John 4:1-14 | Wrestling in the Water
Notes
Transcript
We are continuing in our series in the book of John today.
And looking at John 4 we move into a very practical example of Jesus’s ministry.
WE will se Jesus....
Preaching to the masses
Performing miracles
Doing big things
But some of the greatest examples we have to see who Jesus really was, was in his one on one interactions
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), He left Judea and departed again to Galilee.
We come back to this similar situation we left off with last week.
There is some dispute and disagreement surrounding what some believed to be opposing ministries of John the Baptist and Jesus
We saw clearly last week how this was not the case, and John was clear that he was only there to preach Christ
But what is interesting is Jesus’s response
Two things we notice here....
Jesus leaves the area so that his ministry does not conflict with John’s
This was not because they were actually conflicting, but rather both of their ministries were being affected because of this apparent conflict and it wasn’t worth it
What a lesson for us
How quick are we to make a bigger deal out of things then they are
Jesus would have had every right to go wherever he wanted, and preach however he wanted, but for the sake of the preaching of the gospel, he decided to step away from a conflict he didn’t even start
AND HOW OFTEN ARE WE NOT EVEN WILLING TO DO THIS IN CASES WHERE WE DID START THE CONFLICT
Proverbs 20:3 “It is honorable for a man to stop striving, Since any fool can start a quarrel.”
Proverbs 19:11 “The discretion of a man makes him slow to anger, And his glory is to overlook a transgression.”
Proverbs 17:14 “The beginning of strife is like releasing water; Therefore stop contention before a quarrel starts.”
We are commanded to always be looking for the route to peace
“Oh but Zach what about justice and standing up for myself, if that person did me wrong they better watch out.”
When scripture says a man’s glory is to overlook a transgression it is not saying to be a pushover
It is saying know when to respond, and know when to let it go
And there is a very simple way to test when you should let it go, and when you should address it = ask yourself the question what is my motivation
If your motivation is prideful, overlook it, if your motivation is peace, address it
EX: when the rude drive through kid gets your order wrong, your motivation for lashing out at them is not a desire for peace between you and them, its pride, and it should be overlooked (not that its wrong to try and make things right or request for something to be made right, but rather the justification in how seriously you respond)
EX: when the co-worker continues to make fun of you day after day and it is really starting to get to you, then your motivation for approaching them about this could be a desire for peace between you, and that would be wise
Know when to address a transgression, and know when to overlook it, and always as Proverbs 19:11 says be slow to anger.
Jesus had transgressions made against him here. By the jews, by believers, by followers of John in indicating something about their ministries wasn’t right - and instead of taking the focus away from the gospel, he overlooks the transgression and moves on
Now I want to say one more thing about this before we move on.
This is a great example of how Jesus was perfect, but still grew in wisdom
Luke 2:52 “And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men.”
Jesus would not have been in sin to spend a considerable amount of time addressing all the rumors, and setting the record straight as to what the ministries were about and that they weren’t in competition
But in his ever growing wisdom, he chose to overlook the transgression
2. Jesus doesn’t baptize
Why did Jesus not baptize?
We don’t know, but there are some theories
So others couldn’t brag about being baptized by Christ
Because Christ came to baptize with the spirit, not with water
Matthew 3:11 I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance: but he that cometh after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear: he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire:
So Jesus decides to leave the area and return to Galilee
and on his way to Galilee he has to go through Samaria
Now I want to stop and spend some time here, because I think this story can be considerably misunderstood we don’t understand the history of the Samaritan and the region of Samaria
History of Samaria
SLIDE - map of israel
Saul was the first King of Israel, then David took over as King, then David’s son Solomon.
After Solomon died, the kingdom of Israel was split into two, Israel being in the north, with Judah being in the south.
SLIDE - divided kingdom
Because the southern kingdom of Judah had Jerusalem as its capital, the northern kingdom needed a capital.
So one of Israel’s kings named Omri built the city in 880 B.C. as the new capital of the northern kingdom of Israel.
In 701 B.C. the Assyrian Empire from the north defeated the northern kingdom of Israel and took over the city of Samaria.
When they did this they deported nearly 28,000 Israelites from the area.
To replace all of the Israelites they deported, they brought in Assyrian captives from all the other lands they had conquered.
Remember God was very serious about Israelites not marrying anyone that was an Israelite.
So you go from a nation of people that is almost entirely the same nationality, to now you have people of all nationalities from multiple different areas.
The Israelites begin marrying them, they take on their culture, and over time you have a group of people that is sort of shunned by the other Israelites.
The Samaritan were known as a group of people that used their Jewish heritage when it helped them, and suppressed their heritage when it did not. They were sort of the black sheep of the Israelites people.
When the Jews were allowed to return to Jerusalem to rebuild the temple in 515 B.C., Ezra and Nehemiah refused to let the Samaritans help.
This caused even more separation with the Samaritans and the Israelites.
Eventually those who were part Jewish in Samaria began changing their religion as well.
They believed the scriptures now only consisted of the first 5 books of the Bible,
they took out all of the other OT books,
they considered Moses as the only prophet,
and they created other false beliefs about the end times, straying further and further from God.
_____________________________________________________________________________
So this brings us back now to the time of Jesus.
Jesus is traveling to Galilee and he has to travel through Samaria to get there.
SLIDE - jesus route
There is so much animosity against the Israelite people that if they had to travel near Samaria, they would often take the longer route, all the way around so they didn’t have to go through the area.
But Jesus had no issue traveling through Samaria, and he ends up stopping at a well in Sychar.
So He came to a city of Samaria which is called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob gave to his son Joseph. Now Jacob’s well was there. Jesus therefore, being wearied from His journey, sat thus by the well. It was about the sixth hour.
A woman of Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give Me a drink.” For His disciples had gone away into the city to buy food.
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.
SLIDE - sermon slide
This is one reason why it is important to understand the history of the Samaritans, and the culture.
We may look at Jesus here as being somewhat rude and demanding to come up and tell a women here to give him a drink.
But understand according to the culture and the environment, he was doing something unheard of
A Jewish man, let alone a teacher like Jesus, one with authority and a following would ever sit down and speak to a woman of Samaria
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.”
The woman said to Him, “Sir, You have nothing to draw with, and the well is deep. Where then do You get that living water? Are You greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well, and drank from it himself, as well as his sons and his livestock?”
I think its interesting to note how Jesus proclaimed the gospel.
Some when they go to share the gospel with someone its like they flip a switch and immediately become a preacher, and there conversation is unnatural and awkward, and usually very scripted and harsh
But Jesus often let the gospel come naturally through conversation
He spoke with individuals and through their discussion naturally revealed who he was to them
And when Jesus would go full preaching mode was usually when there was a crowd prepared to listen to him, or the situation directly constituted clear teaching
Why do I share this? - the greatest example in all of history for how to share the gospel with others is Jesus
He had a way of leading the individual to their own understanding of the truth, and guiding them through natural conversation, we should mimic this
He tells the woman that she should have asked him for water instead, because he has living water. Now the woman wouldn’t quite understand, and should stay very skeptical throughout this conversation.
Jesus answered and said to her, “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.”
Now here is where this story gets really interesting.
We don’t know a lot from scripture about how this well got here.
But what we know from history and from what we see in John 4, at some point, Jacob, the son of Isaac, grandson of Abraham, dug this well and usedit heavily.
No we can infer from Genesis when we dug this well and verify again where it is.
Jacob was a very troubled man.
Early in his life he deceived his birthright selling him a bowl of soup
Then later he would deceive and lie to his father to steal the blessing from his brother too
He would spend his days known as a liar and a deceiver, but at the same time he was the one that had the blessing of continuing the line of Abraham, which would be God’s chosen people and the line of Christ
Sometime later in his life, Jacob finds himself traveling to meet with his brother, the one he deceived twice, unsure of how we would respond after all these years.
And the night before he would meet with his brother Esau, a man comes and wrestles with Jacob. Jacob says this once they are done, he says Genesis 32:29
Then Jacob asked, saying, “Tell me Your name, I pray.”
And He said, “Why is it that you ask about My name?” And He blessed him there.
So Jacob called the name of the place Peniel: “For I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved.”
Jacob is saying that he has seen God.
Now when God appears in a bodily form in the Old Testament this is often what we would call a Christophany or an early appearance of Christ.
So this was very likely Jesus himself wrestling with Jacob over 1,00) years before he would be born
The next day Jacob meets with his brother Esau and they are able to make up, and scripture says that Jacob’s son Joseph is there when this happens.
After this Jacob and his sons, including Joseph, and the rest of his family travel to a place called Schechem, and Jacob would buy a piece of land there.
This is where Jacob would have dug this well, and he and his family would have survived off of the water from this well for sometime.
Joseph his son (this is the coat of many colors guy) would ask that after he died in Egypt that his bones would be taken back to Israel, and notice where they them after the Israelites return to the promised land....
The bones of Joseph, which the children of Israel had brought up out of Egypt, they buried at Shechem, in the plot of ground which Jacob had bought from the sons of Hamor the father of Shechem for one hundred pieces of silver, and which had become an inheritance of the children of Joseph.
Joseph is buried on his father’s land that he bought and dug this well on.
did you know you can actually go visit this well today,
SLIDE
Jacob’s well today has one of the strongest cases of authenticity of any other Biblical landmark
Going back through history nearly to the point of Jesus we have a consistent record of Jews and Christians coming to visit this very same well as it was at the time of Jesus
So I want you to get the picture now
Jesus is sitting at this well, dug by the man he most likely directly wrestled with over 1,000 years before.
And Jesus engages again here in another sort of wrestling match, but this one isn’t physical, this one is spiritual and weighted on thousands of years of conflict, sin, and false doctrine
The woman knew Jacob, she understood he dug this well, but what she didn’t understand, was it because of the man sitting in front of her that Jacob dug the well in the first place.
As God, and most likely specifically Jesus himself wrestles with Jacob, he says these words..
And He said, “Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel; for you have struggled with God and with men, and have prevailed.”
It was in that moment, Jacob was transformed into the man he needed to be.
From deceiving and lying to now being renamed and given the blessing of God himself
And it was all because he wrestled with God and prevailed.
You see Jacob had to meet God before he could go and pull water from the ground in the land that was promised to his fathers.
And the woman, at the very well was pulling up the water, asking this man if he was somehow greater than Jacob himself, the one who dug the well?
And Jesus, wrestling with this woman’s faulty mindset says...
Jesus answered and said to her, “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.”
Now this message is going to be somewhat of a 2 parter.
The story of the Woman was so extensive and led to some many different things that I don’t want to rush all of it in one sermon.
So next week is easter, and we will have a special lesson for that, but the next week we will pick up again here in John 4:15 to see how the woman responds, and look at another teaching of Jesus to his disciples when they return to him.
But here is what I want you to get.
Jacob thirsted a lot in his life. But it wasn’t until he finally came face to face with God that he was changed and found truth.
The woman at the well was thirsting for something she didn’t even know. We will see next week that she is looking for the messiah, but she is clearly doubtful, and skeptical, she is in the midst of great sin....
AND JUST LIKE GOD REVEALED TO JACOB FOR THE FIRST TIME THE NAME ISRAEL, WHICH MEANS TO STRIVE OR WRESTLE WITH GOD, HE ALSO REVEALS TO THIS WOMAN WRESTLING WITH ALL THESE THINGS FOR THE FIRST TIME, THAT THE END TO THE WRESTLING IS HERE.
This sinful, doubting, deceiving, woman at war with her own people, searching for some way to satisfy her thirst, encounters Jesus, and SHE IS CHOSEN TO BE THE FIRST TO BE TOLD DIRECTLY THAT HE IS THE MESSIAH
And back in Genesis, this sinful, doubting, deceiving man at war with his own people, searched for some way to satisfy his thirst, encounters Jesus, and HE IS THE FIRST TO CARRY THE TITLE OF THE CHOSEN PEOPLE OF GOD.
Can I tell you today that the framework for you fixing the mess of a life you might be in today is right here.
Man, woman, sin, doubt, deception, wherever you say you fit its the same result.
Come to Jesus, stop trying to be satisfied with the things of the world that never fully satisfy
And instead follow Christ, put your faith in him, repent of your sins, start living for him, read his word, talk to him, dwell in the living water, and you will never thirst again.
