Dr. Sproul investigates Jesus meeting with a Samaritan woman at noontime coming to get water in the heat of the day. Normally this would be done in the morning or evening so this act sets her apart. Dr. Sproul discusses the water that Jesus will give and closes with her request for this water.

We continue with our study of the gospel according to Saint John, and this morning’s lesson is from John 4:1–26. This is a longer reading than normal, but if we are going to follow the flow of this narrative, I think it is important that we examine the whole passage. Chapter 4 of John begins with these words:

Therefore, when the Lord knew that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus made and baptized more disciples than John (though Jesus Himself did not baptize, but His disciples), He left Judea and departed again to Galilee. But He needed to go through Samaria.

So He came to a city of Samaria which is called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob gave to his son Joseph. Now Jacob’s well was there. Jesus therefore, being wearied from His journey, sat thus by the well. It was about the sixth hour.

A woman of Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give Me a drink.” For His disciples had gone away into the city to buy food.

Then the woman of Samaria said to Him, “How is it that You, being a Jew, ask a drink from me, a Samaritan woman?” For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.

Jesus answered and said to her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who says to you, ‘Give Me a drink,’ you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water.”

The woman said to Him, “Sir, You have nothing to draw with, and the well is deep. Where then do You get that living water? Are You greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well, and drank from it himself, as well as his sons and his livestock?”

Jesus answered and said to her, “Whoever drinks of this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst. But the water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life.”

The woman said to Him, “Sir, give me this water, that I may not thirst, nor come here to draw.”

Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come here.”

The woman answered and said, “I have no husband.”

Jesus said to her, “You have well said, ‘I have no husband,’ for you have had five husbands, and the one whom you now have is not your husband; in that you spoke truly.”

The woman said to Him, “Sir, I perceive that You are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, and you Jews say that in Jerusalem is the place where one ought to worship.”

Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe Me, the hour is coming when you will neither on this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, worship the Father. You worship what you do not know; we know what we worship, for salvation is of the Jews. But the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for the Father is seeking such to worship Him. God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.”

The woman said to Him, “I know that Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ). “When He comes, He will tell us all things.”

Jesus said to her, “I who speak to you am He.”

He who has ears to hear the Word of God, let him hear. Let us pray.

Our Father and our God, we thank You for this record of the meeting between Jesus and the Samaritan woman. We thank You for the riches of those things that He discussed with her on that occasion. As we look briefly at them this morning, we pray that You would give us understanding in our minds and in our hearts. For we ask it in Jesus’ name. Amen.

The Samaritan Woman

In this account, we read of Jesus having another meeting with another person. One of the reasons I love the gospel of John so much is that it is filled with narratives of the encounters Jesus had with people from all walks of life. We have already seen His extended conversation with Nicodemus, who was not only a Jew, but a ruler of the Jews, a member of the Sanhedrin. Now we get to eavesdrop on a conversation Jesus has with a woman who was a Samaritan. Not only was she female and Samaritan, but she was a woman who obviously had a reputation for sexual immorality.

There were three things about this woman that did not bode well for Jewish people. One was that she was a Samaritan. They did not like Samaritans. Second, she was a woman; that was strike two. Third, she was a woman who had a reputation for sexual sin. All three of these things set her in a radically different category than Nicodemus, whom we have already seen.

We are told that Jesus left the area of Judea and was going to Galilee. Galilee is in the north, Judea is in the south, and between Galilee and Judea is Samaria. A quick reminder of the history of the Jewish people is that when David became king, he moved his headquarters to Jerusalem, and it was there that Solomon built the temple in the tenth century BC. The temple was destroyed in 586 BC when the Jews were carried off as captives. When they returned, the temple was rebuilt in 516 BC and then Herod renovated the magnificent temple in Jerusalem around 20 BC.

The central sanctuary, the headquarters of the Jewish people, was in Jerusalem. When the kingdom was divided into the Northern and the Southern Kingdoms, those who were in the Northern Kingdom constructed their headquarters, their capital city, in Samaria. Not only was the capital of the Northern Kingdom located in Samaria, but so was their place of worship, Mount Gerizim.

The Samaritans only accepted the first five books of the Old Testament, so they ignored the teaching of the prophets. They ignored the Psalms and the messianic predictions therein, and all that spoke of Jerusalem. Their central place of worship was in Samaria, not in Judea or in Jerusalem.

The Jews were hostile toward the Samaritans for various reasons, which I will mention in a moment. It was also the custom that on many occasions, when they made the journey from Judea to Galilee, instead of taking a direct path through Samaria, they would cross the Jordan River to the east and travel the trans-Jordan highway north, which was quite a bit out of the way. Jesus may have been in a hurry, so He decided to go directly through Samaria to Galilee.

Jacob’s Well

We are told that Jesus came to a city called Sychar, near the piece of ground that Jacob had given to his son, Joseph. When Jacob gave a patriarchal blessing to all of his sons, as mentioned at the end of the book of Genesis, this parcel of real estate was given to Joseph. This was a very important piece of land because it contained an ancient site, the well dug by Jacob so many years before. Keep in mind that when Jesus meets the woman by Jacob’s well, almost two thousand years have transpired from the time that the well was dug by Jacob. Now this woman is at the same well, drinking from it two thousand years later.

If that is not exciting to you, maybe this will be: If you have ever been to Israel, you may have gone to that same site, as I have, right at the base of Mount Gerizim. That same well is still there today, and water still flows freely in it. That well has been meeting the people’s needs for four thousand years. After the first two of those four thousand years, it was considered something of a sacred site by those who traced their roots back to the Old Testament patriarch.

We are told that Jesus, being weary from His travels, came to the well and sat down, and it was the sixth hour. That means it was high noon. The hours started at 6 a.m., so the sixth hour was twelve o’clock. It was the hottest time of day in this desert region. Jesus, in His humanity—and this is one of those marvelous texts that explore the reality of the human nature of Christ—was tired. Not only was He tired, but He was hungry, and now parched with thirst, so He came to the well.

We are told the disciples had been sent away to the city to buy food. You may think that Jesus was acting a bit imperious here by making His disciples go fetch the groceries, and you wonder why He did not go Himself. That was because He was their rabbi. It was part of the rules of the school, part of the academic world that the students were not just committed to learning from the professor. They were also responsible to serve their master, the rabbi, and to take care of his requirements, such as where he would lodge and where the food would come from. So, Jesus, being a good rabbi who had good students, sent them into the city to get lunch and bring it to Him.

Jesus was alone, and He spoke to the woman who came to draw water. Ordinarily, the women of the village would draw water either early in the morning or after sunset, not in the heat of the day. They would get a day’s supply of water for drinking, for bathing, and also for cleaning their utensils, clothes, and so on.

Normally, the women would come in a group to the public well to get the water they needed for the day. That this woman came alone at noon tells us about her social status in the community. She was obviously ostracized from the rest of the women and something of a pariah, so she had to come by herself in the heat of the day to get her water.

Historical Hostility

Much to the woman’s surprise, a stranger came to her and said, “Give Me a drink.” She recognized that He was a Jew, and she said, “How is it that You, being a Jew, ask a drink from me, a Samaritan woman?” Then John makes the comment, “For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.”

I do not know what your translation says. Unfortunately, this is a bad translation of this verse, because it is not true that the Jews did not have any dealings with the Samaritans. They had all kinds of dealings with the Samaritans. In fact, Jesus had sent the disciples into town for a business transaction, to buy foodstuffs from them. What they were not allowed to do was share eating utensils, particularly glasses or cups, with the Samaritans, because they were considered unclean.

The fact that they had “no dealings” with each other is a clue to the lengthy hostility between the Samaritans and the Jews, which had its roots deep in history. Four hundred years before this event, hostility was going on between them. After the Samaritans were carried away into captivity by the Assyrians in 722 BC, they returned with wives they had married from the pagans. The Samaritans became religious half-breeds, as it were. They entered into religious syncretism, intermixing the pagan rites of their neighbors with their historical religion. They had violated the terms of the covenant of Moses.

The Samaritans offered to help the people of the Southern Kingdom. Those Jews were carried off in 586 BC by the Babylonians. When they came back from the Babylonian captivity and wanted to rebuild the temple and the walls of Jerusalem, some of the Samaritans offered to help. The Jews said, “Thank you very much, but we don’t want your help.”

In the past, the Jews had destroyed some of the religious centers of the Samaritans, and in retaliation, the Samaritans threw the carcass of a pig into the construction site of the new temple. Why would they do that? Because the pig was unclean. Before the construction work could resume, the Jews would have to go through seven or so days of purification rites, and the work would stop while this purification took place. The Jews had a deep-rooted hostility towards the Samaritans, and the feelings were mutual.

A Fountain of Living Water

Jesus spoke to the woman and asked her for a drink, and when she said that the Jews had no dealings with the Samaritans, He answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who says to you, ‘Give Me a drink,’ you would have asked Him.” Essentially: “If you knew who I was when I asked you for a drink of water, you wouldn’t give Me the history of the social problems between the Jews and the Samaritans. You would have dropped everything, and you would have said to Me, ‘No, please, give me a drink.’”

Jesus said, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who says to you, ‘Give Me a drink,’ you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water.” She was puzzled by this, and responded: “Sir, You have nothing to draw with, and the well is deep. Where then do You get that living water?”

It was the custom of travelers in the ancient world, when going on journeys that would take them several miles, to carry a goatskin canteen or bucket to retrieve water from wells. Jesus did not have His. That was with the disciples in town.

The woman looked at Him and said: “You don’t have a bucket. You don’t have anything with which to draw from the well. How are you going to give me water? Not only that, this well is deep. It’s about one hundred feet. Where are you going to get this living water?” Now listen to this question: “Are You greater than our father Jacob?” She could not believe that anyone could come along and talk to her who was greater than Jacob. “Are You greater than our father Jacob who gave us the well, and drank from it himself, as well as his sons and his livestock?”

How does Jesus answer the question, “Are You greater than Jacob?” He basically answers it this way: “I grant that Jacob was a great man, and he has done a wonderful thing, giving you this well. It has stood the test of time for two thousand years. People come here every day to get their water. It is a terrific gift that Jacob gave, but if you have noticed, this isn’t the first time that you’ve been here to get water. If you drink from Jacob’s well, you’re going to have to come back tomorrow.”

Jesus says: “Whoever drinks of this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst. But the water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life.”

Here too, the language fails us a bit. When it is said that this living water of which Jesus speaks will “spring up,” it means “leap up.” It is so alive, so dynamic, so energetic, so powerful that not only will it assuage thirst for the moment, but it will begin to pour out of the soul of the person. It is something that continues to nurture day after day, year after year.

When Jesus is engaged in conversation with the woman, He is using the common element of water as a metaphor to describe a spiritual reality. He also, in this symbolic manner of speaking, speaks about thirst. This whole conversation started because He was thirsty, and He met a woman who was thirsty.

Thirsty Souls

If we can let our imaginations go for a moment, how thirsty was this woman? How empty was her life? How empty was her soul? I do not mean that she was passionately pursuing the things of God, hungering and thirsting after righteousness. She obviously was not hungering after righteousness.

You hear this statement all the time from Christians. They talk about their friends who are not Christians, and they say, “My friend isn’t a Christian, but my friend is seeking God,” or “My friend is searching for God.” All the while, the Scriptures tell us that in our natural, fallen condition, none of us ever seeks God. The quest for God does not begin until your conversion. Prior to your conversion, you are running as fast and as relentlessly as you can away from God.

Why is it that we see our friends and neighbors who are not Christians, and we say, “they’re not Christians, but they’re seeking, they’re hungry, they’re thirsty”? I think the best answer for that question came from Thomas Aquinas. When Aquinas was asked that very question, he said, “The Bible said no one seeks after God, and yet it seems that people everywhere are seeking after God.”

Aquinas essentially said: “We see people around us, desperately seeking peace, seeking relief from their guilt, seeking something to fill the emptiness of their souls and their lives. We look at them, and from our perspective, we know that the only thing that will satisfy the hunger and thirst within their souls is the living Christ. So, since they are seeking to have their thirst assuaged and hunger satisfied, they must be seeking God.” Aquinas said: “No, people desperately search for the things that only God can give them, while at the same time they are fleeing from Him.”

Jesus Knows Her Sin

Jesus knew all about the woman. He knew that her life was bankrupt. She did not stop trying to find happiness. Five times she had been married, and every time she entered into marriage, she thought: “This is the one that will make me happy. This is the one that will last.” But she was 0 for 5, and now she was living with someone who was not her husband.

Why was she doing that? Because she wanted to be a bad person? No. She was desperately trying to find happiness. She was so lonely. She was so empty. She had nothing. She had no love, and she was grabbing at anything that could satisfy her thirst.

Jesus said, “If you knew who you were talking to, you’d ask Him, and He would give you water that’s alive, water that will satisfy your thirst forever.” The woman said: “Sir, give me this water, that I may not thirst and not have to come here to draw. I hate it every time I come here. I feel like I have a scarlet ‘A’ sewn over my chest. I have to sneak past the eyes of every woman in the village. When I come out to this place to get my water, I feel so ashamed, so embarrassed, so alone. If you have water like this, give it to me, and I’ll never have to come back to this well again.”

Jesus said, “Go, call your husband, and come here.” She answered, “I have no husband,” and Jesus said: “You have well said, ‘I have no husband,’ for you have had five husbands, and the one whom you now have is not your husband; in that you spoke truly.”

The woman said, “Sir, I perceive that You are a prophet.” That is a brilliant deduction, but why did she have this perception? Because she had just met a man who knew her entire life. He went right through the façade, penetrated right to her heart, and exposed her sin right then and there. She said, essentially: “You must be some kind of holy man. You must have access to knowledge that normal people don’t have.” I think she was terrified, so the best defense she had at this point was to ask a theological question and detour around her sin.

Drink of the Water of Christ

I told you it was best to read this passage up to verse 26, and I did my best to finish those twenty-six verses. That was my plan when I started. I did not complete this plan. We will have to wait until next time for the next installment, because there is more to this story and more to this discussion that is very important.

Before I close this morning, just a word of application. In any group of people as large as what we have here, it is almost inevitable that some have not yet tasted the sweetness of the living water of Christ Himself. There are people whose souls are so thirsty and so empty. We are hearing this morning about the One—indeed, the only One—who can fill that void in your soul. I pray that you would hear the words of Christ to this woman, and that before you put your head on your pillow tonight, you would say to Him, “Give me a drink,” and He will. Let us pray.

Our Father and our God, we who are hungry have come to Thee to eat. We who are thirsty have come to Thee to drink. We have had bread without any price that we have paid, and water that has been freely given to us. Water our souls today with the living water of Christ. For we ask it in His name. Amen.

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.