Sermon
Facing The Truth And Sharing The Wonder
October 29, 2000
Pastor Donald Sheley

Well, we've arrived at page 716. I told you we would. That's in your red Bible, if you're using it, the pew Bible. And I'd like for you to use that today because we're going to go back and do some historical research, and I'll give you the pages and you'll be able to follow a long. So if you can find one of those red Bibles nearby, we're going to study today, and this is not a sermon, this is a historical study. It's going to be a historical presentation, and the reason why, is because we really cannot appreciate chapter four of John unless we understand the background to the story. And so today we're going to do a historical survey for the fourth chapter of the book of John. In your Bible it's John 4 and I'm going to read the first 15 verses.

The Pharisees heard that Jesus was gaining and baptizing more disciples than John, although in fact it was not Jesus who baptized, but his disciples. When the Lord learned of this, he left Judea and went once more to Galilee.
Now he had to go through Samaria. So he came to a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob's well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about the sixth hour. In Jewish timing the day started at six in the morning, so it's 12:00 noon. The sixth hour would be 12:00 noon.
When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, "Will you give me a drink?" (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.)
The Samaritan woman said to him, "You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?" [For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.]
Jesus answered her, "If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water."
"Sir," the women said, "you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his flocks and herds?"
Jesus answered, "Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life." The woman said to him, "Sir, give me this water so that I won't get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water."

Now in our notes today I asked the ushers to pass you each a map. Do you have it? Because in our text there are a considerable number of locations such as Sychar and Samaria and Judea and so forth, so let's get acquainted. Let's kind of get a pictorial picture of this small country that wherein this story takes place. You'll notice there in the measuring suggestions about an inch and a half equals 30 miles. So Palestine is a very, very small country. You'll notice that right at the center it's about 70 miles across and maybe it's 120 miles from top to bottom. It's really a small piece of real estate, isn't it? Gets a lot of world attention though. Now notice right in the center is Samaria. You'll notice it printed in large print. Write beneath it is the little town of Samaria. Do you see it there? And then right beneath there is Sychar and Shechem. They're just two or three or four miles apart. Now if we go due south, look at, we run into Jerusalem, down there about 30 miles is Jerusalem. Today we hear a lot in the news about the Gaza. Go to the left there, over near The Great Sea, the Mediterranean Sea, and you'll notice there's the little town of Gaza. That's where they're having so many problems. And if you go due east you'll see Hebron. Do you see it there? And we're having a lot of fights in the streets of Hebron even this week.

Now if we go back up from Samaria and we start northeast just a little bit, we'll get up to the Sea of Galilee. It's up there about 40 miles, and you'll see Capernaum and there's Bethsaida and Chorazin and Gennesaret and Magdala. These were the little cities surrounding the Sea of Galilee. And then you'll notice, and I should have printed it a little deeper, a little clearer, the Jordan River runs right down the center cleared down to the bottom. Do you see down at the bottom it says Dead Sea? The Dead Sea is an interesting sea. It's 1300 feet below sea level and the salt content is so thick you can almost walk on the water. It's amazing. So there's the Salt Sea, the Dead Sea. So we've kind of got an idea, and in our notes we'll run across this fact, that during the times of Christ this little piece of real estate was divided into three areas. From Samaria and North, or to in the, I should say in the center, was the area known as Samaria. But we get up to nearly Nain or Gadara, we're now in what was known as Galilee. Right around the Sea of Galilee. If we go south from just a little bit above Jerusalem and we go south, all of that was known as Judea. So there was Judea then Samaria, and then we had Galilee up at the top. Do you see now? Do you kind of get an idea? And it really is small. What's 120 miles? Well that's from here to Sacramento, something like that. So really it's a very small country.

Well now let's go to our notes. We kind of got a picture of where Samaria is. I'm on page 3 of our notes this morning, page 3. And let's paint a picture for the scene before us with our pen dipped in the inkwell of ancient history. You who know me know I love history, and so I have fun today with a history lesson. In the land of Palestine, it's only 120 miles long from north to south. But within that 120 miles there were... By the way, did you not get any notes? If you didn't get notes just raise your hand and the ushers will make sure you get them, because we're going to follow the notes along today. Ushers will you just quickly get the folks who raise their hand some notes. The land of Palestine is only 120 miles long from north to south, and within the 120 miles there were in the time of Christ, as we've noted, three definite divisions of territory. In the extreme north, Galilee; in the extreme south, Judaea; and Samaria was in the middle.

Jesus did not wish at this stage of His ministry to be drawn into or involved in a controversy about baptism. Remember, a couple weeks ago, the disciples of John were arguing about whose baptism is the best? Remember that? One of the first arguments in the Christian church. And Jesus didn't want to get involved in this particular controversy about baptism so he decided to leave Judaea for the time being and he transfer His ministry up to Galilee. He spent much of his time in the little lake town of Capernaum. Now let's talk about this middle part known as Samaria. There was a centuries-old feud between the Jews and the Samaritans. Way back about 720 B.C. the Assyrians had invaded the Northern Kingdom of Samaria and had captured and subjugated it. Let's stop there. What happened after David's death, as you know, Solomon took over the reign of the kingdom. Solomon might have been wise in some areas, but he was a terrible, terrible king. In fact, just before his death he almost had a division. But after his death it did divide.

The 10 northern tribes, just north of Jerusalem, said we don't want to be anymore a part of you, and so down in the bottom the tribes of Judah and Benjamin made up the lower kingdom, the southern kingdom, and the 10 tribes made up the northern kingdom. The fellow who was in charge of the northern kingdom was Jeroboam. Solomon's son, Rehoboam, was in charge of the southern kingdom. But now you've got a divided kingdom. So, back to our history lesson, in the year 720 B.C. the Assyrians came over from the east and they invaded the northern kingdom of Samaria, that's under Jeroboam, and had captured and subjugated it. And they did what conquerors often did in those days; they transported practically the whole population to Media. In other words, they made everybody move clear back over into Iraq and Iran. Because what their plan was, bring in all new people and repopulate the land that they had captured. So they do that. They bring in people from Babylon, from Cuthah, from Ava, from Hamath, and from Sepharvaim, and these people now live in what was Samaria, and the people of Samaria, the Jews, have all been taken to another land. Now there's something interesting about these people. The northern 10 tribes, once they got dispersed, history has never found them since. They're known as the 10 lost tribes of Israel.

Okay, now the Assyrians, though, did leave some people in Samaria. When you check the history books, the people they left were the poor people. And when the new foreigners, that's these people from these countries we've just noted, start arriving they become interested in the Jewish girls, and so they inter-marry. And for the Jews, this was an unforgivable crime. They lost their racial purity. And in his a strict Jewish household, even to this day, if a son or daughter marries a Gentile, his or her funeral service is carried out. Such a person is dead in the eyes of orthodox Judaism. Now in the course of time, in the year 585 the southern kingdom, that's Judah and Benjamin, they get invaded from the east and this time they are carried off to Babylon. But they do not lose their identity, and they remained stubbornly and unalterably Jewish in all of their commitments. In time, there came the days of Ezra and Nehemiah and some of those exiles who had gone off to Babylon decide they're going back home. So they return to Jerusalem by the grace of the Persian King. Their immediate task was to repair and rebuild the shattered Temple.

Now let's put our notes down and take our Bible, and if you're using the red Bible, I'd like for you to go to page 329. We're going to read this history. I often tell you about it, but I'd like for you to just read along with me. Now remember now, we've got these two tribes Judah and Benjamin, 585 carried off into Babylon into captivity. The first one who wants to return his name was Zerubbabel, and in the year of 537 B.C. he decides I'm going back to Jerusalem, and he gets some of the folks and back to Jerusalem they go. Well then, in the year of 458, Ezra, a scribe, decides I want to go back to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple once again, so he returns in the year of 458 B.C. Thirteen years later Nehemiah, who has risen to real heights of power in the Persian government, he says I want to go home too, and I'll rebuild the walls. So you have Zerubbabel who goes back then Ezra to build the Temple, and now Nehemiah in the year 445, he's going to go back and built the walls. Okay?

Now we're in Nehemiah chapter 1. The words of Nehemiah the son of Hachaliah. It came to pass in the month of Chislev, in the twentieth year, as I was in Shushan the citadel. Shushan was the capital of the Persian empire, and it's just south of Babylon just a few miles. And Hanani one of my brethren came with men from Judah; and I ask them concerning the Jews who had escaped, who had survived the captivity, and concerning Jerusalem. Now as I said, Nehemiah has risen to a high position, but he's got some friends who visit him from Jerusalem. And he gets into a conversation with them, and he says, fellows, how's things back home? Now here's his position. Go to the last sentence in the first chapter. We know that Nehemiah was very important because he was the king's cupbearer. What's that? Well, in a king's palace somebody had to protect the king because somebody could poison the food or, so the king's cupbearer would always sample the wine and sample the food to make sure it hadn't been poisoned. So if it had been poisoned, he gets it and the king lives. It's that simple. So he's very, very close to the king. But he's got these friends who arrive from Jerusalem and he says fellows, how are things back home? Well, verse 3, "The survivors who are left from the captivity in the province are there in great distress and reproach. The wall of Jerusalem is also broken down, and its gates are burned with fire." It wasn't a good report, was it?

What does Nehemiah do? So it was, verse 4, when I heard these words, then I sat down and wept, and I mourned for many days; I was fasting and praying before the God of heaven. And I said: "I pray, Lord God of heaven, O great and awesome God, You who keep Your covenant and mercy with those who love You and observe Your commandments, please let Your ear be attentive and Your eyes open, that You may hear the prayer of Your servant which I pray before You now. And so the remaining part of the chapter Nehemiah prays and his heart is really burdened for his hometown Jerusalem.

I'm in chapter 2 now. It came to pass in the month of Nisan, in the twentieth year of King Artaxerxes, when wine was before him, that I took the wine and gave it to the king. Remember, that's his job. He's the cupbearer. Now I had never been sad in his presence before. Why? Because there was a law of the palace that you never came to the king in any negative aspect. If you're in mourning, you never wore your mourning clothes. You always had to be positive in the king's presence. He didn't allow sad people there. Therefore the king said to me, why is your face sad, are you sick? This is nothing but sorrow of heart. In other words he's saying, no, he's saying, Nehemiah, this pain is so obvious in your face. There's something really deeply disturbing you. So, he said, I became dreadfully afraid. He's afraid because it's the first time he's violated a dictum of the palace. He's come in sad before the king and he's afraid. And I said to the king, "May the king live forever! Why should my face not be sad, when the city, the place of my father's tombs, lies waste, and its gates are burned with fire?" And the king said to me, well is there any way I can help? What's your request? So I prayed to the God of heaven. And I said to the king, "If it pleases the king, and if your servant has found favor in your sight, I ask that you send me to Judah, to the city of my father's tombs, that I may rebuild it." In other words, king give me a leave of absence I'm going to be gone twelve years. That's how long he's gone.

So it pleased the king to send me. Now the king said to me, well, and the queen was sitting beside him, how long will your journey be? And when will you return? So it pleased the king to send me, and I set him a time when I'm leaving. Now furthermore I said to the king, if it pleases the king, let letters be given to me for the governors of the region beyond the River, that's the Euphrates River, that they must permit me to pass through till I come to Judah. In other words, king, if I'm going to do all this traveling I need a passport, because I'm going to go through all these of various regions of the province and I want to make sure that I can get through each one successfully. So make sure I've got a passport. The king said okay. And furthermore, king I have another request of you. Because he's got a king with a generous heart, he might as well make all the requests right now; and a letter to Asaph the keeper of the king's forest, that he must give me timber to make beams for the gates of the citadel which pertains to the temple, for the city wall, and for the house that I will occupy. And the king said, good, you can have it. The king granted them to me according to the good hand of my God upon me. So then I went to the governors in the region beyond the River, and I gave them the king's letters. Now the king also sent along captains of the army and horseman. I mean, the king gives him a 12-year leave of absence, supplies him for his journey, gives him all that he can get at Home Depot, all the building supplies he needs, and then sends along a horse and an army to take care of him. That's a good king, isn't it?

So when Sanballat the Horonite and Tobiah the Ammonite official heard of it, they were deeply disturbed that a man had come to seek the well-being of the children of Israel. Now who were those guys? Where'd they come from? Well they were the rulers in charge of Samaria, and they didn't like it because for years they had watched Jerusalem had just lay in rubble, and all of a sudden there's a big building program going on down there. The reason why they didn't like it is because there was all possibilities and they would lose their power and rule, and lose their taxation and all the rest, and so... But something else had happened. Back up in your Bible just a few pages, I'm in the red Bible, to Ezra chapter 4 and its page 324 in your Bible. And here's the interesting thing that happened. Notice chapter 4 of Ezra. Now when the adversaries of Judah and Benjamin, remember that's the southern tribes that make up the southern kingdom, heard that the descendants of the captivity were building the temple of the Lord God of Israel, they came to Zerubbabel. Remember now, Zerubbabel had come just before Ezra, and the heads of the father's houses, and they said to them, "Let us build with you, for we seek your God as you do; and we have sacrificed to Him since the days of Esarhaddon king of Assyria, who brought us here." In other words, look at Zerubbabel, we just live up the road here just a little bit and we'd like to come down here and help you build. Seems reasonable.

Look at the reaction they got. But Zerubbabel and Jeshua and the rest of the heads of the father's houses of Israel said to them, "You may do nothing with us to build a house for our God; but we alone will build to the Lord God of Israel, as King Cyrus the king of Persia has commanded us." In other words, we don't want you. Go back home. Why don't they, why wouldn't they let those Samaritans help? Because they were not pure Jewish people. They had intermixed and now they had a mixed race. And old Zerubbabel says, no this is a sacred work and we only want pure Jews involved, and so you guys go on back home. Look at what happened. Then the people of the land, that's those Samaritans, tried to discourage the people of Judah. They troubled them in building, and hired counselors against them to frustrate their purpose all the days of Cyrus king of Persia, until the reign of Darius king of Persia. So what happened was the Samaritans get rebuffed. Well let's go back to our notes. We're right in the middle of page 3. The Samaritans came and offered their help in this sacred task. And they were contemptuously told, I'm down about two-thirds of the page, told that their help was not wanted. They had lost their Jewish heritage and they had no right to share in the rebuilding of the house of God. Now smarting under this repulse, they turned bitterly against the Jews of Jerusalem. It was about 450 B.C. when this feud started, and it was just as bitter 450 years later when Jesus arrives in the little town of Samaria. They didn't like each other. Boy, that's a feud, isn't it, that last 450 years?

But it had further been embittered when a renegade Jew, his name was Manasseh, he went up north and he married Sanballat, the governor of Samaria, he married his daughter. Now that was really, that was something they couldn't take. And then what he did, he built a temple right there in, near Samaria at Mount Gerizim in defiance of the Temple that was in Jerusalem. That's the Temple that she's referring to. Still later, in the Maccabean days, in 129 B.C. John Hyrcanus, the Jewish general and leader, led an attack against Samaria and sacked and destroyed the temple on Mount Gerizim. And so you can see between the Jews and Samaritans there was an embittered hatred. They wouldn't let them help to build. Come back a few years later, 100 years later, tore down their own temple, and they hate each other to this day. It's interesting. It was no small wonder then that a Samaritan woman was astonished when Jesus, a Jew, should speak to her. I mean here's silence, here's feud, here's hatred going on between two peoples, and here's Jesus sitting down and talking with a Samaritan. Now, well there's the history behind the scene, but let's chase one more peak at history.

I'm at the top of page 4 now. I'll hurry along. The Samaritan that Jesus got into a conversation with was a woman. Now the strict Rabbis forbade a Rabbi to greet a woman in public. A Rabbi might not even speak to his own wife or daughter or sister in public. Now I think that's stupid. That was religious and in the days of Jesus. I mean if you're really a spiritual Rabbi, you couldn't even talk to your wife on the street. Well it even got worse than that. There were some of those, there were Pharisees who were called, "The bruised and bleeding Pharisees" because they shut their eyes when they saw a woman on the street and so walked into walls and houses and stumbled and fell. And you see, the guy that had the most Band-Aids on his face for covering his eyes so he couldn't see the scene of all the women on the street, he's the most spiritual. Now that's the kind of religion that Jesus had to deal with. I mean it was stupid.

Let's go on. For a Rabbi to even be seen speaking to a woman in public was the end of his reputation, and yet, Jesus spoke to this woman. Not only was she a woman, she was also a woman of character which was notorious. No decent man, let alone a Rabbi, would have been seen in her company or even exchanging a word with her, and yet, Jesus spoke to her. To the Jew, this was absolutely an amazing story. Here was the Son of God tired and weary and thirsty. One of the interesting things about the gospel of John, and there's no other writer whose so magnifies the deity of Christ, but also who so shows the human side of Jesus. And he sees the divine Christ tired, weary, thirsty. Here was the holiest of men listening with understanding to a sorry story. And here was Jesus breaking through the barriers of nationality and orthodox Jewish custom. Here is the beginning of the universality of the gospel. Here is God so loving the world, not in theory, but in action. Now it's interesting to draw a comparison between this story and the one we've just studied in chapter 3.

In John 3, we have a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus. Here in John 4, it is an unnamed woman from an insignificant village. Nicodemus was a man of rank, an aristocrat of Jerusalem; the latter as a woman of lowest rank, a drawer of water. One was a favored Jew. The other a despised Samaritan! One was a man of high reputation, a member of the Sanhedrin; the other was a woman of despised, dissolute habits. And Nicodemus was sought out by Christ in the blackness of night, but the other was sought out by Christ in the light of day. To the self-righteous Pharisee Jesus said, "Ye must be born again." To the sinner of the Gentiles He tells to her of the gift of life, living water. Now it's interesting to note that the reason why Jesus left Judaea and journeyed through Samaria was because he wanted to leave a scene of jealousy. John the Baptist's disciples were jealous over the success of Jesus and were concerned for their master who was losing his following.

Dropping on down a few lines. You see, the quickest way from Judaea, and we notice that on our map, to Galilee would have been to go right through Samaria. The alternative route was to cross Jordan, to go up the eastern side of the river, to avoid Samaria, and then recross the Jordan River. But the amount of time it took to do that was six days. Where if you went the route that Jesus chose, it was three days. Now on the way, Jesus and his disciples came to the town of Sychar. Just short of Sychar, the road to Samaria forks. And it was at this fork in the road that Jesus came to an ancient well. It was dug by Jacob, and Jacob, on his deathbed, bequeathed this ground to Joseph. And on Joseph's death in Egypt, his body had been taken back to Palestine and had been buried right near this well. So you can see that this, around this well had gathered many Jewish memories. Now the well itself was 100 feet deep. It was not springing well water. It was a well where water percolates and builds up. And here at the well, Jesus strikes up His conversation with the Samaritan woman. Now here's the setting. Here are two nations, or two groups of people, that have feuded for centuries. They avoided each other.

Jesus decides I'm going to break down these barriers. He walks into enemy territory, sits beside a well, and strikes up a conversation with a lady who's a Samaritan. Now the first thing He does, He says, would you give me a drink of water? You'll notice in the text it says that Jews have nothing to do with Samaritans. I forget how it says it in the King James, but the implied is that there were no transactions of any kind between these two people. But we know there was, because Jesus' disciples had gone into Sychar to pick up some food. So there must have been some kind of business, economy that transferred between them. What does that statement mean? Well, there was a standing, an agreement, between these nations that Jewish people never ate from plates or drank from cups of Samaritans. Now you understand why when Jesus said, would you give me a drink of water? She said, look at, what are you asking me for a drink of water. You folks have nothing to do with us. You won't eat off of our plates. You won't drink out of our cups. What's the idea? You're asking me to give you my cup, and you for centuries have rejected us. She said, by the way you talk about living water, what's the idea? She said, are you telling me that you're better than Jacob, because in the mind of Jewish people living water was running water. It was water that was like a river or a stream. So when you said living water to a Jew they thought of water that was moving. She said, who do you think you are? Where can you get that kind of water? She said, here's Jacob's well and he's fed his flocks from here, and you don't even have something to get your own water.

In those days they'd sew a piece of leather into a kind of a pocket, and then on that pocket they'd have a long cords tied, and then they'd take that and wrap those cords around that leather pocket, put it under their arm, go down to the well, and then they would let this leather bucket down with these cords and get their water. And she said, you want to drink from my cup when you folks haven't drunk from my cup for 450 years? You're talking to me, and you are implying that you're much better than Jacob who dug this well. Now you understand what created the tension. I don't have time to talk about the conversation. We'll talk about that next week. But now you have the historical background, and with that knowledge you really now catch the tensions in this great conversation. If you can, join me next Sunday. We'll continue our history lesson.

Lord Jesus, thank you for this time together as a family of believers. We've had a wonderful time, great music, and a water baptism, baby dedication, our communion time together, and then learning some of the background to this great portion of Scripture. And as we continue to search its truths, may You write them indelibly on our hearts in the days to come. And before we go, we mean this from our heart, we want to tell You one more time - we love You dear Jesus. And thank you for loving us. And everybody said, amen. God bless you. God bless you.