“For my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the spring of living waters, and cut out cisterns for themselves: broken cisterns that can’t hold water.
Parallel Translations
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“For my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the spring of living waters, and cut out cisterns for themselves: broken cisterns that can’t hold water.
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For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.
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For My people have committed two evils: they have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.
Cross-references (38)
Passages linked to Jeremiah 2:13 in the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge, ordered by reader-vote popularity; verse text shown in World English Bible.
- John 4:14 but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never thirst again; but the water that I will give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life.”
- John 7:37 Now on the last and greatest day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried out, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink!
- Revelation 21:6 He said to me, “I have become the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. I will give freely to him who is thirsty from the spring of the water of life.
- Jeremiah 17:13 Yahweh, the hope of Israel, all who forsake you will be disappointed. Those who depart from me will be written in the earth, because they have forsaken Yahweh, the spring of living waters.
- Psalms 36:9 For with you is the spring of life. In your light we will see light.
- Revelation 22:1 He showed me a river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb,
- Revelation 22:17 The Spirit and the bride say, “Come!” He who hears, let him say, “Come!” He who is thirsty, let him come. He who desires, let him take the water of life freely.
- Isaiah 55:2 Why do you spend money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which doesn’t satisfy? Listen diligently to me, and eat that which is good, and let your soul delight itself in richness.
- Psalms 81:11-13 But my people didn’t listen to my voice. Israel desired none of me. So I let them go after the stubbornness of their hearts, that they might walk in their own counsels. Oh that my people would listen to me, that Israel would walk in my ways!
- Jeremiah 4:22 “For my people are foolish. They don’t know me. They are foolish children, and they have no understanding. They are skillful in doing evil, but they don’t know how to do good.”
- Jeremiah 2:11 Has a nation changed its gods, which really are no gods? But my people have changed their glory for that which doesn’t profit.
- Jeremiah 2:17 “Haven’t you brought this on yourself, in that you have forsaken Yahweh your God, when he led you by the way?
- Jeremiah 2:31-32 Generation, consider Yahweh’s word. Have I been a wilderness to Israel? Or a land of thick darkness? Why do my people say, ‘We have broken loose. We will come to you no more?’ “Can a virgin forget her ornaments, or a bride her attire? Yet my people have forgotten me for days without number.
- 2 Peter 2:17 These are wells without water, clouds driven by a storm; for whom the blackness of darkness has been reserved forever.
- Isaiah 1:3 The ox knows his owner, and the donkey his master’s crib; but Israel doesn’t know. My people don’t consider.”
- Isaiah 44:9-20 Everyone who makes a carved image is vain. The things that they delight in will not profit. Their own witnesses don’t see, nor know, that they may be disappointed. Who has fashioned a god, or molds an image that is profitable for nothing? Behold, all his fellows will be disappointed; and the workmen are mere men. Let them all be gathered together. Let them stand up. They will fear. They will be put to shame together. The blacksmith takes an ax, works in the coals, fashions it with hammers, and works it with his strong arm. He is hungry, and his strength fails; he drinks no water, and is faint. The carpenter stretches out a line. He marks it out with a pencil. He shapes it with planes. He marks it out with compasses, and shapes it like the figure of a man, with the beauty of a man, to reside in a house. He cuts down cedars for himself, and takes the cypress and the oak, and strengthens for himself one among the trees of the forest. He plants a cypress tree, and the rain nourishes it. Then it will be for a man to burn; and he takes some of it, and warms himself. Yes, he burns it, and bakes bread. Yes, he makes a god, and worships it; he makes it a carved image, and falls down to it. He burns part of it in the fire. With part of it, he eats meat. He roasts a roast, and is satisfied. Yes, he warms himself, and says, “Aha! I am warm. I have seen the fire.” The rest of it he makes into a god, even his engraved image. He bows down to it and worships, and prays to it, and says, “Deliver me; for you are my god!” They don’t know, neither do they consider: for he has shut their eyes, that they can’t see; and their hearts, that they can’t understand. No one thinks, neither is there knowledge nor understanding to say, “I have burned part of it in the fire. Yes, I have also baked bread on its coals. I have roasted meat and eaten it. Shall I make the rest of it into an abomination? Shall I bow down to a tree trunk?” He feeds on ashes. A deceived heart has turned him aside; and he can’t deliver his soul, nor say, “Isn’t there a lie in my right hand?”
- Isaiah 46:6-7 Some pour out gold from the bag, and weigh silver in the balance. They hire a goldsmith, and he makes it a god. They fall down— yes, they worship. They bear it on their shoulder. They carry it, and set it in its place, and it stands there. It cannot move from its place. Yes, one may cry to it, yet it can not answer. It cannot save him out of his trouble.
- Jeremiah 1:16 I will utter my judgments against them concerning all their wickedness, in that they have forsaken me, and have burned incense to other gods, and worshiped the works of their own hands.
- Jeremiah 15:6 You have rejected me,” says Yahweh. “You have gone backward. Therefore I have stretched out my hand against you and destroyed you. I am weary of showing compassion.
- 1 Samuel 12:10 They cried to Yahweh, and said, ‘We have sinned, because we have forsaken Yahweh, and have served the Baals and the Ashtaroth: but now deliver us out of the hand of our enemies, and we will serve you.’
- Psalms 115:4-8 Their idols are silver and gold, the work of men’s hands. They have mouths, but they don’t speak. They have eyes, but they don’t see. They have ears, but they don’t hear. They have noses, but they don’t smell. They have hands, but they don’t feel. They have feet, but they don’t walk, neither do they speak through their throat. Those who make them will be like them; yes, everyone who trusts in them.
- Psalms 146:3-4 Don’t put your trust in princes, in a son of man in whom there is no help. His spirit departs, and he returns to the earth. In that very day, his thoughts perish.
- Ecclesiastes 1:2 “Vanity of vanities,” says the Preacher; “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”
- Ecclesiastes 2:11 Then I looked at all the works that my hands had worked, and at the labor that I had labored to do; and behold, all was vanity and a chasing after wind, and there was no profit under the sun.
- Ecclesiastes 2:26 For to the man who pleases him, God gives wisdom, knowledge, and joy; but to the sinner he gives travail, to gather and to heap up, that he may give to him who pleases God. This also is vanity and a chasing after wind.
- Isaiah 5:13 Therefore my people go into captivity for lack of knowledge. Their honorable men are famished, and their multitudes are parched with thirst.
- Isaiah 63:8 For he said, “Surely, they are my people, children who will not deal falsely;” so he became their Savior.
- Ecclesiastes 4:4 Then I saw all the labor and achievement that is the envy of a man’s neighbor. This also is vanity and a striving after wind.
- Jeremiah 5:31 The prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests rule by their own authority; and my people love to have it so. What will you do in the end of it?
- Judges 10:13 Yet you have forsaken me and served other gods. Therefore I will save you no more.
- Ecclesiastes 1:14 I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and behold, all is vanity and a chasing after wind.
- Ecclesiastes 2:21 For there is a man whose labor is with wisdom, with knowledge, and with skillfulness; yet he shall leave it for his portion to a man who has not labored for it. This also is vanity and a great evil.
- Jeremiah 2:26 As the thief is ashamed when he is found, so the house of Israel is ashamed: they, their kings, their princes, their priests, and their prophets,
- Ecclesiastes 12:8 “Vanity of vanities,” says the Preacher. “All is vanity!”
- Jeremiah 5:26 For wicked men are found among my people. They watch, as fowlers lie in wait. They set a trap. They catch men.
- Jeremiah 18:14 Will the snow of Lebanon fail from the rock of the field? Will the cold waters that flow down from afar be dried up?
- Micah 2:8 But lately my people have risen up as an enemy. You strip the robe and clothing from those who pass by without a care, returning from battle.
- Micah 6:3 My people, what have I done to you? How have I burdened you? Answer me!
Cross-references from openbible.info (CC BY 4.0)
Explain this verse (17 sources)
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John Calvin 1540 · Public Domain If a reason is given here why the Prophet…
If a reason is given here why the Prophet had bidden the heavens to be astonished and terrified, then we must render the words thus, “For two evils have my people done:” but I rather think that the preceding verse is connected with the former verses. The Prophet had said, “Go to the farthest lands, and see whether any nation has changed its gods, while yet they are mere inventions.” I think then the subject is closed with the exclamation in the preceding verse, when the Prophet says, “Be astonished, ye heavens.” It then follows, “Surely, two evils have my people done,” even these, — “they have forsaken me,” — and then, “they sought for themselves false gods.” When any one forsakes an old friend and connects himself with a new one, it is an iniquitous and a base conduct: but when there is no compensation, there is in it united together, folly, levity, and madness. If I despise what I know to be profitable to me, and embrace what I understand will be to my hurt, does not such a choice prove madness? This then is what the Prophet now means, when he says, that the people had sinned not only by departing from the true God, but also by going over, without any compensation, unto idols, which could confer no good on them.
He says that they had done two evils: the first was, they had forsaken God; and the other, they had fallen away unto false and imaginary gods. But the more to amplify their sin, he makes use of a similitude, and says that God is a fountain of living waters; and he compares idols to perforated or broken cisterns, which hold no water When one leaves a living fountain and seeks a cistern, it is a proof of great folly; for cisterns are dry except water comes elsewhere; but a fountain has its own spring; and further, where there is a vein perpetually flowing, and a perennial stream of waters, the water is more salubrious and much better. The waters which rain brings into cisterns are never so wholesome as those which flow from their own native vein: and when the very receptacles of water are full of chinks, what must they be but empty? Hence then God charges the people with madness, because he was forsaken, who was a fountain and a fountain of living waters; and further, because the people sought unprofitable things when they went after their idols. For what is to be found in idols? some likeness; for the superstitious think that they labor not in vain, when they worship false gods, and they hope to derive some benefit. There are then some resemblances to the true in false religions; and hence the Prophet compares false gods to wells, because they were made hollow, suitable to hold water; but there was not a drop of water in them, as they were broken cisterns.
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We now perceive what the Prophet meant, — that we cannot possibly be free from guilt when we leave the only true God, as in him is found for us a fullness of all blessings, and from him we may draw what may fully satisfy us. When therefore we despise the bounty of God, which is sufficient to make us in every way happy, how great must be our ingratitude and wickedness? Yet God remains ever like himself: as then he has called himself the fountain of living waters, we shall at this day find him to be so, except he is prevented by our wickedness and neglect. But the Prophet adds another crime; for when we fall away from God, our own conceits deceive us; and whatever may appear to us at the first view to be wells or fountains, yet when thirst shall come, we shall not find a drop of water in all our devices, they being nothing else but dry cavities. It follows —
John Calvin's Commentaries (1540-1563) — public domain. Text from the Calvin Translation Society English edition (1840s-50s) via the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (ccel.org). Calvin's coverage is partial (roughly two-thirds of the Bible); uncommented books and verses are honest gaps, never fabricated. The 19th-century editor's footnotes and remarks are omitted so the notes are faithfully Calvin's own voice.
Geneva Bible translators 1599 · Public Domain Signifying, that when men forsake God’s word, which is…
Signifying, that when men forsake God’s word, which is the fountain of life, they reject God himself, and so fall to their own inventions, and vain confidence, and procure to themselves destruction, Jonah 2:8; Zech. 10:2.
Geneva Bible (1599) marginal notes — public domain.
John Trapp 1656 · Public Domain Jer 2:13 For my people have committed two evils;…
Jer 2:13 For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, [and] hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.
Ver. 13. For my people have committed two evils.] Contrary to those two good things that I have commanded them, viz., "Depart from evil, and do good." {Psa 34:14} Lust doth first εξελκειν, draw a man from God, and then it doth δελεαζειν, deceive him with a bait of the creature. {Jas 1:14}
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They have forsaken me, the fountain of living water.] The all-sufficient, ever-flowing, over-flowing well spring of all welfare. {Jas 1:17} Trismegist, a heathen, could say, {a} Respicite O mortales, et resipiscite, et ad fontem vitae recurrite, Look back, O mortals, and repent, and run back again to the fountain of life. Seneca also saith, that sin is so foul a thing, that he would not commit it, though he could hide it from men, and get pardon of it of God; for that were to turn his back upon God, the chief good, &c. How well might Bullinger {b} say, that Seneca alone had left to posterity more sincere divinity than all the books of almost all the schoolmen.
And hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns.] Such, and no better, are all idols, human helps, creature comforts, friends, means, merits, &c.; what are they all but cisterns, that hold but muddy rainwater at best? but then, being broken cisterns, riven vessels, what hold they else but limum et lapides, mud and gravel? Such cisterns, therefore, to hew out, what is it better than industrious folly, laborious loss of time? to say no worse of it. Now
“ Turpe est difficiles habere nugas:
Et stultus labor est ineptiarum. ”
{a} Dialog. 7.
{b} Comment. in Rom 1:19. So little reason was there that Alex. Hales should be called first Fons vitae, font of life, and then Doctor Irrefragabilis, irresistible teacher.
John Trapp, A Commentary or Exposition upon All the Books of the Old and New Testament (1647–1656) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Matthew Poole 1685 · Public Domain Committed two evils, viz. remarkable ones, and with a…
Committed two evils, viz. remarkable ones, and with a witness.
Living waters; a metaphor taken from springs, called living here, and Gen 26:19, and elsewhere, because they never cease or intermit; such had God’s care and kindness been over and to them; see on Isa 58:11; his Spirit continually proceeding from the Father and the Son to refresh their consciences. Compare Joh 4:10; 7:38,39.
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Cisterns: it is doubled, to show the multitude of their shifts; and
broken is added, to show the helplessness of them, as being able to hold no water; but when a man hath made many hard shifts to get water, he cannot keep it, but it dries away; or if it abide, proves unwholesome: by which understand either their
idols, which are empty, vain things, that never answer expectation; or the Assyrians and Egyptians, as Jer 2:18, which proved but broken reeds, and as all other supports or props, friends, traditions, merits, &c. are that are trusted to besides God; they are but cisterns at the best, whose water will putrify, or broken, riven vessels, through which they will soak, and leave nothing but mud and dirt behind them.
Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible (1683–1685) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
John Gill 1763 · Public Domain Is Israel a servant?.... That he does not abide…
Is Israel a servant?.... That he does not abide in the house, in his own land, but is carried captive, becomes subject to others, and is used as a slave; so the Targum,
"as a servant;''
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is he not the Lord's first born? are not the people of Israel called the children of the living God? how come they then to be treated not as children, as free men, but as servants? this cannot be owing to any breach of covenant or promise on God's part, or to the failure of the blessing of national adoption bestowed on them; but to some sin or sins of theirs, which have brought them into this miserable condition:
is he a home born slave? or born in the house, of the handmaid, and so in the power of the master of the family in whose house he was born, Exo 21:4 or the sense is, either Israel is a servant,
or a son of the family (d), as some render the words; not the former, being not only the son of a free woman, but Jehovah's firstborn; if the latter,
why is he spoiled? why is he delivered up to the spoilers? as the Targum; why should he be given up into the hands of the Babylonians, and become their prey? is it usual for fathers to suffer their children, or those born in their house, to be so used? some reason must be given for it.
(d) "filius familias", Munster.
John Gill's Exposition of the Whole Bible (1746–1763) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
John Wesley 1765 · Public Domain Of living waters - A metaphor taken from springs,…
Of living waters - A metaphor taken from springs, called living, because they never cease, or intermit; such had God's care and kindness been over them. Cisterns - Either their idols, which are empty vain things, that never answer expectation, or the Assyrians, and Egyptians. Indeed all other supports, that are trusted to besides God, are but broken vessels.
John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the Whole Bible (1754–1765) — public domain. Text via the GEBible commentary corpus.
Adam Clarke 1810 · Public Domain Verse 13. Two evils] First, they forsook God, the…
Verse 13. Two evils] First, they forsook God, the Fountain of life, light, prosperity, and happiness. Secondly, they hewed out broken cisterns; they joined themselves to idols, from whom they could receive neither temporal nor spiritual good! Their conduct was the excess of folly and blindness. What we call here broken cisterns, means more properly such vessels as were ill made, not staunch, ill put together, so that the water leaked through them.
Adam Clarke's Commentary on the Bible (1810–1826) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Albert Barnes 1834 · Public Domain The pagan are guilty of but one sin -…
The pagan are guilty of but one sin - idolatry; the covenant-people commit two - they abandon the true God; they serve idols.
Fountain - Not a spring or natural fountain, but a tank or reservoir dug in the ground (see Jer 6:7), and chiefly intended for storing living waters, i. e., those of springs and rivulets. The cistern was used for storing up rain-water only, and therefore the quantity it contained was limited.
Albert Barnes' Notes on the Bible (1834–1885) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Haydock's Catholic Bible Commentary 1859 · Public Domain Water. The idols and nations, to which they have…
Water. The idols and nations, to which they have had recourse, injure them. (Calmet) --- The Jews did just the reverse to what God commanded. (Worthington)
George Leo Haydock (1774–1849), Haydock's Catholic Family Bible and Commentary, 1859 edition — public domain. Excludes Psalms (Douay-Rheims chapter numbering differs from Protestant) and Deuterocanonical books (Catholic canon only).
Robert Jamieson, A. R. Fausset & David Brown 1871 · Public Domain two evils--not merely one evil, like the idolaters who…
two evils--not merely one evil, like the idolaters who know no better; besides simple idolatry, My people add the sin of forsaking the true God whom they have known; the heathen, though having the sin of idolatry, are free from the further sin of changing the true God for idols (Jer 2:11).
forsaken me--The Hebrew collocation brings out the only living God into more prominent contrast with idol nonentities. "Me they have forsaken, the Fountain," &c. (Jer 17:13; Psa 36:9; Joh 4:14).
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broken cisterns--tanks for rain water, common in the East, where wells are scarce. The tanks not only cannot give forth an ever-flowing fresh supply as fountains can, but cannot even retain the water poured into them; the stonework within being broken, the earth drinks up the collected water. So, in general, all earthly, compared with heavenly, means of satisfying man's highest wants (Isa 55:1-2; compare Luk 12:33).
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown — Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
Daniel D. Whedon 1874 · Public Domain 13. My people have committed two evils — As…
13. My people have committed two evils — As against the one sin of the heathen. A twofold contrast is implied in the language used: 1) Between a living fountain and a cistern; 2) Between a suitable cistern and a worthless one.
Daniel D. Whedon (gen. ed.), Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1874–1909) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges 1878 · Public Domain 13. “Jehovah is a fountain of living water, having…
13. “Jehovah is a fountain of living water, having life in Himself, giving life to all.” (Co.) Israel has preferred cisterns, the contents of which, vapid and worthless in themselves, speedily disappear through leakage. For the figure of water as denoting spiritual blessing, cp. Isa_12:3; Isa_44:3. “The perennial spring of water that leaps and flashes as though it were a living thing, breaking ceaselessly forth from a hidden source, is the best image of that higher life bestowed on him to whom God has unveiled his face.” Hort, The Way, the Truth, and the Life, p. 99.
two evils] The sin of the heathen is idolatry, whereas this people have in addition renounced the service of the one true God.
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cisterns] These were very familiar objects to those whom the prophet addressed. “There are thousands of these ancient cisterns in upper Galilee, where Josephus says there were two hundred and forty cities in his day, and the site of every one was pierced like a honeycomb with them” (Thomson, The Land and the Book, p. 287).
broken cisterns, that can hold no water] “No comparison could more keenly rebuke the madness of a people who changed their glory for that which doth not profit. The best cisterns, even those in solid rock, are strangely liable to crack … and if by constant care they are made to hold, yet the water collected from clay roofs or from marly soil has the colour of weak soapsuds, the taste of the earth or the stable, is full of worms, and in the hour of greatest need it utterly fails … I have never been able to tolerate this cistern water except in Jerusalem, where they are kept with scrupulous care, and filled from roofs both clean and hard” (ibid.).
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges (gen. ed. J. J. S. Perowne; Cambridge University Press, 1878–1918) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers 1878 · Public Domain (13) The fountain of living waters.—The word rendered “well,”…
(13) The fountain of living waters.—The word rendered “well,” as in Pro_10:11; Pro_18:4; “fountain,” as in Psa_36:9, is used of water flowing from the rock. The “cistern,” on the other hand, was a tank for surface water. A word identical in sound and meaning, though differently spelt, is variously rendered by “pit,” “well,” or “cistern.”
A Bible Commentary for English Readers, edited by Charles John Ellicott (1878–1897) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Pulpit Commentary 1880 · Public Domain Two evils. Israel has not merely offended, like the…
Two evils. Israel has not merely offended, like the heathen, by idolatry, but by deserting the only God who can satisfy the needs of human nature. The fountain of living waters. So Jer_17:13. (comp. Psa_36:9) Fountain; literally, tank or reservoir. Such reservoirs were "dug in the ground, (see on Jer_6:7) and chiefly intended for storing living waters, i.e. those of springs and rivulets" (Payne Smith). Cisterns, broken cisterns. A cistern, by its very nature, will only hold a limited amount, and the water "collected from clay roofs or from marly soil, has the color of weak soapsuds, the taste of the earth or the stable." Who would prefer such an impure supply to the sweet, wholesome water of a fountain? But these cisterns cannot even be depended upon for this poor, turbid drink. They are "broken," like so many even of the best rock-hewn cisterns (Thomson, "The Land and the Book," p. 287). How fine a description of the combined attractiveness and disappointingness of heathen religions, qualities the more striking in proportion to the scale on which the religions problem is realized (e.g. in Hinduism)!
Broken cisterns.
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I ALL MEN NEED SPIRITUAL REFRESHMENT. The soul has its thirst. (Psa_63:1)
1. This is natural. We are born with instincts which reach out to the unseen, and the worldly habits which deaden these instincts cannot utterly eradicate them. If they could, we should cease to be men and become merely rational brutes, for "man is a religious animal.
2. This is intensified by the presence of life. Thirst is increased by a heated atmosphere, hard work, disease, and special agents, e.g. salt water; so spiritual thirst is deepened by the heat and burden of life, by its toil and battle, by the fever of passion and the weariness of sorrow, by the poison of sin and the disappointment of delusive promises of satisfaction. How pathetic is this picture! If the living water is forsaken, cisterns even poor, broken cisterns, with scant supply of foul water, are resorted to, for in some way the burning thirst of the soul must be quenched.
II THEY WHO FORSAKE GOD INJURE THEIR OWN SOULS. Hitherto the prophet has spoken of the guilt of unfaithfulness. He now speaks of the loss this entails. It is right that we should first think of the simple sinfulness of our sin, for this is its most important feature. But it is profitable to consider also the folly of it, and the misery that it must bring upon us. This is not to be all relegated to the world of future punishments. It is to be felt now, and would be felt keenly if men were not blind to their own condition. As godliness has the promise of the life which now is as well as of that which is to come, so ungodliness brings present loss. This must not be looked for in the direction of material profit and loss, of bodily pain and pleasure, towards which the Jew was too much inclined to turn his attention. It is inward and spiritual, yet it is not the less real. For the spirit is the self. When the noise of the world is stilled, in silent watches of the night, in lonely hours of reflection, does not the poor homeless soul feel some sense of unrest, some vague thirst which no pleasure or possession has yet satisfied?
III THE INJURY ARISING FROM FORSAKING GOD IS FOUND FIRST IN THE VERY LOSS OF GOD. God is more to us than all his gifts. The greatest loss of the prodigal son is not the food which he craves for in the land of famine, but the father whom he has forsaken. God is the chief source of the soul"s refreshment. Men talk of the duty of religion. They should consider its blessings, and learn to sock God as they seek their bread and water the first necessaries of life. God is a Fountain of living water.
1. His refreshing grace is ever flowing, and in great abundance, not limited in quantity as that of the largest cistern may be so that there is enough for all, and it may be had at all times.
2. It is fresh, like the mountain stream bubbling forth cool from the rock, not like the stale waters of the cistern. "He giveth more grace", (Jam_4:6) and "grace for grace". (Joh_1:16) The Christian does not have to go back to the grace of God in past ages. There is a fresh stream now flowing, and prayer opens to us fresh supplies of the love and help of God.
3. It is wholesome and invigorating, unlike the earthy waters of the cistern. How foolish, then, to turn aside from such a supply for anything! We need no better.
IV THE INJURY ARISING FROM FORSAKING GOD IS INTENSIFIED BY THE UNSATISFACTORY NATURE OF THE SUBSTITUTES MEN TURN TO.
1. These are stir-made. God makes the fresh spring, man makes the cistern. Can our work equal God"s?
2. They are limited in supply reservoirs, not flowing streams.
3. They are often impure; the cistern soon gets impregnated with unwholesome matter.
4. They are imperfect of their kind. The cisterns are broken; what little unwholesome water they have leaks away. All these characteristics apply to the waters men turn to in preference to God e.g. human religion, philosophy, public occupation, social distraction, pleasure; these all fail to slake the soul"s thirst. "Cor nostrum inquistum est donec requiescat in te.
Forsaking the fountain of living waters.
I THERE IS SUGGESTED HERE AN INCONCEIVABLE ACT OF FOLLY. It is a thing which could be believed of no one in his sound senses that he would leave a fountain of living water, knowing it to be such, and enjoying the use of it; and be contented with a cistern such as is here described. A fountain is that from which he benefits without any trouble; it is a pure gift of grace, and all he has to do is to take up his habitation by it. Why, then, should he leave a fountain for a cistern, even if the cistern were ready-made? Still less credible is it that he should take the trouble to make a cistern. And the incredibility reaches its height when we are asked to suppose him doing all this with the end of possessing a broken cistern that can hold no water. Such broken cisterns the people of Israel seem to have known only too well. Dr. Thomson says there are thousands such in Upper Galilee, which, though dug in hard rock and apparently sound, are all dry in winter; at best they are an uncertain source of supply, and the water, when collected, is bad in color and taste, and full of worms. The whole action, then, of the character here indicated is scarcely conceivable, unless as the expression of fear in a diseased mind. In somewhat of this way we have heard of men acting, who, after having made great fortunes, have become victims to the horrid delusion that they are paupers, and must make some sort of provision against utter destitution. So we might imagine the victim of delusion, with fountains all round him, still insisting upon having some sort of cistern provided. Note, moreover, that the aspect of folly becomes more decided when we consider that it is water which is treated in this way. The water which is offered so freely and continuously in the fountain is a thing which man needs, and yet it is for the supply of that which is a great and may be a painful need that he is represented as depending on broken cisterns which with great toil he has constructed for himself.
II THERE IS MENTIONED AN INDISPUTABLE ACT OF DESERTION. Israelites, stung to wrath by a charge of folly, might reply that they had not left a living fountain for broken cisterns. This, however, was but denying the application of a figure; the historical fact which the prophet had connected with the figure they could not possibly deny. Assuredly they had forsaken God. Not simply that at this time they were without him, but, having once been with him, they had now left him. Had" he not taken them up when they were in the weakness, dependence, and waywardness of national infancy? Had they not received all their supplies from him, and gathered strength and prestige under the shelter of his providence? They owed the land in which they lived, and the wealth they had heaped up, to the fulfillment of his promises, and yet they were now worshipping idols. Their worship was not a momentary outbreak like the worship of the golden calf, soon after leaving Egypt, and when they had so long been living in the midst of idolaters. It was a steady settling down into the worst excesses of an obscene and cruel worship, after long centuries during which the Mosaic institutions had been in a place of acknowledged authority. What extenuations there may have been for this apostasy are not to be considered here. The thing insisted upon is the simple undeniable fact of the apostasy itself.
III THIS DESERTION OF JEHOVAH IS DIVINELY ASSERTED TO BE AN ACT OF THE GROSSEST FOLLY. We have noticed the figure under which this act is set forth; and if Israel meant to get clear of a humiliating charge, it was only by denying that God was indeed a fountain of living water. The figure, therefore, resolves itself into a sort of logical dilemma; and the fact is clearly shown that in spiritual affairs men are capable of a folly which, in natural affairs, they are as far from as possible. Man holds within him a strange duality of contradictions. In some directions he may show the greatest powers of comprehension, insight, foresight; may advance with all the resources of nature well in hand. But in other directions he may stumble like a blind man, while around him on every hand are piled up the gracious gifts of a loving and forgiving God. There is no special disgrace to any individual in admitting what a fool he may be in spiritual things. In this respect, at all events, he is not a fool above other fools. He may see many of the wise, noble, and mighty of earth who have lived and died in apparent neglect as to the concerns of eternity and the relation of Christ to them. Men toil to make securities and satisfactions for themselves, but if they only clearly saw that they are doing no better than making broken cisterns, their toils would be relinquished the next moment. It is but too sadly plain how many neglect the revelations, offers, and promises of God; but who can doubt that if they could only really see him to be the true Fountain of living waters, the neglect would come to an end at once? Y.
HOMILIES BY J. WAITE Ver. 13. The people"s sin.
This is the sum and substance of the charge the prophet was called to bring against Israel. Idolatry was their destroying sin, the root of all their discords and miseries. It involved the renunciation of their allegiance to the God of their fathers, and in this their conduct was without a parallel. No instance of such apostasy could be found elsewhere. Those whom God had chosen to be witnesses for him before all the world were put to shame in this respect by the very heathen whom it was their mission to enlighten and bless. But we may regard this as the condemnation of the whole human race. "They have forsaken," etc. Note the view we get here
I OF THE BEING OF GOD AND THE RELATION HE SUSTAINS TOWARDS US. "The Fountain of living waters". (see also Psa_36:9)
1. He is emphatically the Living One. The grand distinction of the Bible is that it reveals "the living God." The Name Jehovah, the mysterious and incommunicable Name, was expressive of this. "And God said to Moses, I AM THAT I AM," etc. (Exo_3:14) Absolute existence essential, independent, necessary being is the idea it conveys. The knowledge of such a spiritual Being, of a personality kindred with our own but absolutely exempt from its limitations, is our supreme need. David did but utter forth the insatiable longing of our nature for its true home, its only possible resting-place, when he cried, "My soul thirsteth for God, yea, for the living God." We want, not mere vague impressions of infinitude and eternity, but an Infinite and Eternal One in whom we may trust. Not mere abstract ideas of truth, and beauty, and righteousness, and love, but One of whom these are the unchanging attributes, and to whom, in the frailty of our nature, we can fly for refuge. "Our heart and our flesh cry out for the living God.
2. He is the Giver and Sustainer of all other forms of spirit-life. The "Fountain" of life; all other existences are dependent upon him. "The Father of spirits;" "we also are his offspring;" "in him we live and move and have our being." Whether our spirit-life once given can ever become extinct again may be a matter of doubt and controversy, but certainly it cannot be regarded as absolute and necessary existence. Though God may have endowed our nature with his own immortality, we do not possess immortality in the sense in which he does. "He only hath immortality." Ours is not self-existent being; it is dependent on him from whom it came an outflow of the "Fountain" of life.
3. He is the Source of all that nourishes, enriches, and gladdens this dependent creature-life "the Fountain of living waters." "Living waters" are the Divine satisfactions of the human soul. The Scriptures abound with similar figurative representations. (Gen_2:10 Zec_14:8 Joh_4:14 Rev_22:1, Rev_22:17) Every age has had its witness to the truth that man"s real satisfactions are only to be found in God. In Christ that witness is perfected, that truth verified. "This is the record," etc. (1Jn_5:11, 1Jn_5:12) Here are the conditions of infinite blessedness for every one of us. To be separated from God in Christ, to turn away from him, is to perish, to doom yourself to the pangs of an insatiable hunger and a quenchless thirst. "This is life eternal, that they might know thee," etc.. (Joh_17:3) This is death eternal not to know him, to refuse the knowledge of him, to dream that you can live without him.
II THE FOLLY AND EXCEEDING SINFULNESS OF SIN., The "two evils" here spoken of are but two forms, two sides, of one and the same thing. There is the self-willed departure from God, and there is the endeavor in that to lead a self-determined and self-sufficient life.
1. They have forsaken me. All sin is a forsaking of God. Adam turned his back on God when he listened to the voice of the tempter. The prophet rebukes here the shameful idolatries of the people. Think what idolatry means. It has, no doubt, its fairer side, in which it is seen to be the ignorant but still honest expression of the religious sentiment in men the blind "feeling after God if haply they may find him." But think how it arose, and what its issues have been. St. Paul tells us how it was born of the corruption of man"s nature, and has ever since been the Satanic means of deepening that corruption. (see Rom_1:20, et seq.) So is it with every sinful life. It begins with a more or less intentional and deliberate renunciation of God. The exact point of departure may not be very definitely marked; but as the life unfolds itself, the fact that this is its true meaning becomes more manifest. How marvelous a picture of this dread reality of moral life does our Lord"s parable of the prodigal supply! Such is the history of prodigal souls. Happy are they who "come to themselves" before it is too late to return to the forsaken home of the Father.
2. The dream of a self-determined and self-contained life. "They have hewed them out cisterns" of their own, which shall render them, as they think, independent of the "Fountain of living waters." Here is the idea of a proud endeavor to find in one"s self and one"s own self-willed way all necessary good. But it is altogether vain. The cisterns are miserably shallow, and they are "broken." It is true of every man, indeed, that his satisfactions must spring from what he finds within rather than from his earthly surroundings; but then he is "satisfied from himself" only because he has learnt to link himself with the Divine Source of all blessedness the living God. Here would we end our quest; Alone are found in thee The life of perfect love, the rest Of immortality. W.
The Pulpit Commentary (1880–1919), ed. H.D.M. Spence-Jones & Joseph S. Exell — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Biblical Illustrator 1887 · Public Domain My people have committed two evils.
Jer_2:13
My people have committed two evils.
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Two astounding evils
I. The force of human freedom. Mightiest rivers cannot break from their source, nor greatest planets from their centre, but man can from centre and fountain of his being.
1. This freedom is a matter of personal consciousness.
2. It invests human existence with transcendent importance.
II. The enormity of human wickedness.
1. Ingratitude.
2. Injustice.
3. Impiety.
III. The egregiousness of human folly.
1. In withdrawing from the satisfying to toil for the unsatisfying.
2. In withdrawing from the abundant to tell for the scanty (Homilist.)
The two-fold sin of mankind
I. The nature of sin. This will be seen by observing--
1. What men leave. God--a fountain of living waters to them. The sum of all excellency, the source of all happiness.
2. What the follow. Broken cisterns.
(1) Worldly business.
(2) Worldly pleasure.
(3) Earthly distinction.
(4) Worldly ease.
II. How we should regard sin. As God regards it--with loathing and abhorrence. Learn--
1. The emptiness of mere outward profession.
2. Gods remedy for mans sin. (C. Clayton, M. A.)
They have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters.
The fountain of living waters
In a land like this, perpetually green with Atlantic showers, which at once refresh the thirsty soil and replenish the subterranean reservoirs, it is not easy to understand the gratitude, reverence, almost affection, with which men who live under a fiercer sky, and upon a parched earth, look upon a fountain of living waters. Some remnant of the feeling, descending to us from an earlier and simpler time, may be noticed in connection with such a strong outgush of pure waters as, at Wells or at Holywell, springs into the upper air, at once a river: men have thought that there must be some healing efficacy in so bountiful a manifestation of one of natures most beneficent forces; and soon they have imagined a legend, and built a shrine, and to the natural holiness have added a superstitious sanctity. But it is almost the same in the thirstier lands of the East with any rill of water, so it be perennial. A spring becomes a natural landmark of a kind to which expectation points, round which memories are wont to gather. When all the long day the caravan has toiled patiently through the pitiless brightness, and the path has lain for many a weary mile over the sand slopes shimmering in the heated air, or by the mountain pass where the sun-smitten rocks reflect the intolerable rays,--how grateful, as the shadows are lengthening, to descry afar off the fringe of palm trees on the horizon, and to quicken the march, till at last there is a bubbling in the cool grass, and shade overhead, water for the thirsty lips, rest for the tired feet! And how terrible the disappointment, if, when the journey has tended to some less fortunate spot, where the care of man has provided--poor substitute for the bounty of God!--a cistern to catch a precarious and failing supply, the travellers have found at nightfall only a broken reservoir, and the trace of help and refreshment passed away! What resource, but a night as comfortless as the day had been toilsome, and on the morrow, a renewed effort, with diminished strength and a courage sustained by despair, to reach some happier island in the desert, where the waters of God never fail to flow! There is a depth of spiritual meaning in this passage, which, ignorant as we may be of the precise occasion to which it applies, forbids us to interpret it in any but a religious sense. It was, so to say, the nature, the destiny, of the Jewish people to be always committing the two evils of which it speaks. Theirs was indeed a mixed character, in which elements as opposite almost as light and darkness perpetually struggled for the mastery. Their distinguishing mark as a nation was insight into God: they had discerned Him as one; they had learned that He was holy; they had fixed, for all coming time, the true point of contact between God and man in the god-likeness of humanity; and yet in their history, as told by their own lips, they show themselves false, fickle, sensual, cruel, as hardly any other people. In Judah of old, a distracted State, the sport of fierce political passions within and beyond her own borders, falling back now upon a hard Levitical religiousness, now madly rushing upon alien idolatries, now again wakened to better life by the thunder of prophetic rebuke;--in Judah of old it was possible for a man to climb, like Isaiah, to such heights of rapt communion with the all-holy God as human feet have since but rarely trodden, or to find a downward way to abysses of foul sensuality, masking itself in a pretence of religion, such as it is not good even to speak of. It is enough surely to forsake God; to pass through the dry and thirsty land of life as if no fountain of living waters sprang up to cheer and to fertilise it; to choose the sun-smitten sand, to toil up the parched torrent bed, when it is possible to rest beneath the palm trees shade, and to drink of the brook that murmurs through the grass. And yet this can hardly be: the thirst for the Divine cannot wholly die out of the human heart: there must be some reaching forth to the unseen, some attempt to find a stay in the Eternal. So the first evil has its natural issue in the second. Those who have turned away from the living fountain bend their wandering steps towards a cistern of their own making, a broken cistern which will hold no water; a cistern which, as the traveller draws nigh, offers to his thirsty lips only the slime, where water was long ago, baking in the sun. This it is to forsake the solemn worship of Jehovah for the wild dance of the devotees of Baal. It may not be easy to expound this passage; but, as it stands, it is impossible not to feel how deep and how vivid it is. It contains all the secret of religion; the secret which it is the object of preaching of every kind to reveal and to enforce; the one truth which prophets present in every form of living and burning words,--that all life worthy of the name is life in, and with, and for God; that life without God is a dream likest death, except that by Gods mercy it is always possible to awake from it. So I take this particular metaphorical representation of the central truth to indicate that an essential element of human nature is a longing for the Divine, as heat and weariness thirst for cool water: a sense of a higher law, a holier will, to which it would be peace and happiness to conform: a desire to find, amid the perplexity of things, a hand of guidance, and in their mutability and sorrowfulness a heart on which to rest: a yearning after something fixed and changeless, to set against the daily experience of loss and decay and death. The thirst is in us all: when sorrow strikes us down upon the sand; when disappointment bars our way in the mountain pass; when the mirage of earthly affections first allures and then deceives us, we feel it, and all the more keenly that we hardly know where to seek the spring that will refresh us. Would that always we had the courage to listen to the promptings of our nobler nature, and to enter upon the impossible task of quenching the souls thirst for God! Would that always we could recognise the demand of our true need, and bring our parched lips through every desert and over every obstacle to the living spring whereof who drinks shall never thirst again! (C. Beard, B. A.)
The fountain and the cistern
Jeremiah was the medium rather than the source of these words; and it is noteworthy that he does not lay claim to them. We find lying between the two verses a clause which invests them with Divine authority, namely, saith the Lord.
I. The character which God gives Himself. It is a fact, that all that God has made and sustains speaks to us of God; and it is essential to morality and religion, as well as to our happiness, that God should reveal Himself. Before we can know that He is worthy of our supreme love, reverence, and trust, and that we should obey His will, He must make Himself known. We cannot conceive of God giving Himself a false character. God sets Himself forth as the fountain of living waters. His estimate of Himself is high, but not too high. He does not speak of Himself as a stream or reservoir of water. He is a fountain, and not merely a fountain among other fountains, but the fountain. If there be other fountains, they spring from Him; and He casts them completely into the shade. He is not content with representing Himself as the fountain of waters. He applies the epithet living to the waters that issue forth from Him. He is a fountain that is ever gushing. There is no exhausting of Him. There is an immense difference between the water that is taken from a reservoir and that which is drawn from a fountain. The water which is taken from a fountain is peculiarly fresh, pure, sweet, and wholesome. For ages the angels have been enjoying God. Has He become distasteful to them? The waters that flow from Him never grow stale and fiat. They are living and life-giving. They undergo no change for the worse. This language--the fountain of living waters--is, of course, figurative, and on that account all the more beautiful and expressive. The grand idea which they suggest is--that God alone can satisfy individuals and communities. Creatures are good and useful. As things are, we cannot do without them. Earth is not a superfluous gift. We require light and air; we require bread and human society, and a multitude of other things; but creatures are not absolutely needed. If God chose, He could dispense with them. Assuredly, it is not in creatures to satisfy us. They yield us more or less pleasure; and it would ill become us to despise them; but we have a mind above them. Deal with them as we may, they leave us unsatisfied. We were made for God, and, till we find Him, there is a void within. He is the fountain of living waters, and besides Him there is no fountain. Thirst has an injurious effect upon the bodys life, beauty, health, and strength, and is a most painful sensation. Well, what do the thirsty need? Lead them to a bubbling fountain, and they are satisfied.
II. The two evils with which Judah is charged.
1. The first evil is desertion of God. They have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters. To forsake God in any physical sense, in the sense in which birds sometimes forsake their nests, and children home, is impossible. We can put local distance between us and our fellow creatures, but not between us and God. The forsaking referred to is departure of a moral kind, or departure in thought and affection. This species of departure from God was possible to the inhabitants of Judah. Like ourselves, they were morally free. They might either think about God or not, either love Him or not, either trust in Him or not, either do His will or not, either seek their happiness in God or not; and how did they act? It seems that the departure from God which we have characterised as possible, became actual. God did not turn His back on them; but they deserted Him, and in deserting Him they forsook the fountain of living waters. They forsook Him as a people, and in forsaking Him they committed an evil. They neither did God nor themselves justice, Morally, they backslided from Him--dismissed Him from their minds and hearts, and lapsed into A state of sin and idolatry. Instead of seeking their happiness in God, they began to seek it in other objects. What God pronounces an evil must be an evil. It is criminal to forsake God; and, as we would expect, it is as injurious as it is criminal.
2. The second evil is attempting to find a substitute for God. And hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, etc. These two evils go together. The one naturally leads to the other. The religious is perhaps mans strongest instinct. There is something which men of the world ever supremely fear and love, to which they look and pray in times of danger and distress, and on which they lean for happiness. Accordingly, when we cease to worship God--the right object of worship--there is not with us an end of all worship. There is merely a change of worship. Wrong objects are put in the place of God. Man is not competent to the supply of his own wants, and he knows it. He cannot rid himself of the consciousness of limitation and dependence. Hence, when he departs from God, he precipitates himself on a variety of objects, and devotes himself to a variety of pursuits, with the view of indemnifying himself, Nothing will do for those who renounce God, but trying their hand at cistern making They are driven to exert themselves in order to the discovery of a substitute for God; and are they successful? No. One cistern may be larger than another, or differ from another in shape, or other respects; but the best cisterns are leaky. Water may be poured into them, but, alas! they let it through. Whatever may be thought of them by the maker, they fall infinitely short of God, the fountain of living waters.
III. The summons to astonishment addressed to the heavens. Be astonished, etc. Were a fountain of living waters and a leaky cistern put before a person suffering from thirst, it would excite wonder were he to prefer the cistern to the fountain. We would be strongly tempted to call in question his sanity. Were a youth to leave a happy home--to forsake a father well able to provide for, protect, school, guide him, advance his temporal and spiritual interests, how would we feel on being introduced to him as a deserter from home? We would look on him with no small measure of pity and surprise; and how can we help being affected with the profoundest astonishment when with the minds eye we contemplate an intelligent and free creature turning his back upon God? (G. Cron.)
The misery of forsaking God
I. What has man substituted in the place of the happiness which might have been found in God?
1. Philosophy. They have sought enjoyment in calm contemplation on the relation of things, and on the abstract questions of philosophic inquiry. They have sought to raise themselves above suffering by rendering the mind insensible to the common ills of life, and they attempt to separate themselves from the common herd of mortals by their insensibility to the woes which affect the mass of men.
2. A part, men of leisure and of taste, fly to the academic grove, and look for happiness there. They go up the sides of Parnassus, and drink from the Castalian fount, and court the society of the Muses. Their enjoyment and their solace is in the pursuit of elegant literature. Their time is spent in belles-lettres--in the records of historic truth, or in the world of poetry and of fiction.
3. Another portion have substituted the pursuit of wealth in place of religion, and their happiness is there. This has become almost the universal passion of civilised man. Yet is not happiness so much sought in the pursuit of wealth itself as in that which wealth will procure. He looks on to the old age of elegant retirement and leisure which is before him; he sees in vision the comforts which he will be able to draw round him in the splendid mansion and grounds, and in the abundance which his old age will enjoy.
II. Has the plan succeeded?
1. What is happiness?
(1) It must be adapted to the nature of man or fitted to his true rank or dignity. There must be some permanency, some solid basis on which the superstructure is to be reared.
(2) There must be a recognition of immortality. This must be, because man is so made that he cannot wholly forget it.
(3) True happiness must be of such a nature that it will not be materially disturbed by the prospect of sickness, the grave, and eternity. My Athenian guest, says Croesus to Solon, the voice of fame speaks loudly of your wisdom. I have heard much of your travels; you have been led by a philosophic spirit to visit a considerable portion of the globe. I am here induced to inquire of you what man, of all you have beheld, has seemed to you most truly happy. After one or two unsatisfactory answers, and being pressed still for a reply, Solon said, I shall not be able to give a satisfactory answer to the question you propose till I know that your scene of life shall have closed with tranquillity. The man of affluence is not in fact more happy than the possessor of a bare competency, unless in addition to his wealth his end be more fortunate. Call no man happy till you know the nature of his death. It is the part of wisdom to look to the event of things; for the Deity often overwhelms with misery those who have formerly been placed at the summit of felicity (Herod. 1:24, 32). Our happiness must not be of such a nature as to be disturbed by the recognition of death, and the anticipation of a future world.
2. Can happiness be found away from God? My appeal is mainly to experience; and here the argument need not be long. The experience of the world on this point may be divided into two great parts--the recorded and the unrecorded. Of the recorded testimony of the world, I appeal to the records made on sick beds, and in graves; to the disappointments, and cares, and anxieties, evinced all over the world as the result of the revolt in Eden, and of wandering away from God. Recall for one moment what the forsaking of God has done. Whence is sorrow, disappointment, pain, death? The misery of our world all began at that sad hour when man ate the fruit of the forbidden tree. What might not this world have been if man had never forsaken the fountain of living waters! Alexander wept on the throne of the world. Charles V and Diocletian descended from the throne to seek that happiness in the vale of private life, which could never be found in the robes of royalty. Goethe, the celebrated German author, said of himself, in advanced age, They have called me a child of fortune, nor have I any wish to complain of the course of my life. Yet it has been nothing but labour and sorrow, and I may truly say that in seventy-five years I have not had four weeks of true comfort. It was the constant rolling of a stone that was always to be lifted anew. Who shall record the disappointment of those who seek wealth as their portion? The most instructive part of the history of our world is unwritten--at least is not written among mortals. It is recorded in the book that preserves the memory of human deeds with reference to the judgment, and will be developed only on the final trial It is the record of numberless individual failures and disappointments; the total history of that which makes up the vast experiment in our world to find enjoyment without the friendship of the Most High. (A. Barnes D. D.)
Broken cisterns that can hold no water.--
Broken cisterns
I. A sinners life is laborious. Have your dreams of ease in sin been fulfilled? Have you not found the life of sin to be a toilsome, thankless drudgery? Be honest to your own heart if you cannot confess it to man. Has not sin been an universal deceiver, a cruel, remorseless taskmaster? Have not all the fairy visions of our fancy been converted into bushes of thorns and barren rocks of desolation? God has made the broad road thus to prevent His children walking therein.
II. A sinners work is worthless. Our grandfathers could tell us what a great noise sounded through Europe in the days of their early youth at the strokes of a great cistern hewer. By a series of marvellous steps the mightiest military genres of modern days reached the cold and tottering summit of imperial power. He had devoted almost superhuman energies of body and mind to the task of hewing out a cistern, he had compelled millions of slaves to assist in this gigantic construction. Strong and glorious as the fabric was, God could not be outwitted; His decree went forth against the cistern, by His iron rod it was broken into a thousand shivers, and the exile of St. Helena sat himself down for weary months and years in the chill shadow of his own broken cistern which could hold no water, till his own heart broke, and he passed away, to render his account unto God. Power, glory, fame, are but a broken cistern to the soul of man. You may get it by becoming a vestryman, an alderman, a popular novelist, a member of Parliament, a Cabinet minister, or a hundred other ways, but the end will be the same dissatisfaction and unrest which overwhelmed the great Napoleon. Ah, when will saints give as much diligence to their high and holy calling as the servants of pleasure give to theirs?
III. A sinners state is appalling. Shall we witness the blindness, madness of our own friends and neighbours, of our fellow citizens, and have no bowels of compassion for them? Let us fervently, kindly, personally appeal to them; lot us watch for their souls, invent wise contrivances, and lovingly use them till the scales fall from their eyes, and we bring them to the Fountain of living waters.
IV. A sinners condition is not hopeless. God is still the Fountain of living waters. In Him abides the fulness which alone can supply all the lawful and infinite longings which rise up within the mysterious nature of man. Do we want knowledge, wisdom, love, life, peace, rest, immortality? They are all in God. From Him is ever issuing a stream bearing upon its bosom the richest spiritual blessings His mercy can provide. The grace of God is wider, deeper, richer, than in the era when the prophet of lamentation poured forth his sorrowful strains over the folly of sinners. (W. A. Esscry.)
Broken cisterns
Think over these cisterns which have been built, and have been offered to us in our time, and ask whether, after all, they are not broken, obviously broken before our eyes.
1. I thought of the immense part that, a few years ago, secularism seemed to play in the thought of London. A cistern offered to us of this kind, that man should confine his attention to the world in which he lives; that we should seek to make the most of our material and intellectual opportunities here; that we should use our time honestly and well, we should instruct one another in the affairs of the world and of life, but we should remit the consideration of religion and thoughts of God to another world if it ever comes, and not trouble ourselves with them here. That cistern of secularism, at which the men of England have been requested to drink, must always be an unsatisfying cistern--a broken cistern indeed. For what reason? Because you never can silence the deep craving of the human soul; you never can bring man within the limits of time and space, and get him quietly to remain there. If secularism could give us, as we wish, a more equal distribution of opportunities, and if every man had all that the world could offer, every man would still remain unsatisfied. Count Leo Tolstoi has told us himself how in his youth he was a nobleman with every advantage of wealth and education and social position, and, moreover, he was a man in perfect health, and there seemed to be not a cloud to cross his sky. And yet he has told how at that time his deep dissatisfaction and misery were such that he was constantly contemplating suicide.
2. And then I thought of that cistern which has been offered to us under the name of socialism. That cistern is so well constructed, and is so attractive, that I would be the last to deny that waters of a satisfying kind might for a time be stored within it. It proposes to make a framework of society in some future day complete and satisfying, but meanwhile it has no message to the millions of human souls that are passing, as it were, in a dull, dead flood, week by week, day by day, into the silent grave.
3. Then it occurred to me how much we had heard in our time of natural science and physical science as cisterns at which human beings were to quench their thirst. And I remembered how, in my earlier ministry, we were constantly told that the discoveries of science would take the place of religion, and that man would learn to live his life in the world, subject to its many limitations, in the clear light that science sheds upon the development of human life and its possible goal. Then I took up the utterance of a great scientific man today, Sir Henry Thompson, who has published his little pamphlet called The Unknown God, in order to show us what the creed of science really is. I turn over the pages of Sir Henry Thompsons book and see what a great and candid and earnest scientific man makes of this universe, and of this life in the light of science. When I read his broken and halting conclusions, and see what he offers me as the cup of cold water to quench the ardent thirst of my soul, I cannot hesitate to say, with all reverence to so good, so honest, and sincere a thinker: My friend, you have brought me to a broken cistern, which can give no water for the thirsty soul of man.
4. And then I thought of that which is much commoner than secularism, socialism, and science, as the solution of human life--I mean the widespread and absolute indifference to all higher things into which so many of our unhappy people fall. The men who seem agreed to live as if they were merely animals upon the earth, like the beasts with lower pleasures, like the beasts with lower pains. The men who put aside altogether ideals and dreams. The men who do not ask for either God or life or eternity. The men who do not concern themselves about moral improvement or the benefit of their fellow creatures, but drift along the path of life an aimless crowd, careless of the world, careless of themselves, indifferent to all that makes life truly worth living and significant. And it seemed to me that this was not so much a cistern which is offered, or even a broken cistern, but a dull, flat pool, a mere stagnant pond where men can never quench their thirst, but where they can be and must be poisoned by the malaria that rises from the stagnant waters. What is to happen to these men if the soul thirst should ever awaken within them? And when I thought of all these broken cisterns that can hold no water, I remembered from my text that meanwhile there is a fountain; it rises there in the far-off Galilean hills, and the stream flows through the thirsty centuries, and where it flows the margin of the stream is green and fertile. And today it seems as if it were in a sense easier to get to the spring than in any other day that has ever been. If any man thirst let him come unto Me and drink. (R. F. Herren, D. D.)
True happiness to be found not in the world, but in God
I. The soul of man naturally thirsts after happiness.
1. This affords a strong argument for the dignity of the soul, and the certainty of a future state.
2. These inward and insatiable cravings, amidst the high enjoyments of sense and the world, should lead us to God, who alone can felicitate the soul He hath made; should deaden our desires towards the delights of life, and quicken them after those of religion.
II. Notwithstanding this native thirst in the souls of men after happiness, yet they are generally mistaken in their choice of it.
1. There are many who quite mistake the object of their happiness, and place it in those things which are not only foreign from but opposite to it. Wealth, ambition, pleasure.
2. Some are right in their notions of happiness, but seek it the wrong way. Instead of seeking Gods favour in the way of righteousness, through the mediation of Christ, by the assistance of His Spirit, they build their hopes of it either on a zeal for speculative opinions, party notions, formal services, modes of worship, voluntary mortifications, impulses of fancy, deep knowledge, rigid faith, or unscriptural austerities.
3. How many are they who have not only right notions of happiness but of the way to it, who yet fall short of it through neglect and indolence; and the fatal influence which the world and the things of it have upon their hearts! whereby they are rendered quite cold, lukewarm, and indifferent, in the things which concern their eternal salvation.
III. Mankind are naturally disposed to seek their happiness from this world, where it is not to be found.
1. The pleasures of this life are very scanty and confined. They are but cisterns of water--which can hold no very large quantity--not sufficient to answer all the occasions we may have for it, at least not for any considerable time.
2. They are also insipid and unsatisfying; like water in a cistern, stagnated and exposed to the sun; whereby it not only loses its quick taste and freshness, but contracts scum and dirt and foulness.
3. They are at the same time uncertain, and continually wasting away. The vessel that holds them is leaky.
4. They are not to be had without much pains. Even these broken cisterns we are obliged to hew out to ourselves, and be at great labour to procure.
IV. Men are naturally backward and averse to seek their happiness from God where alone it is to be found. The folly of this will appear by considering that the pleasures of piety have properties just the reverse of those belonging to worldly pleasures.
1. They are most full and capacious. Not contracted and limited, not diminished by successive draughts, as water in a cistern is--but free, and full, and ever flowing, as water at the fountain head.
2. They are the most exquisite and satisfying delights.
3. They are most durable and imperishable.
4. They are easy to be had. Freely offered. (J. Mason, M. A.)
The sin of peoples forsaking God and betaking themselves to the creature in His stead
I. Forsaking of God in Christ, and betaking oneself to the creature in His stead, are two signally ill things.
1. The forsaking of God in Christ.
(1) The object forsaken by the hearers of the Gospel must be considered as--God in our nature, for communion with guilty men (Mat_1:23). God in our nature, ready to communicate His fulness to us, for making us happy in time and eternity (Joh_4:10). A God we have professed to betake ourselves to for our happiness (Jer_16:19).
(2) How sinners forsake God in Christ. Lowering their esteem of Him, the value and honour they had for Him sinking low (Psa_50:21). The hearts falling off its rest in Him, and turning restless, so that the fulness of God cannot quiet it (Isa_30:15). Ceasing to cleave to Him by faith, and letting go believing gripes of the promise (Heb_3:12). Looking out some other way, for something to rest their hearts in (Psa_4:6). Growing remiss in duties, and slighting opportunities of communion with God a form of duties may be kept up, but the heart is away, what avail they? Having no regard to please Him in their ordinary walk (Eze_23:35). Laying aside the Word for a rule, and regulating themselves by another standard (Psa_119:53). Forsaking His people for their companions (Pro_13:20). Forsaking ordinances and the communion of saints therein (Heb_10:25-26). Throwing away the form of religion, casting off the mask, and giving the swing to their lusts.
(3) Why they forsake Him. There is a natural bent to apostasy in all (Hos_11:7). Many were never truly joined to the Lord, though they seemed to be so: so having never knit with Him, no wonder they fall away from Him (1Jn_2:19). They often have some idol of jealousy secretly preserved when they are at their best; and that upon a proper occasion does the business; like the young man in the Gospel, that went away from Christ grieved, because he had great possessions. Their not pressing it to the sweet of religion, in an experimental feeling of the power of it (Psa_34:8). The want of a living principle of grace in the heart, that may bear out in all changes of ones condition (Psa_78:37). They cool like a stone taken from the fire, and wither like a branch that takes not with the stock. Unwatchfulness. Thereby men are stolen off their feet (Pro_4:23). A conceit of being able to live without Him (Jer_2:31). Ill company carries many away from God (1Co_15:33).
(4) The ill of sin that is in forsaking God in Christ. It is a downright perversion and deserting of the end of our creation. There is in it a setting up another in the room of God. Fearful ingratitude for the greatest mercy and kindness (Jer_2:2; Jer_2:12). Notorious unfaithfulness to our kindest Head and Husband (Jer_2:20). Notorious unfaithfulness to our own interest and folly with a witness. An affronting of God before the world, casting dishonour on Him, bearing false witness against Him (Jer_2:31). A practical commendation of the way of the world, contemning God, and seeking their happiness in things that are seen (Pro_28:4). A sinning against the remedy of sin, making ones case very hopeless (Heb_10:26). An opened sluice for all other sins. The man that forsakes God, exposes himself a prey to all temptations, to be picked up by the first finder (Pro_27:8).
2. The betaking of oneself to the creature in Gods stead.
(1) The object taken up with in Gods stead.
(a) It is not God (Deu_32:21).
(i) It cannot satisfy.
(ii) It cannot profit.
(b) It is the world (1Jn_2:15); the great bulky vanity (Ecc_1:2); the passing world (1Jn_2:17); the present evil world (Gal_1:4).
(2) How sinners take up with the creature in Gods stead. Raising their esteem of and value for the creature, till it come to overtop their esteem of God in Christ, like Eve with respect to the forbidden fruit. Bending their chief desire towards the creature (Psa_4:6) to obtain it, and the satisfaction they apprehend is to be found in it. Embracing and knitting with it in love (2Ti_4:10). Seeking a rest for their hearts in it. Trusting in it, and having their chief dependence on it, notwithstanding the curse pronounced against such trust (Jer_17:5-6). Using their chief and most earnest endeavours for it. Rejoicing most in their enjoyment of it, and delighting most in it. Sorrowing most of all for the want of it, under the frowns of it.. Still cleaving to it, under never so many disappointments from it; nor forsaking it, but trying another means, when one misgives (Isa_57:10). Following the creature, whithersoever it goes, even quite over the hedge of the law of God.
(3) Why sinners take up with the creature in Gods stead. Because the heart of man is naturally wedded to the creature; and that bond not being truly broken, it is apt to return upon occasion to its natural bias. Because mans corrupt nature finds a suitableness and agreeableness in the creature to itself (Isa_57:10). Because the creature takes by the eye and other senses; God and His favour is the object of faith, which is rare in the world. Because the creature promises a present good, whereas the greatest things of God are reserved to another world. Because, by the power of a strong delusion, conveyed into the nature of man by the serpent in paradise, they expect a satisfaction and happiness in the creature (Gen_3:5-6). Because they must needs betake themselves to something within themselves, not being self-sufficient; so, having lost God, they fall of course to the creature in His stead.
(4) The ill of this practice, taking up with the creature in Gods stead. It is an egregious wrong done to God, and His infinite excellency (Jer_2:11). It is a wrong done to the creature, as being a putting it out of its proper place (Rom_8:21-22). It is a wrong done to the whole generation of the saints (Psa_73:12-15). It is an egregious wrong to the sinners own soul, putting the arrantest cheat upon it that one is capable of (Pro_8:36).
II. To forsake God in Christ, and take the creature in His stead, is a wretched exchange.
1. It is an exchanging of a fountain for a cistern.
(1) The water in the cistern is borrowed water; that in the fountain is from itself.
(2) The water must needs be sweeter and fresher in the fountain than in the cistern.
(3) The water in the cistern is no more but a certain measure in the fountain it is unmeasurable.
(4) The water in the cistern is mostly very scanty; the fountain is ever full.
(5) The water of the cistern is always dreggy; the fountain clear and pure.
(6) The water of the cistern is soon dried up; the fountain, never.
2. It is an exchanging of a fountain made ready to our hand, for a cistern that remains to be hewed out by ourselves.
(1) The fountain is always ready for us; the cisterns often are unready. There is access at any time to be had unto God, through Christ, by faith (Psa_46:1). But the creature is an unready help, so that the mans case is often past cure, ere help can be had.
(2) The fountain is made ready for us by another hand, the cistern must be prepared by our own (Zec_13:1; Joh_7:37).
(3) At the fountain one has nothing to do but drink; but it is no little pains that is necessary to fit out the cistern for us. Hard and sore work (Hab_2:13). Longsome work, that one comes but little speed in. Weary work.
3. It is an exchanging of a fountain for many cisterns.
(1) None of them are sufficient, but all defective.
(2) There is something disagreeable and vexing in them all (Ecc_1:14).
(3) They enlarge the appetite, but do not satisfy it (Hab_2:5). As one draught of salt water makes the necessity of another, so the gratifying of a lust doth but open its mouth wider; as is evident from the case of those, who having once given themselves loose reins, nothing can prevail to bind them up, till the grace of God change them. They go from ill to worse. Now, this is a wretched exchange; for the access to one fountain is far more ready than to many cisterns. He that has but one door to go to for sufficient supply is certainly in better case than he that must go to many; so he that has the fulness of a God to satisfy himself in, is in circumstances a thousand times better than he who must go from creature to creature for that end. The water is better that is altogether in one fountain, than that which is parted into many cisterns. United force is strongest; and that which is scattered, the farther it is scattered abroad, it is the weaker. It is with greater ease of mind that one may apply to the one fountain, than to the many cisterns. O what ease has the man that goes to Gods door for all, in comparison of him who begs at the doors of the creatures, ranging up and down among them! Use--Repent then of this folly, and take the one fountain instead of your many cisterns; go to one God instead of the multitude of created things.
Motive 1.--This will contract your cares now so diffusive, lessen your labour, and spare you many a weary foot.
Motive 2.--Ye shall find enough in God, that ye shall see no necessity of seeking any happiness without Him (Joh_4:14); more than shall supply the want of the corn and wine (Psa_4:7); that shall be commensurable to your whole desire (2Sa_23:5). (T. Boston, D. D.)
Forsaking the fountain for the broken cistern
I. The object forsaken.
1. Sin is an ungrateful rejection of God. The parental bond is broken, the conjugal tie is dissolved, the oath of suretyship is annulled.
2. We cannot forsake God without forsaking our own mercies. Sin is always the act of a suicide; we cannot reject the counsel of God against ourselves without rejecting His blessings also.
3. What is the fountain which Israel hath thus forsaken? Oh! it is deep as the unfathomed sea; free as the unbought air; more healing than Bethesdas pool; fresh as the stream which comes forth from the throne of God and of the Lamb.
II. The object preferred.
1. The deadening character of all worldly enjoyments. For all the ends of consolation and encouragement and hope the resources of the world are worse than unavailing; The cisterns are not so empty as they are poisonous.
2. Poor as the worlds enjoyments are, they are to be obtained only at great cost and labour. In drinking of the fountain you will have to stoop much, to kneel long, and to lie low. In drinking from the cistern, you will have to labour hard, to drag heavily, and to climb high.
3. Another characteristic of worldly enjoyments is their instability, their transitoriness, their incapacity for yielding any continued happiness, or for giving a man peace at the last. They are not cisterns only, but broken cisterns; vessels which let out their contents as fast as they put them in; cisterns which can hold no water. The world not only palls upon its votaries while drinking of its waters, but its tide is always ebbing away. Not only may we write upon it Marah for the bitterness of its taste, but also Ichabod for the evanescence of its glory. (D. Moore, M. A.)
Broken cisterns
I. The first cistern which attracts our attention is one of sensualism. The youth who is working at it with mallet and chisel, and with hot and fevered face, dreams that the highest enjoyment of life is that which comes through the senses. He will inform you that he regards man as an animal more than anything else, and that it behoves him to listen to the cry of his passions and to satisfy it. He will demand of you why his passions were lodged in his heart, if they were not to govern him. But the sensualist reasons as if he forgets two most important points. He forgets that the passions are no longer what once they were. He reasons as if the soul were still as it was when it came bright and sinless from its Creators hands; as if its original harmony and balance were undisturbed; as if there had been no obscuration of the moral sense and no inflammation of the passions. And he forgets, too, that while the soul has passions they have their due place assigned them in the economy of our constitution, and that that place is not the throne but the footstool. They can never sit in the throne but by revolt, rebellion, and usurpation. Their position is one of service, a service, too, assigned them by a pure conscience and an enlightened judgment. I said the sensualist forgets these two important points rebut does he not forget another? He strives to hew out a cistern of satisfaction by gratifying his passions; but has he not yet learned from observation, if his own experience has not taught him, that from their very nature the passions can never yield a constant happiness? The more they are indulged, the less they can be gratified. The pampered appetite becomes the jaded appetite, and at length becomes the diseased and ruined appetite. And the man who is hewing out for himself a cistern of sensual pleasure is like the dram drinker, who derives less stimulus and delight from the same quantity every day, who has accordingly to increase the dose to supply the same excitement; who at length gets beyond the range of gratification, but finds that the passion holds him fast in its serpent coils even when all its joys are forever fled.
II. We find another earnest worker who is hewing out a cistern of wealth. No sooner do we reach him than he begins to pour out his contempt of the man we have just left. He wonders how it is possible for any one with an atom of sense to spend his life and strength at such a cistern as that--a cistern which, even if it could be made to hold water, proclaims the mean and degraded character of the man who could drink it. Then turning to his own cistern he points with evident pride at this monument of his superior wisdom; expatiates on the various powers of wealth; tells us how money answereth all things, how it has ministered to the growth of nations, to the development of civilisation, to the creation and sustentation of commerce, to the advancement of the arts and sciences, to the physical and moral improvement of mankind, and even to the extension of the Gospel itself. Now what shall we say to this man? It will not serve any good purpose to call him hard names. You cannot scold a man out of any sin, still less out of the sin of covetousness. Nor must we bluntly deny all that he has said in praise of wealth. It is when we find men mistaking its functions and properties, and labouring to hew out of it a cistern of satisfaction, that we are constrained to remind them that such a cistern will hold no water. Christ speaks of the deceitfulness of riches. I wonder where the man is who can raise an intelligent and experienced protest against the epithet. Wealth is the feeder of avarice, not its satisfaction. It inflames the thirst, it does not quench it. But, would you learn the weakness of wealth as well as its power, look at the narrow limits within which after all its efficacy is bounded. If there are times when one feels that money answereth all things, there are times when one feels still more keenly that it answereth nothing. When the brain becomes bewildered, or its substance begins to yield and soften, what can a mans wealth do for him then? If you travel on the sea, and a destructive storm falls upon your vessel, will the waves that engulph the poor retire in bashful respect for a wealthy man? The digger of this well has said something about the power of wealth: is it not well that he should learn, too, its powerlessness in regard to many of the great needs and sorrows of life? It cannot give you health; it cannot give you talent; it cannot give you the real and abiding respect of your fellow men; it cannot give you peace of mind; it cannot save your wife or children; it cannot avert death and its preliminary horrors and pains from yourself.
III. But we must leave this worker, and make our way to another who is hewing out the cistern of intellectualism. He is clearly a higher type of man. There is a refinement about his appearance which shows that his communion has been with the thoughts of poets and philosophers He expatiates on the intrinsic greatness of man; on his immortality; on his reason, that vision and faculty divine; on the unapproachable supereminence of man over all the universe around him. Knowledge, he says, is the thing for man. For this we were made. It is the element in which we are to live, and without this there is no life worthy of man. And yet, somehow, there seems a shade of sadness upon that face now that his glowing excitement has passed away. Aye, it is even so. He tells us that he is not yet satisfied; that he is hoping to be; that with all his knowledge he feels more ignorant than wise; that if he gets fresh light he seems only to realise more fully the fact that he is standing on the border of a vaster territory of darkness; that if he solves one mystery it serves but to show a thousand more; and that he has been striving, too, for many years at some difficulties which have hitherto beaten him back in hopeless confusion. We assure him that this need not distress him, for with his limited capacities he cannot expect to understand all things at once, and that while it is true that death will for a moment interrupt his speculations and researches, there is eternity before him with its illimitable scope and opportunities. He is paler now than ever, and seizes convulsively his mallet and chisel, and works away with averted face at his cistern, muttering between every stroke, Death, death; ah! it is death which troubles one. What is death?--what will it be to me? Why should I die? and if I must die, why should I fear to die?
IV. While thus he muses and mutters, let us visit the cistern of morality. Its owner accosts us at once as follows: And so you have been visiting my learned neighbour yonder. He is incurable, and I would fain believe, insane, He has the fancy, that man is nothing but intellect, and that our whole mission in this world is to acquire knowledge. I have told him once and again, that if this were the chief end of man he need not to have had either affections or conscience, and that we are moral creatures as well as intellectual ones. Now, the cistern which I have been working at for years is the cistern of morality and good living, for it is clear that we ought to love God with all our hearts, and minds, and strength and our neighbours as ourselves; and that, in fact, our happiness lies in this, and in nothing else. And it is delightful to have something which ones own hands have made, to have a righteousness we ourselves have wrought out, and for which we are indebted to no one. Thus speaks the man, and while he speaks we have been looking at the cistern, which is not without its beauty, and which shows traces and proofs of long and careful working; and we have seen, or think we have seen, chinks great and small which do not promise well for the serviceableness of the cistern, if it be meant, as it is meant, to hold water. Has it been made exactly according to the pattern which you have specified, namely, that you love God with all your heart, and all your soul, and all your strength, and your neighbour as yourself? Will it hold any water? And the man, chagrined to have the perfectness of his work called in question, replies: I know that as yet it will hold no water, but it is not finished. I am striving to fill up the defects and openings with mortar--with the mortar of sorrow for the past, and endeavours to do better for the future. But what, we ask, if the mortar be as porous as the stone? What if it will not hold water any more than the cistern? What if future obedience cannot repair the mischief of the past? What if repentance without Christ itself needs to be repented of? What if even an awakened conscience itself refuses to accept the part for the whole? And what if God say, By the deeds of the law shall no flesh living be justified? And what if there be a special condemnation for those who, going about to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted themselves to the righteousness of God?
V. As we retrace our steps and visit the other cisterns, lo! we find that the workers work no more. The end has come to all. And on the cistern of the scholar we find the inscription, as if traced by a mystic hand, The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; but fools despise wisdom and instruction. And on the cistern of the worldling we find, So is every man that layeth up treasure for himself, and is not rich towards God. And on the cistern of the sensualist we find, To be carnally minded is death. And as we look within we find that all is parched and dry as summer dust, and that the description is awfully exact and literal: Cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water. (E. Mellor, D. D.)
Broken cisterns
Whilst two evils are specified, we are not to suppose they are ever committed separately: no man forsakes the living fountain who does not also hew out the broken cistern--for there is a search after happiness in which all men naturally engage; and if they do not seek happiness in God, where alone it may be found, they will inevitably seek it in the creature, though only to be disappointed. Yet notwithstanding that these truths are attested by universal experience, there is continually going on the same forsaking of the fountain, the same hewing out of the cistern, so pathetically and indignantly denounced in the text. There is something very striking in the expression hewed them out cisterns. What labour does it indicate, what effort, what endurance! Had the cisterns been ready made to their hands, there had not been so much with which to upbraid them. But God has caused that it shall be actually toilsome thing for men to seek happiness in the creature. Witness the diggings, so to speak, of avarice: the painful climbings of ambition: the disgusts and disappointments of sensuality. God makes it an aggravation of the sin of his being forsaken that He is forsaken for that which must demand toil, and then yield disappointment. He sets the fountain of living waters in contrast with broken cisterns--as though He would point out the vast indignity offered Him, in that what was preferred was so unworthy and insufficient. It is the language not only of jealousy, but of jealousy stung to the very quick by the baseness of the object to which the plighted affection has been unblushingly transferred. Wonder, O heavens, and be astonished, O earth. God speaks of His people as offering Him this indignity; but He does not speak to His people. He tells His grievance to the material creation, as though even that were more likely to feel and resent it than the beings who were actually guilty of the sin. And ye who are setting up idols for yourselves, ye who, in spite of every demonstration of the uselessness of the endeavour, are striving to be happy without God, we will not reason with you: it were like passing too slight censure on your sin, it were representing it as less blinding, less besotting, than it actually is, to suppose that you would attend to, or feel the force of, an ordinary remonstrance. It may move you more, ye worshippers of visible things, to find yourselves treated as past being reasoned with, than flattered with addresses which suppose in you the full play of the understanding and the judgment. Ye will not hearken: but there are those who witness and wonder at your madness: the visible universe, as if amazed at finding itself searched for that which its own sublime and ceaseless proclamations declare to be nowhere but in God, assumes a listening posture; and whilst the Almighty publishes your infatuation, He hath secured Himself an audience, whether ye will hear, or whether ye will forbear; for the accusation is not uttered till there have been this astounding call: Be astonished, O ye heavens, at this, etc. But let us proceed to the case which is perhaps still more distinctly contemplated by the passage before us--that of the abandonment of the true religion for a false. If ever God discovered Himself as a fountain of living waters, it was when, in the person of His own Divine Son, He opened on this earth a fountain for sin and for uncleanness. The justifying virtue of the work of the Redeemer, the sanctifying of that of the Spirit--these include everything of which, as sinful but immortal beings, we can have need: by the former we may have title to the kingdom of heaven, and by the latter be made meet for the glorious inheritance. Nevertheless, can it be said that men in general are ready to close with the Gospel, to partake of it as the parched traveller of the spring found amid the sands? Even where religion is not neglected, what pains are bestowed on the making some system less distasteful to pride, or more complacent to passion, than practical, unadulterated Christianity! What costly effort is given to the compounding the human with the Divine, our own merit with that of Christ; or to the preparing ourselves for the reception of grace, as though it were not grace by which, as well as for which, we are prepared, grace which must fashion the vessel, as well as grace which must fill it. Truly, the cistern is hewn out, when the fountain is forsaken. Let Christ be unto you all in all, made unto you of God, wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption, and the fountain gives a river which, like the rock struck in Horeb, never ceaseth to make glad the believer. But turn away, though by a single step, from Christ, and, oh, the toil, the dissatisfaction, of endeavouring to make--what? a broken cistern, a cistern that can hold no water--if creature comforts are such cisterns to those who seek happiness, creature systems must be to those who seek immortality. For what shall endure the severity of Gods scrutiny, but that which is itself of Gods appointing and providing (H. Melvill, B. D.)
A broken cistern
The mother of Hume, the philosopher, was once a professor of Christianity. Dazzled by the genius of her son, she followed him into the mazes of scepticism. Years passed and she drew near to the gates of death, and from her dying bed she wrote him the following: My dear son,--My health has failed me. I am in deep decline. I cannot live long. I am left without hope or consolation, and my mind is sinking into a state of despair. I pray you hasten home to console me, or, at least, write to me the consolations that philosophy affords at the dying hour. Hume was deeply distressed at his mothers letter. His philosophy was a broken cistern in which was no water of comfort.
The Biblical Illustrator, edited by Joseph S. Exell (c. 1880s–1900s) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Alexander MacLaren 1905 · Public Domain
Jeremiah
FOUNTAIN AND CISTERNS
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Jer 2:13.
The proclivity of the Jews to idolatry is an outstanding fact all through their history. That persistent national tendency surely compels us to recognise a divine inspiration as the source of the prophetic teaching and of the lofty spiritual theology of the Old Testament, which were in sharpest unlikeness and opposition to the whole trend of the people’s thoughts.
It is this apostasy which is referred to here. The false gods made by men are the broken cisterns. But the text embodies a general truth.
I. The irksomeness of a godless life.
The contrast is between the springing fountain, there in the desert, with the lush green herbage round about, where a man has only to stoop and drink, and the painful hewing of cisterns.
This emblem of the fountain beautifully suggests the great thought of God’s own loving will as the self-originated impulse by which He pours out all good. Apart from all our efforts, the precious gift is provided for us. Our relation is only that of receivers.
We have the contrast with this in the laborious toils to which they condemn themselves who seek for created sources of good. ‘Hewn out cisterns’-think of a man who, with a fountain springing in his courtyard, should leave it and go to dig in the arid desert, or to hew the live rock in hopes to gain water. It was already springing and sparkling before him. The conduct of men, when they leave God and seek for other delights, is like digging a canal alongside a navigable river. They condemn themselves to a laborious and quite superfluous task. The true way to get is to take.
Illustrations in religion. Think of the toil and pains spent in idolatry and in corrupt forms of Christianity.
Illustrations in common life. Your toils-aye, and even your pleasures -how much of them is laboriously digging for the water which all the while is flowing at your side.
II. The hopelessness of a godless life.
The contrast further is between living waters and broken cisterns. God is the fountain of living waters; in other words, in fellowship with God there is full satisfaction for all the capacities and desires of the soul; heart-conscience-will-understanding-hope and fear.
The contrast of the empty cisterns. What a deep thought that with all their work men only make ‘cisterns,’ i.e. they only provide circumstances which could hold delights, but cannot secure that water should be in them! The men-made cisterns must be God-filled, if filled at all. The true joys from earthly things belong to him who has made God his portion.
Further, they are ‘broken cisterns,’ and all have in them some flaw or crack out of which the water runs. That is a vivid metaphor for the fragmentary satisfaction which all earthly good gives, leaving a deep yearning unstilled. And it is temporary as well as partial. ‘He that drinketh of this water shall thirst again’-nay, even as with those who indulge in intoxicating drinks, the appetite increases while the power of the draught to satisfy it diminishes. But the crack in the cistern points further to the uncertain tenure of all earthly goods and the certain leaving of them all.
All godless life is a grand mistake.
III. The crime of a godless life.
It is right to seek for happiness. It is sin to go away from God. You are thereby not merely flinging away your chances, but are transgressing against your sacredest obligations. Our text is not only a remonstrance on the grounds of prudence, showing God-neglecting men that they are foolish, but it is an appeal to conscience, convincing them that they are sinful. God loves us and cares for us. We are bound to Him by ties which do not depend on our own volition. And so there is punishment for the sin, and the evils experienced in a godless life are penal as well as natural.
We recall the New Testament modification of this metaphor, ‘The water that I shall give him shall be in him a fountain of water.’ Arabs in desert round dried-up springs. Hagar. Shipwrecked sailors on a reef. Christ opens ‘rivers in the wilderness and streams in the desert.’
Alexander MacLaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture (1904–1910) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Tyndale Open Study Notes 2022 · CC BY-SA 4.0 2:13 The Israelites foolishly did two evil things: They…
2:13 The Israelites foolishly did two evil things: They abandoned the Lord, their true source of life, and they began to worship false gods that could not help them. • A fountain of living [i.e., running] water that flows throughout the year, even in drought, is a rare treasure (Ps 36:9; John 4:14). • The cisterns the Israelites dug after they entered Canaan were holes in the ground that were lined with plaster. These crude tanks collected water that drained from roofs in wet weather and provided water through the dry summers. The water could become putrid and dangerous to drink, and the plaster often cracked, letting the water drain out.
Tyndale Open Study Notes — © Tyndale Open Resources, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Text via the HelloAO Bible API.