It is not then quite correct, as some have said, that Christ is here alluded to as meant by “the gift of God,” the next clause being viewed as explanatory. Undoubtedly He was the means of displaying it, but the first of the clauses in this rich word of our Lord sets forth the thought, so strange to man, of the free-giving of God. Nature as such never understands it; law alone makes it still less intelligible. Faith only solves the difficulty in the person, mission, and work of Christ who is the witness, proof, and substance of it; but it is the gratuitous grace of God that is meant. Hence the second clause, instead of being merely exegetic of the first, directs attention to Him who was there in the utmost humiliation, weary with His journeying and asking a drink of water from one whom He knew to be the most worthless of Samaritans, yet the Son of the Father in unshorn fullness of divine glory and of grace to the most wretched. And this was so true that she who was as yet blind to all this had but to ask Him and have the best and greatest gift the believer can receive living water, not life only, but the Holy Ghost. Thus, while Christ is the way of it, the Trinity was really involved in making good these words of our Lord to the Samaritan woman, all the Godhead engaged in the proffered blessing.
“The woman saith to him, Sir, thou hast no bucket, and the well is deep: whence then hast thou the living water? Art thou greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well, and drank of it, himself and his sons and his cattle?” (Ver. 11, 12.) She comprehends none of the gracious words she had heard: they were not mixed with faith in her heart. She therefore reasons against them. If the water was to be drawn from Jacob's well, where was the bucket to let down, for the well was deep? Did He pretend to be greater than Jacob, or His a better well than that which of old supplied him and his house, a well which was now theirs? Thus the mind argues against the Lord, according to the senses or tradition: so fatal is ignorance of His person and of the truth. Circumstances are the trial of faith and the swamp of unbelief, which gladly avails itself (with or without any just title) of a great name and its gifts, alas! to slight a greater, yea the greatest.
Mark now the Savior's grace. He develops with the utmost fullness to this dark soul the unspeakable gift of God, in contrast with her own thoughts, and with those of man generally. “Jesus answered and said to her, Every one that drinketh of this water shall thirst again; but whosoever drinketh of the water which I shall give him, shall in no way thirst forever, but the water which I shall give him shall become in him a fountain of water springing up into eternal life.” (Ver. 13,14.)
Water of whatever spring nature boasts may refresh, but thirst will come again; and God has ordered for the creature that so it should and must be. But it is not so when one is given to drink into the Spirit. Christ gives the Holy Ghost to the believer to be in him a fresh fountain of divine enjoyment, not only eternal life from the Father in the person of the Son, but the communion of the Holy Ghost, and hence the power of worship, as we shall see later in this very conversation. Thus it is not only deliverance from hankering after pleasure, vanity, sin, but a living spring of exhaustless and divine joy, joying in God through our Lord Jesus, and this in the power of the Spirit. It supposes the possession of eternal life in the Son, but also the love of God shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit which has been given to us.
Even then the Samaritan remains as insensible as ever. “The woman saith to him; Sir, give me this water that I may not thirst nor come here to draw. He saith to her, Go, call thy husband and come here. The woman answered and said, I have not a husband. Jesus saith to her, Thou saidst well, I have not a husband; for thou hast had five husbands, and now he whom thou hast is not thy husband: this thou hast spoken truly. The woman saith to him, Sir, I see that thou art a prophet.” (Ver. 15-19.) She would gladly learn how she might be relieved of her wants and of her labor for this world. As yet not a ray of heavenly light had entered her. Not to thirst nor to come here to draw formed the boundary of her desires from the Savior not yet known to be a Savior.
This closes the first part of our Lord's dealings with her. It was useless to say more as before. Jesus had already set before her the principle on which God was acting, and His own gracious competence to give her, on her asking, living water; He had also shown the incomparable superiority of His gift as being divine over any or every boon left by Jacob. But her heart did not rise above the sphere of her daily wants and earthly wishes. She was deaf to His words, albeit spirit and life, which disclosed what is eternal.
Had it been in vain then to have so spoken to her as He did in the fullness of God's love? Far from it. It was all-important, when a door was once opened within, to reflect and find that such riches of grace had been brought to her absolutely unsought. But it was useless to add more till then. Hence the Lord's abrupt and seemingly unconnected appeal, “Go, call thy husband, and come here.” But was the digression apart from the question of her salvation? Not so. It was the second and necessary way with a soul if it is to be blessed divinely. It is through an awakened conscience that grace and truth enter; and it was because her conscience hitherto was unreached that the grace and truth were not at all understood.
On the one hand it was of all consequence that she and we and all should have the clearest proof that the testimony of the Savior's grace goes out before there is any fitness to receive it; for this, as it magnifies God and His free-giving, so it abases and exposes the wholly evil and frightfully dangerous state of man.
On the other hand it was equally momentous that she should be brought to feel her need of that free and wondrous grace of which the Savior had assured her, in all its depths and amplitude and everlasting continuance, before she had judged herself as a sinner before God. To this point He now conducts her: for if it is impossible to please God without faith, without repentance faith is intellectual and worthless. It is man discerning evidence and accepting what he in his wisdom judges best; not a sinner who, met by sovereign grace, is judged, owning himself in his sins, but too glad to find the Savior, the only Savior, in Jesus Christ the Lord.
For the Lord still holds to grace. He does not say, “Go, call thy husband” without adding “and come here.” He does not repent of His goodness because she was dull; on the contrary He was using the fresh and necessary means to have the need of such goodness felt. How painstaking is grace, working in the soul that it may enter and abide, now that it had been testified of in all its fullness and without any preparation for it, any more than desert, in man!
The woman answering “I have not a husband” is astounded to hear the withering reply, “Thou saidst well I have not a husband; for thou hast had five husbands, and now he whom thou hast is not thy husband: this thou hast spoken truly.” She was convicted. It was in demonstration of the Spirit, and power. Yet were the words few and simple, not one of them harsh or strong. It was the truth of her state and of her life brought home most unexpectedly, as God knows how to do and does in one form or another in every converted soul. It was the truth which spared her not and laid her sins bare before God and her own conscience. She did not doubt for a moment what it was that made everything manifest. She recognized it to be the light of God. She owns His words to be not men's wisdom but God's power. She falls under the conviction and at once confesses, “Sir, I see that thou art a prophet.”
It is plain hence that “prophet” does not mean one who predicted the future, for this was not in question, but one who told out the mind of God—one who spoke by the evident guidance of the Spirit what could not be known naturally, yet what therefore so much the more put the soul before God and His light. So Abraham is a prophet (Gen. 20:7), and the fathers generally (Psa. 105:15), and the O.T. prophets in all their ministry and writing, not merely in what was prediction. The same thing is emphatically true of New Testament prophesying as we may see in 1 Cor. 14. It is communicated from God which judges the life, yea, the secrets of the heart before Him.