Broken Cisterns
Scripture Reading: Jeremiah 2:1-13
I once visited the home of a young couple who were attending a church I pastored. They were renovating the wife’s grandparent's old home which had sat empty for many years. Her grandfather had built the house while also starting up a dairy farm. Every concrete block that formed the walls of the house had been meticulously made by her grandfather by hand-mixing and pouring concrete into wood forms, also hand-made.
While the husband was showing me around the small home, he asked if I wanted to see the old cistern. Of course, I was interested. So, he took me into a small room that they had made into their laundry room/pantry and raised a hinged section of the plywood floor. Sure enough, below the floor was a round, rock-lined cistern. He explained that his wife’s grandfather had dug the cistern because they didn’t have a natural water source or well and this is where they stored water, mainly collected from rain runoff. Amazingly, it was well sealed and didn’t collect water in it, so they were converting it to a root cellar to store their garden harvests.
Cisterns are hand-dug wells, places to store water when there isn’t a natural source of water available. Now, had the original homesteader had a natural spring of water, they would not need to dig a cistern in their house. Not only would it be unnecessary, but it would also be the most sensible course of action. Why would you want to drink tepid rain runoff when you could have cool, refreshing spring water?
It also wouldn’t make sense to invest all of that exhausting labor into digging out a cistern, coming up with a way to line it, a plan to fill it, and a way to make the water in it safe to drink when you could walk over to a fountain and drink clean, pure, satisfying water without doing any work for it.
My friends' grandfather was fortunate that his cistern worked for him. It held water. The problem with cisterns is they are susceptible to leaking. Cracks form, the material used to line them fails, and other issues develop making them unreliable sources of water. A natural spring has none of those issues.
This is the spiritual analogy of what God’s people did, and still often do. They forsake Christ, the freely given fountain of pure, refreshing, and satisfying spiritual water for cisterns of their own making. They dig wells, exhausting themselves with their religious works, and discover that after all of their effort, their cisterns can’t hold water. They are left still thirsty and have the added trouble of spiritual exhaustion.
No wonder Jesus told the woman at the well, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” (John 4:10). Here Jesus reveals the two great hindrances to coming to the fountain: We are ignorant of the true nature of grace and we are ignorant of who Jesus is. If we knew the gift of God and who Jesus is we would have asked and he would have given.
Most people are wearing themselves out digging cisterns a few short steps away from the Fountain of living waters.
