The last several day’s I’ve been freshly pondering Jeremiah 2:13.
In the passage, God speaks to Jeremiah and declares that God’s people have committed two evils.
First, they have forsaken (abandoned/neglected) God, the “fountain of living waters.”
And second, they have instead “hewed out for themselves cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.”
In Israel, as a Middle East country with little freshwater availability, water is considered precious, valuable, and essential.
God looks upon His people and sees them leaving the endless aquifer of living water of Himself (which never runs dry) and instead attempts to dig for themselves cisterns in the rock.
Cisterns throughout Israel were often hand-cut or chiseled into rock approximately 15-20 feet in the earth. These pear-shaped caverns typically had an opening 2-3 feet wide and once carved, the community would draw water from a well, haul it over to the cistern, and pour the water in – as a storage supply for the entire community.
God’s accusation of His people is that rather than live from an endless supply of water, they seek out their own source and in self-effort try to carve out a supply of the life water they need.
To make matters worse, these self-produced cisterns have cracks and all the water tossed into them seeps into the ground and is lost.
What a tragic picture of humanity’s effort to produce life outside of Christ … and what a convicting illustration of what we as Christians often do to attempt to live out the Christian life.
May I encouage you to allow the Spirit of God to examine your heart afresh and see if there is any broken cisterns in you?
Let’s us draw near to God and drink deeply from the well of living water, Jesus Christ!
“… whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I shall give him will become in him a well of water springing up into eternal life.” – Jesus in John 4:14
Cheering you ever deeper into Him!