he hangs around, that's not going to happen. So to continue with his work, he moves. He just simply transfers his operations to go up here to Galilee to get away from that danger there. Again, doesn't make him a coward. Just means he is being prudent. He is acting. We'll find this in a number of times we go through the Gospels. There are times when he's very open about who he is as the Messiah. We'll find times when he heals people, and he tells them, okay, go out and tell people who did this, who healed you. At other times, he heals people and says, don't tell anybody about it. Why does he do that? It's because of where he is and the particular political situation where these miracles take place. And that is what is going on right here. He knows his time is not yet. And if he stays around here in Judea, he's going to be in big trouble. So he transfers his operation up there then. So continuing here, we'll wrap up a couple of other remaining verses here, Mark 1 and verse 14. Now, after John was put in prison, Jesus came to Galilee. Again, it's after John is thrown into Herod's jail. He goes to Galilee, preaching the Gospel of the kingdom of God. And wrapping it up in Luke 4 and verse 14, then Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit to Galilee. He returned because, again, he'd grown up in Nazareth, was from Galilee. And news of him went out through all of the surrounding region. So it's interesting how all four of the Gospel writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, give us little individual pieces of the puzzle, but nobody really spells it all out in one place. Nobody gives the whole story. Now, this shows a couple of things. One, it shows that the Gospel writers didn't get together and coordinate all of their stories. That's part of our legal system. That's one of the vital things about witnesses. You don't want to get your witnesses, or even worse, your suspects together to coordinate their stories. That's why everybody's questioned individually, one at a time, without the others present, to make sure you're getting their story, not some conspiracy or conspired manipulated story that everybody has worked to manipulate to get it together. This shows that each of the Gospel writers wrote independently of each other, and they all included the details that were important to them.

This also gives the lie to a lot of the Bible critics who say that the Gospels weren't written there in the first century. They were written actually a century or two later by people who were never there and never saw these events and never witnessed these things. Because if you're writing this a century or two later, you have four different people making up all of these stories out of a whole cloth there, how would they make these details mesh together like that? If you're making it all up a century or two later, no, it just doesn't work like that. How would you also make it mesh with the details that are recorded by a secular historian, Josephus, there, who gives us another important part of the puzzle that's not mentioned there in the Gospels?

There. So again, nobody can fabricate those kind of coincidences. So this shows, again, that the four writers did write independently of each other and that they did not coordinate their stories there and that it's not something that's fabricated much later. So any questions? We're at another transition point here about to move into something else. So yes, Dave? I just wonder if Jesus knew that they may be lying in the wake of the earthquake. Because it's very rough, very mountainous in there. There's only one way in and out. That's why this was a very popular road. And Jericho was a major city down there in the Jordan Valley. There was a major ford that we talked about earlier because the road ran from Jericho across through the Jordan River and up to what is today Amman. So it was a major trade route there, an intersection, because you also had the north-south road going up from the Dead Sea to Galilee. So there would have been a lot of activity, a lot of travel, probably a lot of authorities there, policemen, you might say, as well. So, and John has been baptizing there just north of the Dead Sea and up at Aenon where we saw earlier. So Herod, this is all Herod Antipas' territory there. So so yeah, he's obviously concerned with somebody else doing what John is doing, which is potentially turning the people against him. And that's the last thing he wants. So Jesus' word is getting around about Jesus. He's having success. He's drawing a lot of people. So Jesus can kind of see the handwriting on the wall where this is going and makes a deliberate choice to take another route and get out of there. So that's yeah, hopefully that answers your question there. I won't say he knew for a fact that they're laying in wait there, but that would have been the logical place for him to do it right there. Let's see, Paul, you had your hand up.

Yeah, it was. And let's see, I think this may be part of the key at the top of that. What happened, that area was given to one of Herod's sons. And he was actually such a bad ruler that the Jews petitioned Rome to get rid of him. So I don't remember the exact year, but he was actually removed from office by the Romans. He was such a corrupt good for nothing. And the Romans installed a governor there, and that's how Pontius Pilate became governor. Pontius Pilate was no relation to Herod. So that province of Judea and Samaria was under direct rule from Rome by a Roman governor there. In contrast to the other areas, Peria and the area up north, where he was ruled by Philip, the Philip we just read up. He had his capital, its Caesarea Philippi, up there. So yeah, you have different types of government administration going on. But yeah, good question. Brian, you had your hand up. I was just thinking that part of that Jesus had got the protection that he wanted him to go into those places. He wanted him to preach at that time in those areas, but I thought it kind of gave a lesson to not walk into something we know these days. Yeah, don't tempt God in other ways.

In other words. But on the other hand, you might say the flip side of that is, because Brian's comment was Jesus knew that he had God's protection. And certainly so, later on, when he is taken and captured, he says, did you not know I could call my father? He would send legions of angels to protect me. But on the other hand, you could argue that he knew that John the baptizer is God's protection too, and what's happened to him. He's just been thrown in jail, and he's going to die there. So you don't necessarily know that for sure how things are going to work out. Actually, we'll touch on that in a minute. How much did Jesus know about exactly the path he was going to take? Well, see something that will give us some interesting insights on that in a minute. Yes, Sheila?

Yes, that it may have served his purpose to go through Samaria. And indeed, I think that's what we see here. We'll get into that next. Okay, let's continue the story. Interesting things. Did you find this kind of stuff interesting to put these little pieces of the puzzle together and realize some of the backstory that's going on there? I just find it completely fascinating.

Now we'll pick up here John 4 and verse 5 with the story of the Woman of the Well.

Oh boy, I'm going to have to rip through this quickly here. Verse 5, So we came to a city of Samaria, which is called Sukar, near the plot of ground that Jacob gave to his son Joseph. Let's look at our map again and see what we're talking about here. Sukar is just north of the word Samaria on your map. You can see it right up here.

This has a question mark on the map. I'm not sure why. It's pretty conclusive. This is the location it's being talked about here. Today, this is a place we see mentioned, if you read the news from Israel, you'll find this spot mentioned quite often. It's the Arab city of Nablus.

It's a town of about 120,000. It appears fairly regularly in the news because at different times it's been a hot bit of terrorism to be blunt. Terror is coming out of Nablus to attack launching attacks in Israel. Before it came to be known as Sukar, its biblical name was Shechem.

Shechem probably rings a bell here. Here's what it looked like in 1918 from an aerial photo. This is the village of Sukar, or ancient Shechem. You've probably heard of Mount Ebel and Mount Gerizim.

Shechem is located in this valley between the two mountains. You can actually see the valley very clearly here and the two mountains on either side. It sits right down in this valley, which is also a major route between the mountains too, an ancient route that ran right through here. Jacob's well was on the outskirts of the city of Shechem there.

Let me show you another illustration here. This is from the 1800s to show you what it looked like. This is from ground level, and you can see the city down here in the valley in Mount Ebel and Gerizim rising up above it here. Quite a fascinating place. A tremendous amount of biblical history that took place here. Let's discuss this very briefly. You may just want to write down the scripture or references here, just to give you some sense of the importance of this particular place. What were some of the mentions that we find of Shechem in biblical history? First of all, Abraham built an altar and was promised the land there. We find that in Genesis 12 and verses 6-7.

Jacob, or Israel, lived and built an altar there. We find that in Genesis 33 verses 18-20.

Simeon and Levi, if you remember the story, their sister Dinah was raped by Shechem, the individual who gave the town its name. As a result, they talked all the men of Shechem into being circumcised. While they were recovering from that procedure, they killed them all.

Rather gruesome story, but this is where this took place here.

Joseph came to Shechem looking for his brothers. They were out tending the herds, the goats, and the sheep. Joseph came to Shechem looking for them. They weren't there. They were at Doton, which is not too far from there. If you remember the story, they lowered him down into a well and sold him to a band of traders coming through on their way to Egypt. This is also very much in this immediate area. Joseph's bones. Joseph died in Egypt before the Exodus. When the Israelites left Egypt, they took his bones with them and buried him at Shechem. There's actually the tomb of Joseph, which you can visit to this day there at Shechem. Another item, when the Israelites crossed over into the Promised Land, one of the things they did is they were told to shout the blessings and cursings for keeping or disobeying God's laws from Mount Evil and Mount Gerizim, the two mountains that we looked at earlier here. It's rather interesting if you go through Shechem, which is very difficult today. It's a Palestinian-controlled town. You can't take an Israeli rental car through there today, but I was able to do that back in 1998.

Actually, these two mountains, there's kind of a natural amphitheater on either side of this road that goes through there. You can just envision the Israelites shouting back and forth across this narrow valley to each other. Years ago, people actually did some acoustical tests there and found that, yes, you can hear somebody quite clearly shouting back and forth from these natural amphitheaters there that would amplify the voices of the people. It just really makes this come alive to be there and to see that particular spot. Also, Joshua, when he was near death, gave his last words to Israel there at Shechem. Finally, Shechem became after King Solomon died and Jeroboam became the new king of Israel. Shechem became his first capital there of the northern ten tribes in that new kingdom.

Now, after this, I would leave this open, let you write all this down, but we need to move on. After this, the Israelites, the kingdom of Israel, established a new capital up here at Sabasti, as it's called. You'll find it on your map. I think it's labeled Samaria and Sabasti.

Sabasti was a name here at the Great, rebuilt this ancient capital of Israel as a new modern Roman city, and renamed it Sabasti. But that's the location. It's only eight or ten miles here from Shechem there. It gives you just a tremendous amount of history that took place in that. We'll see that reflected a little bit in the story as we go along. So, the land of Israel, the northern ten tribes, became known as Samaria after its capital, which was Samaria right up here. So, that's where this region gets its name from, that Israelite capital. So, it was called that about 900 years before what we read about here, and it's still called Samaria here in Jesus' time. Now, there was a great deal of hostility there between the Jews and the Samaritans in Jesus' time that we see reflected there in the Gospels. As I mentioned earlier, the Jews would normally avoid Samaria traveling either from Galilee, they would come down the Jordan River Valley, to Jerusalem for the feasts, and vice versa. They would go up there to avoid setting foot in Samaritan territory. There are actually historical records of Jews traveling through Samaria being attacked by the Samaritans, and also vice versa. It wasn't just one way, because the Samaritans hated the Jews, too. So, there are records of Jews attacking Samaritans, if they set foot on Jewish territory. So, there's no loss of loss between these two peoples. Another interesting tidbit, this city name Sukar comes from Hebrew, and it means drunkard. Apparently, the Jews renamed Shechem Sukar as an insult to the Samaritans there. So, that kind of gives you a little bit of insight into the hostility, animosity between these two groups of people. They call this town drunkard, you know, drunk town, drunkardville, whatever. So, where did this hostility come from?

Let's cover a short history lesson here. Some of you, this may be a bit of a review, or maybe new to you. But, as I mentioned, after Solomon died, the ten northern tribes split off to form the Kingdom of Israel, and the two southern tribes, plus a lot of Levi, formed the Kingdom of Judah. This is the same map just showing the territories of the Kingdom of Israel up here, which incidentally included Galilee, this whole area, and the Kingdom of Judah down here with its capital in Jerusalem. And again, here's the capital city of Samaria up here in Shechem.

And you can actually see there's a main road that runs between those two cities as well.

So, Solomon had already, we know from history, led the people into idolatry because of all of his wives, concubines, and this sort of thing. So, Jeroboam becomes the new king of Israel, and he takes it a lot further. There's not a single good, righteous king of Israel throughout the Kingdom of Israel, throughout its history there. And Jeroboam sets up two sinners of idolatry. One is Bethel, just north of the border here between Judah. It's actually not far at all from Jerusalem, maybe 10-15 miles. And then he also sits up in idolatry city up at Dan, north off the map here. So, Jeroboam leads the people of Israel into idolatry. And at times, the kingdoms of Israel and Judah are actually warring against each other because they've split up. They're no longer one United Kingdom, as they were under Saul and David and Solomon. So, eventually, God gets fed up with Israel's idolatry. And if you remember the story, he allowed the Assyrians to invade and to take Israel captivity. Some of the Israelites fled as the Assyrians come in from the north. Some of them flee, and they move down here to Jerusalem. You may remember that there's actually a lot of historical archaeological evidence of Jerusalem that the city vastly expanded under King Hezekiah at the period when the Assyrians were invading Israel. So, a lot of Israelite refugees moved down here and become part of the kingdom of Judah. That's why you find some of the different ten tribes interspersed with those of the kingdom of Judah later on.

Most of the people, however, are taken captive out of there and taken away into captivity in Assyria. They leave a few of the poorer people, anybody who had valuable skills, anything like that. They took them away as captives. Some who just had total homeless, landless people, a few of those they left there in the land. There we read about this in 2 Kings 17, verses 5 through 24. We won't read all of that, but just hit the high spots to get the story. Now, the king of Assyria went throughout all the land and went up to Samaria, the city of Samaria, and besieged it for three years. And you surrounded a city, and you starved them until they surrendered, is what it's talking about. In the ninth year of Hoshiah, the last king of Israel, the king of Assyria took Samaria and carried Israel away to Assyria, and placed them in Halaah and by the Habor, the river of Gozon, and the cities of the Medes. So it was that the children of Israel had sinned against the eternal their God, and they had feared other gods. And then skipping down to verse 22. For the children of Israel walked in all the sins of Jeroboam, which he did, they did not depart from them. It's talking about his idolatry.

Until the Lord removed Israel out of his sight, as he had said, by all his servants to prophets.

What this is saying is God sent them prophet after prophet to warn them of what would happen, and they didn't listen. So Assyria was carried away from their own land to Assyria, as it is to this day. And then, after the Assyrians exiled the Israelites, then the king of Assyria brought people from Babylon, Cutha, Ava, Hymoth, and from Sepharbim, and placed them in the cities of Samaria instead of the children of Israel. And they took possession of Samaria and dwelt in its cities. Let's look at a map and see what this is talking about. Basically, here's where Samaria is. Here's the Assyrian Empire and what is today Iraq. So what they do, they come down, they invade, they capture Samaria, they take all of the Israelites, they take them back out and settle them in these different places that are mentioned along here. And they took people from down here in the area of Babylonia and moved them over here and replaced them, put them in Samaria where the Israelites were before. Now, what's going on? So the Israelites get moved over into what is today Iraq and Iran, moved over there, and people are brought out of Babylon and dropped in there. Why did the Assyrians do that? Well, it was a method to show people you didn't mess with them. If you messed with the Assyrians, if you rebelled with them against them, they would come in like a ton of bricks, and this is what would happen. So they would actually uproot whole nations of people, transfer them a thousand miles away to uproot them from the land so that they no longer had anything to fight for, basically. They no longer had their homes, they no longer had their towns, they no longer had their vineyards, their fields, their orchards. They didn't have anything to fight for anymore. They're uprooted. Everything they've ever known about their lives is gone. So they're basically landless people who are totally detached from the land that they've grown up on and their ancestors grew up on. They're separated from their gods, from their idols, and all of that, too. So it was a method of control of populations by the Assyrians. And these aren't the only ones. They did it to the Syrians, they did it to Egyptians, they did it to basically everybody that they conquered. This was the Assyrian policy there, and not just from the Bible, but from other contemporary historical records as well. There are actually a number of carvings that show what this looked like. The Assyrians recorded their exploits.

These are actually some carvings from the British Museum, and you can go there and see these. This is a depiction of what a siege of Samaria would have looked like. This isn't drawn to scale, but you can see the city in the middle, built on a hill. And you see the towers and the defenders of the city up here, again, not to scale. Over here, the Assyrian soldiers raising ladders up against the walls and coming up to fight with the men. Here's a defender who's been shot with an arrow and he's falling off the wall. Over here is a battering ram with the beams with big iron points on the end of it battering against the walls of the fortress to bring it down. It's got wheels down here you can see, and a siege ramp, and a big covering to keep the defenders from tossing out torches and boiling oil and stuff like that on the men inside there. So this is a big leather covering. And then here are Assyrian archers out here firing arrows at them. So that's that's what it looked like. I mean, this is a moving picture, essentially, of what the siege of a city of Samaria would have looked like. And the end result of that, they also recorded, which is the refugees being taken away. Here you see a donkey with a couple of kids sitting on it, and people walking away. Here's a man with his little child riding piggyback on his shoulders, a couple of women behind him. They're carrying their goods. These are the refugees that the Assyrians have captured, and they're moving away from their cities over to the other lands, as we talked about earlier. They're very graphic. You can see a lot of this depicted there in the British Museum. These are from the throne rooms of the various Assyrian kings, several of which are mentioned there in the Bible. This is what took place. This is the origin of the Samaritan people there that we see so much hostility from between the Jews and the Samaritans there in the Gospels.

These other people who were moved in, when they came, they brought their own gods with them from Babylon and other places to worship there when they were brought in to live in the area of the Israelites. You can read about that in the rest of 1 Kings 17. It shows that they mix their pagan practices, their worship of their gods, with some elements of worship of the true God in there, which is something that both the Jews and God Himself viewed as abominable, because you're mixing pagan beliefs, pagan teachings with God's truth. He just abhors that.

More than a century later, the Kingdom of Judah followed the same basic pattern. They also lapsed into idolatry and were taken away into captivity, this time by the Babylonians. The difference is that for the Jews, those of the Kingdom of Judah, their time in captivity made them more religious.

That's where we see a lot of the origins of the ritual washings and the really strict rules and regulations regarding the Sabbath and so on. A lot of that traces back to their time in Babylon, because they knew from the prophets God had taken them away into captivity for their Sabbath breaking, for their idolatry, that sort of thing. So they built fences around the laws to keep from ever coming close to breaking them again. That's where we see a lot of the conflict later between Jesus and the Pharisees over things like the Sabbath. Now, the northern kingdom of Israel, they became less religious in captivity, and as a result they lost their identity and became the lost ten tribes. Another source of conflict that takes place is the Jews are in captivity in Babylon for 70 years, and then they're allowed to return. We read about this in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah.

This also is another source of conflict with the Samaritans, because if you remember the story, when Nehemiah comes back and he's rebuilding the walls and the city of Jerusalem, he runs in a lot of opposition. One of the leaders of the opposition is an individual by the name of Sanballat. He is actually the ruler of Samaria, this region of Samaria. I think he's called the governor there in Scripture, if I remember correctly. Sanballat and the Samaritans were some of those who greatly opposed the rebuilding of Jerusalem and the temple there in the period of Nehemiah. So this conflict goes back for centuries. There, this hatred there.

The Samaritans built their own temple, like the temple in Jerusalem on Mount Gerizim in 388 BC.

The Jews, again hating the Samaritans, went up and destroyed it. They raised an army and went up to Samaria, invaded it, and destroyed their temple in 128 BC. So about 150 years before what we read about here in the Gospel. So there's just been this conflict between the Samaritans and Jews going on for centuries there. They just absolutely hate each other. That's why you don't go through the Samaritan territory if you're a Jew. It might cost your life if you did that. So this is the background for what we read about here. Yes?

Yeah, Connie's comment is one of the reasons the Samaritans mixed their pagan religion with some of the true religion. It's because they believed gods were specific to a geographical area.

I was going to get to that in a few minutes here. But yeah, actually what they did is they rewrote parts of the Bible. The Samaritans believed in only five books of the Bible. It's called the Samaritan Pentateuch. Maybe you've heard of that term before. Pentateuch being the five books of Moses, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. But they actually rewrote parts of the story. For instance, in their version of the Pentateuch, Abraham doesn't go to sacrifice Isaac on Mount Moriah, which is the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. No, he goes to sacrifice Isaac on Mount Gerizim there at Samaria, which is where they build their temple. So they mixed elements of truth and rewrote parts of the Bible there as part of what they're doing there. This also contributes to the hatred and hostility there. We'll see that reflected here as we read what the woman says to Jesus in a few minutes here. Yeah, Sheila. Yeah, you're precisely right. Actually, Sheila's point is, and you'll find this in 1 Kings 17. I skipped over it for lack of time. But yeah, the Babylonians get moved in. They're being attacked by wild animals because the land, the people have been taken out. So the land is empty, and the animals come in and start attacking the new people the Assyrians have brought in. So what they do is they get a Samaritan priest and bring him in to teach them about the ways of the God of the land, which is kind of the point that Connie was making. So that's where this mixture of truth and error gets started there is because of that very thing.

Yes, yes, they're Gentiles. Right. Yeah, they're Babylonians. Well, it goes back to bringing in the Samaritan priest who knew elements of the truth. But he's a pagan priest. He's under Jeroboam's pattern of idolatry and so on there. So yeah, they are Gentile. Now, there are a few Israelites, as I mentioned, who are left in the land there. They didn't get every last one of them out. So there's some intermarriage in there, too.

Although probably not a whole lot. Yeah, my read from archaeology and history is probably they're nearly all Gentile. The people still live there. You can actually go to Samaria.

Even though Shechem itself is Arab, basically 100% Arabic, there's actually a small community of about 400-500 Samaritans who have maintained their identity going back at least close to 3,000 years there. They look very different from the Arabs. They look very different from the Jews. They are a distinct ethnic religious mix there. They still do things like the Passover. One thing I've wanted to do for years is try to go over there and see the Passover. If you want to see the closest thing to a biblical Passover, go to Samaria and see the Samaritan Passover these days. So they do still have elements of the truth, but it's also been polluted, corrupted by all this error mixed in as well. Yes, Michael? There is a stone pillar at Shechem, and I have seen it myself.

I think this is probably what you're thinking about. We can talk about it afterwards. In the ruins of the old city of Shechem, which you can see there, it's kind of surrounded it's a long story. It's literally the garbage dump for the city of Nablus today. It shows how much those people respect the history. But there is a large pillar that is about yay-wine and about yay-thick and about six feet high. The top of it is broken off at about a 45 degree angle.

A number of archaeologists think that is what one of the things Joshua did when he came into the land was to erect a standing stone or memorial to commemorate the Israelites' conquest of the land. A lot of archaeologists believe that pillar is actually that very stone that is mentioned in the Bible. You can go there, and if you can find a way to get through the garbage dump to find this, you can actually see that pillar there to this day. It's quite a fascinating artifact. There's no way to tell for certain that's what it is, but it's so massive it was clearly shaped and erected at a very prominent place there in the heart of the city of Shechem, where Joshua did erect a pillar to commemorate those events. It was just a man who could talk about all the stuff that went on in the city of Shechem, the area of Shechem there forever. It's just tremendously historical area. I've just kind of scratched the surface and hit the high points of this, but it's just an amazing area there. Let's see, where was I? Let's go on here. I'll cover what I can here pretty quickly. Back to the story from John 4 and verse 5. Jesus came to the city of Samaria, which is called Sukar, near the plot of ground that Jacob gave to his son Joseph.

Jacob's well was there. Jesus, therefore, being wearied from his journey, sent us by the well. It was about the sixth hour. Let's notice several things here. This area, again, has had a long, long biblical history, going back to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The towns of that time were generally pretty small, and they had a community well that would have looked something like this. Wells took a lot of effort to build, to dig. Private individuals rarely had their own wells, unless they were quite wealthy. They had community wells on the outskirts of the town. This is pretty much what it would have looked like, been some kind of stone lining around to prevent erosion from filling it in. These things, incidentally, are watering troughs for the animals, for the sheep and goats. It was your community well. The shepherds would draw the water up, if there wasn't a stream nearby, and they would pour it into the troughs for the animals there. This is kind of what the setting would have looked like. The women would have come to the well with large water jugs. Not quite as large as this one right here, but they might hold three, four, five gallons of water. A lot of weight to a hall there. They would have to draw the water up out of the well using some kind of goat skin or pottery vessel, perhaps a wooden bucket, something like that, and fill that and take it to their houses there for water. Then they would take it to their houses because they would use the water for washing, for food preparation, cleaning food, drinking, that sort of thing. Drawing water was considered woman's work. They would generally come to the well twice a day in the morning and in the early evening. You didn't want to come in the heat of the day, noontime, because it's hot. You're going to be making several trips with your water jug to haul this water back and forth. You didn't do it at noontime, which, incidentally, is when this takes place. It takes place at the sixth hour, which is noon, according to the reckoning of the time of that day. Incidentally, you can go and visit this exact location today. It's under a church, as, unfortunately, most of the places are in Israel today. Don Harms and I went to this very well back in 1998 when we were in Israel for the Feast. We even drank some of the water from it, which I got diarrhea from, but that's another story we won't get into right now. So, anyway, back to the story in verse 7. A woman of Samaria came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, Give me a drink. For his disciples had gone away into the city to buy food. So, let's notice several things from this. First of all, Jesus is tired. He's weary from his journey, having been walking there in the heat of the day. He's thirsty. He asks a woman for a drink, and he's probably hungry because the disciples have walked into town to get food.

This tells us, just as a sidelight, that he is truly human. Not just divine, but God and man.

He gets tired. He gets thirsty. He gets hungry. He needs a drink of water.

It's also interesting that later we see that he miraculously multiplies lobes of bread and of fishes to feed thousands of people. But here he doesn't use those powers to satisfy his own needs. It's just something he doesn't do. He only uses his miracles to serve others, not himself.

Another interesting point is that the disciples have gone into the city of Sukar, which is a Samaritan city, to buy food. But, hey, don't the Jews hate the Samaritans and vice versa? The rabbis at that time actually taught that the Samaritans were worse to eat food from a Samaritan than to eat swine's flesh. They considered the Samaritans that disgusting and despicable.

You couldn't buy food from them. You couldn't eat food that they had prepared. That kind of thing.

Shows part of this level of hostility there between them. But what do we see? We see Jesus we see his disciples going in to buy food from the Samaritans. This again probably eight, nine, ten months into Christ's ministry. Obviously Jesus' teaching is already having an effect on these people. They're overcoming some of the prejudices that they have had up to this point.

They don't view the Samaritans as subhuman, as a lot of the Jews view the Samaritans. It's not even fully human. Not having souls. This kind of thing. Something between an animal and a human being. So the disciples don't have that prejudice. They've gone ahead and are in there buying food from the Samaritans here. Again, this is the sixth hour. It's the middle of the day when this woman comes to get her water, not at the normal times of morning and evening. So what's going on here?

We'll get a clue as we read on. Verse 9, continuing the story. Then the woman of Samaria said to him, How is it that you, being a Jew, ask a drink from me, a Samaritan woman? For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.

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. There are several things to notice here. First, in typical rabbinical fashion, he's making a puzzling statement to get her to think. Same thing that happened with Nicodemus that we covered last time. He gives Nicodemus these strange statements. That was a typical method of teaching for a rabbi because you didn't just come right out and tell the story straight. No, you wanted the person to think about it. You wanted to put some work and effort into that so they would come to the right conclusion. The rabbi was to guide them in the way, not just to give them the answer straight out or straight up there. They wanted their audiences to think so they would come to the answer on their own. That's what's going on here. Jesus also uses a term here that's easy to gloss over if we don't understand. He said that he could give living water.

What's he talking about here? Israel, for the most part, is a pretty dry country.

A photograph from the top of Mount Gerizim, looking across to Mount Ibal.

Here's the city of Nablus down in the valley below. You can see it's pretty dry there. In Israel, you basically have about six months when it can rain and six months of drought every year.

From about November to May, approximately, is the rainy season. From May to the end of October, it doesn't rain. Very hot, very dry, very dusty there. During the dry season, what the people of the land did is they would store the water in cisterns, which are underground chambers carved out of the soft limestone there in line with a waterproof plaster there. During the rainy season, they would actually literally carve channels in the rock to funnel the rainwater down into these underground storage chambers called cisterns. Some of you may have used to actually be pretty popular in parts of the country before we had city water systems throughout.

Israel gets about 20-25 inches of rain a year, somewhat more than we do here.

They hid this water that would be poured into cisterns, and that kept them through the dry periods. It was another type of water, though, that they called living water. This would be water from a stream, from a river, from a spring coming up out of the ground, or from a well.

It was called living water because it was moving. It's living, it's moving, it's alive, it's the way they viewed it. Wells were considered living water because they did a well then. They would dig a well where there might be a seep of water coming up out of the ground.

You didn't just do like we do today and drill down 300 feet and hope you hit water. No, they didn't have the resources for that. You would dig a well where you knew there was some water, or water coming where the water table was high enough, that sort of thing. That's where you'd put in a well and you would line it with stone and this sort of thing, which is the case with Jacob's well that we're talking about here. So that was living water because it was moving, albeit very slowly, but it was still moving living water there.

So living water was fresh, it was cool, it was refreshing, it was life-giving. There, the other source of water, as I mentioned, was cisterns. Now, here's what a cistern of that period looked like. This is actually from the site of Shiloh, Shiloh and Don Harms.

I'm sure you don't recognize him here, but back in 98. He and I visited and spent some time there at Shiloh. This is when we found this huge underground cistern there that was used to store water. Now, what would happen with a cistern? They would literally carve channels during the rainy season for the water to run, and it would run in through an opening like these we see here to fill up these big cisterns. And some of them are enormous, as big as this room carved out of solid rock. So it shows you something of the importance of it there.

But as you can also see, washing into the water when it ran into the cisterns would also bring in mud and twigs and leaves and bugs and things like that. And eventually they would start filling up. And the original floor of the cistern is probably about 10 or 15 feet below the level that we're on here.

That's how much mud and debris is washed into this cistern over the centuries there. And also in a cistern you'd have bugs and insects and mice and things like that that would come in to get water too, and they would drown. So you're cistern water was not all that good. It would get algae in it after being in there for six months. You'd have bacteria and this sort of thing. So water from cisterns like this was a necessity, but living water was much more preferable because it's fresh, it's clean, it's clear, it's cool. It's not this dirty, muddy stuff with algae growing in it like you'd find in a cistern there.

So when Jesus refers to living water, He's referring, I think, back to Eremes, a hint or a clue or a look back to Jeremiah 2 in verse 13 where God says, For my people have committed two evils. They have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewn themselves cisterns, broken cisterns that can hold no water. The cisterns had to be lined with waterproof plaster, otherwise you'd get cracks and the limestone is porous so your water would run out. So what God is doing here is drawing a comparison between the living water, the fresh and cool and life-giving water that comes from Him as a source of all good things with this dirty, muddy water with algae and dead mice and bugs and stuff like that in it that was the result of doing things their own way.

I could really give a whole story on this. I've given this as a Bible study if it's steem boat before. But that's the basic point. That's the contrast. That's why Jesus uses this term of living waters. And what He's saying by this, He's saying that He is the Messiah. He is this fountain of living waters here that Jeremiah foretold long before. But the woman doesn't catch that reference here. So continuing on, verse 11, the woman said to Him, Sir, you have nothing to draw with. You don't have a bucket.

And the well is deep. Where then do you get this living water that you're talking about? Are you greater than our father Jacob? So here they're claiming ancestry from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, as we talked about earlier, who gave us this well and drank from it himself as well as his sons and his livestock. So again, this is adopting Israelite history as their own and claiming to be the true people of God there instead of those nasty, dirty Jews down there in Jerusalem. So continuing on, then Jesus says to her, verse 13, 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. And here, I think, is another Rimes. Back here, he talks about a fountain of water. And here God says, they have forsaken me the fountain of living water. So Jesus is doing the Rimes again, pointing her back to that. So the point here is that Jesus offers the power through God's Spirit for us to become fountains of living water, figuratively. In other words, that we, our lives, should be giving life, should be giving refreshment to other people there. That's the kind of people we should have, reflecting God's Spirit at work within us. Continuing on, verse 15, The woman said to him, Sir, give me this water, that I may not thirst, nor come here to draw.

One thing we don't catch in reading through the Gospels is the tone of voice. Is the woman serious here? Is she seriously saying, Okay, well, give me some of this water you're talking about.

Actually, I doubt it. I think she's probably giving a somewhat sarcastic response here.

Something like, Yes, mister, give me some of this water that you're talking about, and then I'll never be thirsty again. I won't have to come here every day to this well to haul the stinking water back to my house twice a day here. And the reason I say that is because of what Jesus says next, because he dramatically shifts the tone of the conversation. He's been kind of, you might say, playing with her to a point, giving her these challenging statements, but now he turns deadly serious in what he says. He shifts to something that grabs her attention in a very powerful way. Verse 16, Jesus said to her, Go, call your husband, and come here.

And the woman answered and said, I have no husband. And Jesus said to her, You well said, I have no husband. For you have had five husbands, and the one whom you now have is not your husband.

In that, you spoke truly. And this has to totally blow this woman away here. She's dumbfounded. How could this stranger she's just met know that she's been married five times and is now living with a man who is not her husband? That's why I think Jesus really shifts gears in what he says.

She might have given him something of a flippant response. He comes back and says, OK, let's get serious about it here. One of the study questions I sent out last night is, What does this tell us about this woman? Think carefully about that before you answer, because you may think you know.

You know, we would assume from reading this that she's simply a very immoral woman, that she's hard to get along with. She's been married and divorced five times, jumping from husband to husband or bed to bed, because she's looking for someone or something better. And she lacks a character to stick things out when her marriage is going bad. And now she's shacked up with a guy living together unmarried. And she's coming to the well in the middle of the day when nobody else will be there. And I think this is why, because she knows when all the other women are coming, they're going to be talking about her, to be blunt about it. She's going to be the topic of conversation. So she comes in the middle of the day when no other women are there.

She doesn't want to be there with that kind of scrutiny and gossip and that kind of thing going on. And that may well be true. But I'd like us to consider another possibility as well when we understand some about that culture. Because in that culture, women had a very hard life. They had very few rights as we have them today. In Jewish culture, a husband could divorce his wife for a number of reasons. It could be something like she couldn't bear children. He could divorce her. She couldn't give him a son. He could divorce her. If he didn't like her cooking, he could divorce her.

If she got older, not as hot, not as good looking as she used to be, he could divorce her. Get a younger model. This kind of thing. That was allowed under Jewish law. Mind you, it's not right, not right in God's sight, but it happened in those days there. That's the way the culture was. That's what we see from Jewish writings. This is Samaria. It's somewhat different, but probably the same overall there. If a woman is divorced, if her husband puts her away in divorce, what were her options? What could she do? On rare occasions, she might be able to go back to her family if she's young enough, if her parents are still alive and can take her in, if her siblings didn't object, whatever. She could try to find another husband, if she could, if she's still young enough, still good looking enough. That sort of thing. She might be able to find another husband and marry again. Being thrown out of the house by her husband, she could turn to begging.

That's one thing we see a lot of in the Gospels. People begging for a living because they have no family, no resources, no spouse to take care of them. Very sad situation. Or she could turn to prostitution. Find that mentioned a lot in the Gospels. There just weren't many options for a woman who was divorced in that culture, in that time. Or she might just find, as apparently happened with this woman, find a man to live with who would give her food, who would put a roof over her head, if she would essentially become his servant or his slave. And everything that that entailed.

And that's apparently the lot of this woman at this point in life. That's a sad reality. Maybe she is a very immoral woman, like we talked about earlier. Or maybe she's just somebody who is beat down and broken by the circumstances of life and has no other options. Nowhere to turn than to live with a guy who will put a roof over her head and give her food.

I don't know. We don't know for sure. But from her reaction, as we read through this, I think it's probably more the latter option than the former option there.

Verse 19, the woman said to him, when he tells her this shocking statement that she's been married five times before, she said, Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. So again, she's been told something that no stranger could possibly know. And then she says something really puzzling.

Our fathers worshipped on this mountain, Mount Gerizim, where they have their temple there, and you Jews say that in Jerusalem is the place where we ought to worship.

Where does this come from? Out of the blue. This odd statement. She's just...well, here's my take on it, considering again the culture. She's just met a man that she realizes and acknowledges as a prophet of God. And that man has pointed out to her that A, she's lived a very immoral lifestyle, and she needs to change. Or B, he has offered to help her turn her life around, and to get right with God, one or the other. Now, how did people worship in that day? Well, you worship by going to a temple where your God lived, and generally offering a sacrifice there.

So she's just been confronted with...she's a immoral sinner and needs to get right with God.

Or she's met somebody who's finally giving her hope to turn her life around, and she needs to get right with God, one or the other. So in her mind, she thinks, I've got to go to the temple.

The question is, which temple? She's got the Samaritan temple on Mount Gerizim right behind them where they're talking. But here's a guy who's obviously a Jew, who's obviously a prophet and man of God. But the Jews worship at this temple down in Jerusalem. So which temple do I go to?

I think that's what's prompting this odd statement that seems to come out of the blue for us. Our father's worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews say you've got to go down to Jerusalem because of the temple there. I think that's what's going on here. Again, kind of hard to say, but I think that's her dilemma. She needs to pay homage to God. She needs to worship God. But where does she go? The Samaritan temple or the one in Jerusalem? In verse 21, Jesus said to her, Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem worship the Father. So Jesus explains that it's not a matter of worshiping in a physical temple at a particular spot, that that's all going to change with Him and His ministry. But then He says, However, since you brought it up, you worship what you do not know. We know what we worship for salvation is of the Jews. In other words, you Samaritans have got it wrong in how you're worshiping here. You're not worshiping God in the right way. You're not worshiping the right God.

And of course, the Jews didn't have it all right either, but they were a whole lot closer than the Samaritans were. And of course, salvation would come through the Jews because Jesus Himself is a Jew. So He says, verse 23, 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. So several things to point out here. God doesn't accept people worshiping Him with lies, as the Samaritans were doing. They were mixing pagan religion with the true religion, and God didn't accept that. He wouldn't accept it.

So we are supposed to, as Jesus says here, worship God in spirit and in truth, not in half truths, not in truths mixed with errors. So how do we worship God in spirit? Again, in that day, you worship God by bringing sacrifices to Him at the temple of your God. But what does God have to say about that? I'm going to run through several scriptures here very quickly for lack of time.

Yes. At 1.30. Okay. All right. I'm hurrying. Don't interrupt. So thanks. Okay. A few scriptures. I'll just run through these really quickly. You may want to write them down and look them up later. Psalm 51 and verse 17. This is the kind of sacrifice and worship God wants. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and a contrite heart. These, O God, you will not despise. Romans 12, 1 and 2, I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, wholly acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service, and do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God. Hebrews 13 and verse 6. But do not forget to do good and to share, for with such sacrifices God is well pleased. So this is the kind of sacrifices God wants. And finally, from the words of Jesus, Mark 12 and verse 33, And to love God with all the heart, with all the understanding, with all the soul, and with all the strength, and to love one's neighbor as oneself, is more than all the whole burnt offerings and sacrifices. So this is how we worship God in Spirit and Truth, is by these principles. Having a humble and converted spirit, having our minds transformed to be like Jesus Christ, by sacrificing our lives in service to God and others, and by loving God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and loving others as we do ourselves. So let's see. Yeah, continuing back here in John 4, verse 25. The woman said to him, I know that Messiah is coming, who is called Christ. When he comes, he will tell us all things. And Jesus said to her, I who speak to you am he. And this is quite remarkable, because as near as we can tell, this is the first time that Jesus tells someone openly that he is the prophesied Messiah.

And who does he choose to tell? He tells a Gentile. And he tells a woman Gentile. At that.

Quite remarkable, because again, women were not highly regarded in that culture, in that society. Verse 27. And at this point, his disciples came, and they marveled that he talked with a woman.

Yet no one said, What do you seek? Or why are you talking with her?

Several things to notice here. First of all, this tells us that Jesus was talking with a woman. How were women regarded in that day? Legally, just a few tidbits from Jewish culture and history, a woman's testimony wasn't considered as good as that of a man, legally. A common prayer of that time for Jewish men was, I thank you, God, that I was not born a Gentile or a woman.

As we saw earlier, men could divorce their wives for pretty trivial things. Some of the rabbis devoted whether women had souls and could possibly be a part of the kingdom of God.

Many of the rabbis forbade speaking with a woman in public, even if the woman is your own wife or your own sister. They forbade doing that. So women were very much looked down on in that day. This is not from the Bible, it's from prejudice and from human culture. Later on, of course, we see that Jesus has a very different attitude toward women. He has women who are following him among his followers there, women who supported him in his ministry. So his attitude toward women is very different from the prevailing culture of that time. This is reflected in what we see here, that he's here in public conversing with this Gentile woman there.

That was something most rabbis would have run screaming in the opposite direction there. So he holds women in a very elevated position compared to what was normal for that day.

Also interesting too, that the disciples didn't interrupt him in this conversation with a woman. It says here, they were quite surprised. Verse 27, at this point his disciples came and they marveled that he talked with a woman and yet no one said, why, what do you seek or why are you talking with her? So they are quite respectful toward that. They don't interrupt their rabbi, their master. Continuing the story to wrap it up here in the last few verses, the woman then left her water pot, went her way into the city, and said to the men, come see a man who told me all the things that I ever did. Could this be the Christ?

Then they went out of the city and came to him, to listen to him. It's interesting that John, the writer John, includes this little detail. She left her water pot.

She did that because presumably she's so excited about what she's heard that she can't wait to run into town and tell everybody else what has happened. That's one possibility. Or the other, is she knows that she's going to come back and listen to him some more. Again, just an interesting tidbit that's thrown in there. We don't know, but either way it's evidence that this woman, her life, has just changed in a pretty powerful way.

Verse 31, In the meantime, his disciples urged him, saying, Rabbi, eat. So they've now returned with the food that they have gotten out of the town at the beginning of the story. And they offer him the food to him. But Jesus said to them, I have food to eat, of which you do not know.

So here Jesus is doing the rabbi thing again, giving them a challenging statement to get them to think about what he's going to say, and then he's going to guide them to the right answer.

Verse 33, Therefore the disciples said to one another, Has anyone brought him anything to eat while we were gone? And Jesus said to them, My food is to do the will of him who sent me, and to finish his work. In other words, this is his mission, this is his purpose, his goal, his life, his desire in life. It's what keeps him going, is to do the will of the Father and to finish his work. Verse 35, Do you not say, There are still four months, and then comes the harvest. Behold, I say to you, Lift up your eyes, and look at the fields, for they are already white for harvest. And he who reaps, receives wages, and gathers fruit for eternal life, that both he who sows, and he who reaps, may rejoice together. For in this the saying is true, One sows, and another reaps. I sent you to reap that for which you have not labored. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labors. And that is the story of the church down through the ages, to be blunt, that other people worked and labored before us, and we are here as the recipients of their work, and their message. And we continue to sow the seed that we do, that will bear fruit in the future, in times to come, there, because of what we re doing now. Probably most of that harvest is going to come out of the Great Tribulation, when many people we know will be called at that time.

We re sowing a lot of seed, a lot of people are familiar with what we re doing, but not that many are acting on it now. But I don t doubt that that will come. And in the meantime, we do need to be praying for more laborers for the harvest, so that we can reach more people. Because, as Jesus said, here the fields are ripe and ready for harvest. Wrapping up, verse 39, And many of the Samaritans of that city believed in him, because of the word of the woman who testified, he told me all that I ever did. So when the Samaritans had come to him, they urged him to stay with them, and he stayed there two days. So the point was brought up earlier, how much did Jesus know about what he was going to do? Well, here s an incident that is totally out of the blue. He meets by chance this woman at the well and ends up staying there when he was in a hurry to get to Galilee. But he ends up staying there and teaching these people in the Samaritan city for two days there. So this shows that Jesus, even though he is gone in the flesh, really doesn t know everything that is going to happen and how things are going to work out or how things are going to turn out. And it certainly shows that he doesn t have everything planned out to a T at this point because of this. And concluding in verse 41, And many more believed because of his own word. Then they said to the woman, 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 that wraps it up for today. I m not going to have time for more questions, but feel free to see me afterwards if you d like. And we do need to be out by 1.30 today. I saw what I had to say. That s Paul s scenario.

Good point. Yeah, this is Paul s point. This is a big Rimes or a Zemur, you might say. A Rimes looking forward that God is going to call Gentiles. And indeed, that is what happens. Yeah, much of the book of Acts and Paul s writing is interacting with Gentiles later on.

And it s interesting what Jesus s... well, it s another whole story we don t have time to get into.

But yeah, good point, Paul. Thanks.