Broken Cisterns

“… for my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water.” – Jeremiah 2:13

Water management and distribution was a big deal in the arid ancient near east, and so wells and cisterns were commonplace. Wells were long tunnels dug down to reach groundwater. Cisterns, on the other hand, were shallower pits dug into the ground to catch and store rainwater. They had to be waterproof: otherwise, of course, the rainwater would simply seep out into the ground.

Cisterns were hewn out of rock. Why would anyone do that kind of backbreaking work when there is a fountain of water available? Why would anyone actually leave a fresh source of water for a stagnant one? Yet that is what we do. There is something in us that wants to have it our way, on our own terms, through our own doing. Soren Kierkegaard once said, “If I had in my service a submissive Jinni who, when I asked for a glass of water, would bring me the world’s most expensive wines, deliciously blended in a goblet, I would dismiss him until he learned that the enjoyment consists not in what I enjoy but in getting my own way.”

But the cruel truth is that our cisterns are not waterproof. Our work is in vain; the water ever eludes us. None of our toiling and achieving can ultimately or permanently attain for us that for which we thirst. Jesus, sitting at a well, said in John 4, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” The first step is to see that our cisterns are broken; they are beyond repair. The second is to return to the fountain of living water. If you know this gift of God, Jesus says in John 4, you would ask, and he would indeed give you living water.