Vision (12.20.24): We have found water (Genesis 24:32)

 

Note: Devotion taken from last Sunday's sermon on Genesis 26.

Genesis 26:25 An he builded an altar there, and called upon the name of the LORD, and pitched his tent there: and there Isaac’s servants digged a well.

 

Genesis 26:32 And it came to pass the same day, that Isaac’s servants came, and told him concerning the well which they had digged, and said unto him, We have found water.

 

Genesis 26 is focused on events in the life of the Patriarch Isaac. As he sojourned in Gerar, Isaac resolved to dig up the old wells that the Philistines had stopped up and filled with earth (v. 15b), and then to give them their old names (v. 18b: “and he called their names after the names by which his father had called them.”). This led to tension with the herdsmen of Gerar. Isaac abandoned one well calling it Esek (contention) and then another calling it Sitnah (hatred (vv. 20-21). He moved to another place called Rehoboth (Room) (v. 22), and then he arrived at Beersheba (the well of the oath) where his servants set to dig again (v. 23).

 

This account indicates that for God’s people there will be times when the old wells of the fathers must be dug again. There will always be a process of revival, reformation, and retrieval. This is what happened at the time of the Protestant Reformation. The old wells had been filled with earth by the medieval Roman church. Rather than teaching the doctrine of justification by faith, they were teaching justification by works. Rather than pure and simply evangelical worship, they had added the traditions of men.

We must constantly go back to the old wells that supplied the needs of our godly spiritual fathers and call them by the names that those same fathers used.

We might also consider how this passage, with all its descriptions of digging wells and its climactic description of finding water, points us to Christ. A parallel passage that comes to mind is John 4, when Christ encounters the Samaritan woman at the well. This was “Jacob’s well” at Sychar (John 4:5-6).

 

Christ asks the woman to give him a drink and then tells her that he can give to her “living water” (4:7, 10). She takes his words literally and tells him he has no means to draw this living water. Then John says:

John 4:13  Jesus answered and said unto her, Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again: 14 But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.

The woman later leaves her waterpot to go to her city and tell her neighbors of this man she met at the well, saying:

John 4:29 Come, see a man, which told me all things that ever I did: is not this the Christ?

A Christian is simply one who says, after finding the Lord Jesus (or, better, being found by him), “We have found water.”

Grace and peace, Pastor Jeff Riddle