We find ourselves still in that part of our Gospel which precedes the Galilean ministry of our Lord presented in the three Synoptic Gospels, though this journey through Samaria is conducting the Lord to their starting-point. In chapter 3:24 it will have been noticed that John was not yet cast into prison. When he was put in prison (Mark 1:1414Now after that John was put in prison, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God, (Mark 1:14)), and Jesus heard it (Matt. 4:1212Now when Jesus had heard that John was cast into prison, he departed into Galilee; (Matthew 4:12)), He came into Galilee, preaching. Our chapter speaks of a previous moment and, se usual, lets us into a deeper view of all that was at work.
“When therefore the Lord knew that the Pharisees heard that Jesus maketh and baptizeth more disciples than John (though Jesus himself did not baptize but his disciples), he left Judaea and went away [again] into Galilee.” (Ver. 1-3.)
Little did the disciples know the depth of the glory that was in Him or the consequent blessing for man, though they zealously baptized and thus exposed their Master to the spleen of those who could ill brook His increase and honor. It will be noticed that not He but His disciples did baptize. He knew the end from the beginning; and this finds its appropriate statement here. They might baptize to Him as Messiah; but He, the Son of God, knew from the first that He must suffer and die as the Son of man: so indeed He had already declared to Nicodemus with its blessed results for the believer. The baptism He instituted was therefore after and to His death and resurrection. The Son of God knew what was in man, even when he was disposed to pay Him homage because of the signs which He wrought: So did He know the effect of His disciples' activity on the religious men of that day.
It was the jealousy of the Pharisees then which in reality drove the Lord from Judaea. What was that land longer? What without Him, above all when it rejected Him and He abandoned it? They might boast of the law, but they had not kept it; they might claim the promises, but He, the promised One and accomplisher of all the promises, had been there, and they knew Him not, loved Him not, but were more and more proving their heart-estrangement from Him, their Messiah. What could the first covenant avail now? It must ensure their condemnation; it could work no deliverance. The Jew was to reap only ruin and death under its terms. We shall presently see more; yet here at the beginning of the chapter is the Son of God through the ill-feeling of those who ought most to have appreciated His presence forced out, we may say, from the people of God and the scene of His institutions, but in the power of eternal life, whatever the humiliation which the haughty religionists put on Him who saw in Him a man only, little suspecting that He was the Word made flesh.
“And he must pass through Samaria. He comes therefore to a city of Samaria called Sychar near the land which Jacob gave to Joseph his son. Now a fountain of Jacob was there. Jesus Therefore being wearied with the journeying sat thus at the fountain. It was about the sixth hour.” (Ver. 4-6.) He is as truly man as God, but the Holy One always and only. Weary and rejected, He sits there in unwearied love. The false pretensions before Him can no more hinder now than the proud iniquity He had just left behind. Jerusalem and Samaria alike vanish. What could either do for a wretched heart, a guilty sinner? And such an one approaches.
“There cometh a woman out of Samaria to draw water. Jesus saith to her, Give me to drink (for his disciples had gone away into the city to buy provisions). The Samaritan woman therefore saith to him, How dost thou being a Jew ask to drink of me being a Samaritan woman? for Jews have no intercourse with Samaritans. Jesus answered and said, If thou knewest the gift of God, and who it is that saith to thee, Give me to drink, thou wouldest have asked of him, and he would have given thee living water.” (Ver. 7-10.)
He that made the heart perfectly knows the avenue to its affections. And what grace can He not show who came to give a new and divine nature, as well as to reveal God in love, where there was nothing but sin, self, and unrest? God in the lowliness of man asks a favor, a drink of water, of the Samaritan woman; but it was to open her heart to her wants, and give her life eternal in the power of the Holy Ghost, communion with the Father and His Son Jesus Christ.
Beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace; that bringeth good tidings of good, that publisheth salvation, that saith unto Zion, Thy God cometh. So said the Spirit of prophecy by Isaiah of old; and so it will be fulfilled in its fullness by-and-by, as even now it is in principle. But what a sight to God, and indeed to faith, the Son of God, when driven out by the jealous hatred and contempt of man, of His own people who received Him not, thus occupying Himself with an unhappy Samaritan who had exhausted her life in quest of happiness never thus found! Surprised she inquires how a Jew could ask aught of one like her: what had she felt, had she then conceived who He was and that He knew to the full what she was? And how reassuring to her afterward when she looked back on the path by which God had in gracious wisdom led her that day that she might know Himself for evermore!
Alone He spoke to her alone, beginning in her soul His work for heaven, for eternity, for God. No miracle of an external sort is wrought before the eyes, no sign is needed without. The Son of God speaks in divine love, though (as we shall see) intelligence is not till the conscience is reached and exercised. The law is good if one use it lawfully, knowing that its application is not to a righteous person but to lawless and insubordinate, to impious and sinful, and in short to all that is opposed to sound teaching. But Christ is the best of all as the revelation of God in grace, giving all that is wanted, producing (not seeking) what should be, not to dispense with the absolutely needed lesson of what we are, but enabling us to bear it, now that we know how truly God Himself cares for us in perfect love spite of all that we are.
This is grace, the true grace of God. No error is more complete or perilous than the notion that grace makes light of sin. Was it a slight dealing with our sins when Christ bore them in His own body on the tree? Did law ever strike such a blow at any sinner, as God when He sending His own Son in likeness of flesh of sin and for sin condemned sin in the flesh, and thus brought no condemnation to those in Christ Jesus? Nay, it was expressly what the law could not do. The law could condemn the sinner with his sins; but God has thus in Christ condemned not only the sins but the root of evil, sin in the flesh, and this in a sacrifice for sin, so that those who otherwise had nothing but condemnation inwardly and outwardly, past and present, in nature as well as ways, have now by grace “no condemnation.” All that could be condemned has been condemned, and they are in Christ, and they walk not according to flesh but according to the Spirit.
Here doubtless there was no such standing yet existing, or consequently possible to any. But the Son was here acting and speaking in the fullness of grace which was soon to accomplish all for the believer and give all to him. Yet He lets the Samaritan know that she knew nothing. For, whatever His goodness (and it has no limits), grace does not spare man's assumption; and the revelation it bring! from God and of God never really enters till self is judged. Samaria and Jerusalem are alike ignorant of grace; and only Christ by the Spirit can open the heart to bow and receive it. “If thou knewest the gift of God.” Such is the reality and the aspect of God in the gospel. He is not an exacter but a giver. He is not commanding man to love Him, but proclaiming His love to man, yea, to the most wretched of sinners. He is not requiring the creature's righteousness, but revealing His own. But man is slow to believe, and religions man the slowest to understand, what makes nothing of himself and all of God. But such is the word of truth, the gospel of our salvation; such the free-giving of God, which the Lord was then manifesting as well as declaring to the woman of Samaria.
But there was and is more. The knowledge of the gift of God, in contradistinction from the law on the one hand or from blank ignorance of His active love on the other, is inseparable from faith in the personal dignity of the Son of God. Therefore does the Savior, all-lowly as He was, add “and who it is that saith to thee, Give me to drink.” For without this nothing is known aright. Jesus is the truth, and abides ever the test for the soul, which owns with so much the more decision and adoring thankfulness the glory of Him who, true God, became man in infinite love that we might have eternal life in Him. For otherwise, we may boldly say, it could not be. The truth is exclusive and immutable; it is not only the revelation of what is, but of what alone can and must be, consistently with the real nature of God and the state of man. Yet is God acting in His own liberty, for His love is always free and always holy, and the truth can only be what it is; for it is He who has brought down that love in man to men in all their sin and death and darkness.
It is the revelation of God to man in Him, who though the Son of God stooped so low to bless the most needy and defiled and distant from God as to ask a drink of water that He might find in this the occasion to give even to such an one living water. For this too He does not fail to say as a consequence, “If thou knewest the gift of God, and who it is that saith to thee, Give me to drink, thou wouldest have asked of him, and he would have given thee living water.” For grace truly known in Christ produces confidence in grace and draws out the heart to ask the greatest boon of Him who will never be below but above the highest position that can be conferred on Him. Never can it be that the faith of man equals, still less surpasses, the riches of the grace of God. If men, spite of their evil, know how to give good gifts to their children, how much more should the Father who is of heaven give the Holy Spirit to those that ask Him? If a guilty Samaritan woman is assured by the Son of God, that she, knowing the gift of God and who He is that asked of her to drink when weary by the fountain, had but to ask of Him in order to receive living water, still none that so asked and received had anything like an adequate sense of that infinite blessing, the Holy Ghost given to be in the believer.
Such is the living water that Christ here speaks of: not power in gift, nor yet simply eternal life, but the Spirit given of the Son to be in the believer as the spring of communion with Himself and the Father.