When we try to articulate the Gospel in a nutshell, and in such a way as to give real understanding, we find we can’t do it. Words are woefully inadequate to say: ‘This what the Gospel is…’ in a few sentences.
The Bible does not even attempt it because it cannot. But a picture is worth a thousand words, and so the Bible gives us some pictures of the Gospel, and taken together, these pictures help us to understand what the Gospel is.
We have considered the courtroom metaphor and the slavery/freedom metaphor.
Today we will consider the ‘Life & Death’ picture: the idea that we are dead in sin, but God makes us alive in Christ. The Bible frames the Gospel in these terms. But side by side with it, the Bible sets another picture: ‘thirst’. That is, without water we will die.
Just as we traced the legal framework of the Gospel to its beginnings in Eden, so the language of ‘life and death’ also begins there. God placed Adam and Eve in the Garden to work it and care for it, and their descendants would eventually fill the earth to work it and care for it. But Adam and Eve’s life was not just ‘work’. Their work would happen in the context of a close, personal relationship with God. They would love him and worship him; while God would love them and rule over them.
Love, however, must be freely given, or it’s not love. God, accordingly, gave Adam and Eve a means by which they could choose to love him: will they trust God and his love for us? We know what happened: when tempted to trust God’s word to them or not, they made their own decision and ate the fruit of the tree.
God had said to Adam concerning this tree, ‘You may surely eat of every tree in the Garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die’.
What is interesting is that after they ate the fruit, they were expelled from the garden, had children and lived for many years. But did not God say, ‘On the day you eat of it, you will surely die’? Does God not keep his word?
Well, they did die that day, and it was a very real death. We say ‘they died spiritually’. That used to seem like a cop-out to me, a weak way of explaining a seeming contradiction. But it is not.
The Bible uses words like ‘life’ and ‘death’ in much the same way we do. We have lived. You breathe. You eat. You walk around. But ‘living’ is more than that. We know that there is a level of life beyond simply existing and having a pulse. You are at a 5-star resort, and you say ‘Now this is living!’ Or someone cooped up in their basement playing video-games 6 hours every night we say, ‘He has no life.’
The Bible uses the idea of ‘life’ in the same way. When Adam and Eve ate of the fruit, they ruptured their relationship with God. They became separated relationally from God, estranged from a holy God by their sin. It was an unhappy, hollow existence. Something fundamental to their nature was now gone: the real, close and face-to-face relationship with God, in whom is life. To be estranged from God is really to be no longer ‘living’, but ‘dead’, spiritual zombies: walking around, but not really alive.
In the 16th Century John Calvin wrote: Under the name of ‘death’ is comprehended all those miseries in which Adam involved himself by his defection, for as soon as he revolted from God the fountain of life, he was cast down from his former state, in order that he might perceive the life of man without God to be wretched and lost, and therefore differing nothing from death.
Sin kills. Ephesians 2: You were dead in sin.
Ever since Eden, the human heart has longed for life. But the longing is unfulfilled, the need unmet, our existence unsatisfying.
The Bible also speaks of this longing as thirst. Our need for God is a thirst.
Psalm 42 – As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.
Psalm 63 – O God, you are my God. Earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you. My flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.
So what have we done with our thirst?
In Jeremiah 2:13 God laments the foolishness and sin of Israel: ‘Be appalled at this, O heavens; be shocked, be utterly desolate’, declares the LORD, ‘for my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and they have hewed out for themselves cisterns, broken cisterns that can hold no water.’
Have you looked around lately? People are desperately thirsty, and digging wells all over the place trying to find water to quench that thirst: Wells of ‘success’, or of achievement. We dig wells of busyness. We dig wells of marriage or family. We dig wells of comfort, convenience and a certain level of ‘living’. We dig wells of beauty or physique. But they are all dry.
At Christmas, some kids get countless gifts, but they will still be disappointed when they realize that they have opened the last gift.
If people count on all these things to quench their inner thirst, they will discover that they are, essentially, drinking sand. These wells are broken cisterns that cannot hold water. You know these thirsty people. You see them at work, and know they are unhappy. You live beside them. You see them frantically building wells. You see them at your school, desperately trying to ‘fit in’ and ‘be accepted’, because that will quench the thirst. You may see well-diggers at your dinner table. You may even see one in your mirror.
Far from God, people dead in sin, desperately thirsty, and unable to find what will quench that thirst.
Then Jesus comes: God’s son, from the glory of heaven, sent to die for the sins of the world. The Gospels record for us the history of Jesus’ ministry on earth, ending, ultimately, by dying on the cross and being raised to life. There were things that he did and said along the way.
Let us do a quick fly-by of the Gospel of John:
In John chapter 3 a man named Nicodemus comes to see Jesus by night. Nicodemus is a religious leader of the people, but he is intrigued by Jesus and wants to know more. He has seen some of Jesus’ miracles and knows intuitively that Jesus is of God. They will talk about what it means to be a part of God’s kingdom, but Jesus prefaces the conversation by saying, ‘Unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God’. There is a sort of ‘new birth’, not physical, but nevertheless a new life begun after being ‘dead’ for so long.
Nicodemus is surprised. He does not understand this language of ‘new birth’. He has been digging the well of religion. He thinks that the surest connection to God and his Kingdom comes from trying to keep the commandments. So he has worked at that to the point where he is a ‘ruler of the Jews’, a member of the religious ‘supreme court’.
But this life is not something we strive for; it is something we are given, something that happens to us. So Jesus also says, Unless one is born of water (that is, natural birth, the first birth) and the Spirit (that is, a new birth, a second birth), he cannot enter the kingdom of God.
Where does this life-of-the-Spirit come from? God. God is the giver of life. Life only comes from him. So what we see a chapter later is surprising.
In John 4, Jesus travels from the south of the country to the north, and passes through the province of Samaria. Most Jews would take the long way to avoid Samaria, because Jews and Samaritans hate each other with a mutual, racial hatred. But Jesus doesn’t bypass Samaria but travels through it. He stops to rest beside a well and as he rests there a woman comes to draw water. Jesus asks her for a drink, and she, like Nicodemus, is surprised: surprised that a Jew man would not only speak to a Samaritan, but would actually ask for his help.
Jesus says to her, ‘If you only knew who’s asking you for a drink, you’d be asking me for a drink, and I would give you living water.’ Jesus says: ‘Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water I give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I give will become in him a spring of living water welling up to eternal life.’
As they converse further, it turns out that the woman has had five husbands, and is now with a sixth man, but unmarried. What is she thirsting for? What well has she been digging to quench her thirst? Is she ‘living’?
Jesus is saying that in him is the knowledge of God, which is life, and he is the source of the ‘water’ that will permanently quench thirst.
Now John chapter 10 – Jesus calls himself a ‘good shepherd’, who knows and loves his sheep, and whose sheep know his voice and ignore the ‘thieves and robbers’. Then Jesus says, The thief comes only to steal, kill, and destroy; I came that they might have life and have it abundantly… in other words, that they might really live.
Jesus also says in John, ‘I am the resurrection and the life’. He says, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life’.
The Jesus that we see in John’s Gospel proclaims himself as the one who gives water so that one can never thirst again… it is water that wells up to eternal life… life that consists in the knowledge of God.
If that is true – if Jesus is the thirst-quencher, and the life-giver –then there is only one possibility: that Jesus has somehow reversed the effects of the sin of Adam and Eve, and the sinfulness of man. If in Jesus, we who were dead in sin have been given life abundant & who desperately thirsted after God now can know him, then it must be true that Jesus has made right the almost indescribable wrong that Adam’s sin has entrenched in the human condition for thousands of years.
But how did he do that?
Here is the Gospel: Jesus, sent by God for this very purpose, died on the cross. At his death, he took on himself the judgment of God for our sins. And he experienced the consequences of our sin: he died, he felt the forsakenness by God that sin inevitably brings, he said ‘I thirst’…. Only, he experienced these things without having sinned.
But that is not all, as we have heard from his own lips. Having taken from us, he also gives to us. Or rather, God having placed on Jesus our sin and its consequences, he gives to us the privileges that accompany his sinlessness:
Romans 6: Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried, therefore, with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.
Ephesians 2 – But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.
And look how the human story ends for those who are in Christ Jesus, bringing to a marvelous culmination these intertwined threads of death and thirst, and life and water: Revelation chapters 21 & 22:
And he said to me, ‘It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give from the spring of the water of life without payment.’ … Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb… on each side of the river stood the tree of life… The Spirit and the Bride say, ‘Come.’ And let the one who hears say, ‘Come.’ And let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who desires take the water of life without price’.
Now, all that remains for us today is to ask and answer the questions, ‘Are you living fully? Are you thirsty? Is there some deep longing in your soul that you have tried to satisfy, but cannot? Are you digging a well?’
If you are not living, is it possible that you have not understood the gospel of Jesus, and the person of Jesus?
If you are digging a well, what is that well? At what place – job, pleasure, achievement, relationships – at what place have you said, ‘Here I will find water’? Perhaps only you know what that well is. Perhaps others around you can see it, too.
Christian, ask yourself. Am I living? Am I digging? Perhaps you are still looking to something else to satisfy you.
If you are not a Christian, do you realize that your greatest need is for life in Christ, and that your soul’s greatest thirst is for him?
Will you not turn from your digging, go to the spring of living water, and receive from him the water of life?
Amen.