Finding God in the Mystery of every day

030705 Finding God in the Mystery of every day

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Psalm 63: 1 A Psalm of David, when he was in the wilderness of Judah.

God, You are my God; I shall be watching for You; My soul thirsts for You, my flesh yearns for You, In a dry and exhausted land where there is no water.

John 19:28 After this, Jesus, knowing that all things were now accomplished, that the Scripture might be fulfilled, said, “I thirst!”

            Have you ever been really thirsty? I recall working in the fields as a young man and finding myself so parched and thirsty that I had to go seeking some water to drink. There were no water bottles such as people carry around with them all day so we had to find and use the watr pumped up out of the ground with a hand pump like that shown above. There was honestly nothing finer than to slake our thirst with the cool clear water from the pump, to splash it on our hot foreheads and be refreshed. A quite romantic picture is it not?

            That is not what the verses above are talking about. In the first instance in David’s Psalm, he is feeling his separation from his familiar understanding of God and wondering (thirsting) for some explanation for all of the trouble he seems to be having by doing what he knows to be right. That’s what happens when we try to race ahead of God and assume we are doing what he wills for us to do.

            In the second instance Jesus is on the cross and is about to die. He realizes that at that particular moment His Father has “turned His face away” and that the constant flow of “living water” has been stopped. He is alone. The saddest moment of the scriptures occurs moments later when He cries Eloi, Eloi, lama sabacthani. (My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?

            Spiritual thirst is perhaps the deadliest human affliction there is. People seek satisfaction from many polluted sources and are poisoned by them deluding themselves into accepting the condition as the best they can get. Recall if you will the encounter of Jesus with the Samaritan woman at the well of Jacob (John 4) The woman got the idea of “living water” and ran to tell others the good news. Importantly, his all happened across an enormous cultural divide and constituted the first clear self-revelation of Jesus as our Savior.