Off the Beaten Path

For those of us who have read the Bible for any number of years, it can become easy to move through passages with glazed eyes. We stay on the beaten path, making our way through chapter after chapter that we’ve read dozens of times before. Sometimes, though, we’ll be reading and will notice something that until then we’ve never really noticed. Most of the time when there are parts of Scripture that jump out at me like that, instead of being whole passages, it’s single verses or even phrases, and usually their jumping out at me is an indication that I need to pause and pull out the magnifying glass (figuratively speaking, that is).

Today, I’d like to walk through examining one such passage in the hopes that the next time you have a “huh, I’ve never noticed that before” moment, you won’t just pass it by as a novelty but will follow the trail that it opens up to you. So where are we headed? To Jeremiah 2:13. Let’s take a look:

“for my people have committed two evils:

they have forsaken me,

the fountain of living waters,

and hewed out cisterns for themselves,

broken cisterns that can hold no water.”  (ESV)

It’s a pretty basic study practice, when reading the Bible, to pay attention to lists. When things are clearly set forth in a group or numbered in some way, it helps us easily identify something to pay attention to or dig into more deeply. In this verse, right at the outset, God spells out that there are two specific ways in which His people, the Israelites, have done wrong. That is the flag that caught my attention in this verse, so let’s step off the beaten path of familiarity and see where this trail leads.

Having come across this initial statement, we should next ask what those two ways are and look to the text for the answer.  As a side note, one of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever been given for studying the Bible is always to ask questions of the text and get the answers from the text. We should let the Bible speak for itself before we turn to commentaries or study guides. While those tools are not necessarily bad, they aren’t the living Word of God; the Bible is.  Okay, stepping off the soap box now and back on the trail. . . .

We’ve asked the question, “what are the two evils that God’s people have committed,” and we find as we read that the answer is immediately following. First, they have forsaken God. Okay, that’s pretty obviously a bad thing to do if you’re God’s chosen people.  But secondly, they have . . . “hewed out cisterns for themselves”? What is that supposed to mean? And why is that evil?

Again, we want to go back to the text. In the middle section of the verse, where God identifies the first evil, He gives a descriptive phrase about Himself—“the fountain of living waters.” So we see that the God the Israelites have forsaken is one who supplies not just something that is necessary to sustain life (water) but something that actually gives life (living water).

Here would be a good time to look up other places in the Bible where living water is referenced (think Jesus with the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4). This can be done using a tool called a concordance that lists all the words in the Bible and gives the reference for every time each word is used. But for now, let’s just stick with what’s in this verse.

Once we see that God has established the water metaphor, we can better understand what the second evil actually means. The Israelites have turned away from a fountain of living water and have made a cistern instead. That is, instead of stopping at rejecting God, they go a step further and try to replace Him with things of their own making. Their souls clearly need living water, but they turn away from the One who can provide it and try to fill the void with other supplies.

This is a profoundly weighty example of “adding insult to injury.” It’s essentially saying to God, “I don’t acknowledge anything you’ve done for me; I don’t want what you have to give or to follow your lead, and on top of that I think this other thing is better than you are.” Not exactly the right thing to say to the Supreme Being that created you.

But there is more to be gleaned here. What else should we ask? How about the difference between a fountain and a cistern? A fountain is something that puts forth water, but a cistern is only something to hold water. It has to be refilled; it doesn’t supply itself.

So on top of rejecting God, the One who has chosen them out of all the people on the earth and has made available to them this living water of eternal life, they try to get their spiritual fill from something they make themselves that isn’t self-sufficient, much less able to supply anything. But it gets worse. If we keep reading we see that those cisterns they’ve made are broken ones that can’t even hold water! Basically, the replacements (“cisterns”) can’t even do their own job much less do what God does.

Now that we’ve dug into this verse some, asking questions of it to discover the meaning and to better understand the weightiness of what it is saying, we can take the step of applying it to ourselves. It’s easy to read about the Israelites’ rebellion and think how foolish they were. After all God had done for them, how could they turn on Him?

Aren’t we all prone to the same rebellion, though? We may not worship statues of our own making at high places around our city like they were doing, but we all have spat in God’s face and said, whether subconsciously or explicitly, that we want our own plan instead of His. We say we don’t need Him, but we turn around and reveal that we do by seeking fulfillment and satisfaction from other people or things. In doing so, we commit not just one evil, but two.

When we read passages like this one, then, we can use them as prompts to examine our own hearts, to recognize our own tendency to wander and to ask God for help, to marvel at God’s relentless grace, and to praise Him for the power He possesses by which He can give us eternal life through Jesus Christ. And that’s just from one verse.

I hope this example has given you the challenge and encouragement you need to go exploring in God’s Word. For when we step off the beaten path of what we know or are familiar with and follow the trails of discovery, we begin to tap the reservoirs of truth and spiritual blessings that are in the pages of Scripture for us to find. 

To read the Arabic translation of this post, click here.

لقراءة الترجمة العربية لهذا المنشور إضغط هنا.