Today’s reading: Jeremiah 2; Matthew 7
The imagery Jeremiah uses in Jeremiah 2 to call out Israel’s turning from God is both powerful, and really helpful in thinking about our own sin and the folly of favoring our own ways over the Lord’s.
The whole beginning of this chapter is an indictment against Israel for their baseless faithlessness. We start off reading about all that God did for Israel, how He brought them through the wilderness and into a plentiful land, but then, despite His care and provision, they turned from Him and defiled the land He had given them with idolatry. Then God makes this damning statement, “Has a nation changed its gods, even though they are no gods? But my people have changed their glory for that which does not profit.” Think about that, the nations have had no problems staying faithful to their idols, but Israel cannot stay faithful to the creator God of all that exists! What have these other gods done to deserve the faithfulness of their people? Nothing at all, and yet they stay faithful. But while God has actively, undeniably moved powerfully in history on Israel’s behalf, they quickly turned from Him to worthless idols.
Then Jeremiah gives us this imagery that I find so helpful. He says:
“Be appalled, O heavens, at this; be shocked, be utterly desolate, declares the Lord, 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.”
I love this distinction, God is the fountain of living waters, but Israel has hewed out broken cisterns for themselves to use instead. On the one hand, if you have a consistent fountain of water, what need do you have for a cistern? A cistern is for storing collected water so that you have it when your water source dries up (e.g. during the dry season when the rains stop falling and the streams dry up). But the Lord is a fountain of living waters, so if they are looking to Him, there is no need for a cistern at all. But what I love even more is the picture of broken cisterns. If the cistern has a crack, no matter how well you fill it one day, you will wake the next to find the water has run out and you have to do it all over again. So not only did they reject the fountain for a cistern, but their cistern won’t even hold water, meaning they have to continually run after filling it over and over again.
The reason I like this imagery so much is because it is exactly how things go when we try to make life work on our own apart from the Lord. We can do great things at times, make great progress, and feel like we’re really succeeding in life, and we may be, for a time, but the best we could ever achieve in this life, apart from the Lord, is still constant upkeep and maintenance. We do well and are successful and feel a sense of purpose and identity in our success, but what about the next day? The past success fades and we need another win to maintain our identity and feel like we really have purpose in life. Our cisterns leak. We fill and fill and fill, maybe managing to top the cistern off from time to time, but no matter how well we do one day, we will always have more work to fill it again the next.
This leaves us with the deceptive illusion that we can do it without the Lord. When we manage to fill the cistern (or even get it near full), it seems to validate that we can do it on our own, by our own power, and/or in our own ways. I know the Lord says that going this way is wrong or won’t ultimately satisfy, but it’s what I did today and it really seems to have worked, so I’m pretty sure He’s wrong! So we double down on our sin, we double down on our independence, and we run headlong after filling our leaking cisterns. And all the while, God is offering us something so much better. He’s not just offering to patch up our cisterns so that when we work hard to fill them, the work lasts longer, He is offering us something entirely different. He is offering us streams of living water welling up inside us. He is offering us a life and a reality where, when we are relying on Him, we are always satisfied. But to know this kind of spiritual life and satisfaction, to experience the fountain of living water poured out for us, we have to choose His ways over our own, even when we are convinced that we could fill our own cisterns without Him.
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