John 4 is usually told as a sweet story about a kind teacher and a woman with a past, and it is that, but it is so much more. Every line of this chapter stands on ground soaked in the history of Israel. The well belonged to Jacob. The field was bought by the patriarch and holds the bones of Joseph. The city sits in Samaria, the old heartland of the northern kingdom that Assyria tore away and scattered among the nations. The woman who comes at noon with her waterpot is not a random stranger; she stands in the wreckage of that scattered house, worshipping on the mountain her fathers had chosen...
John 4 is usually told as a sweet story about a kind teacher and a woman with a past, and it is that, but it is so much more. Every line of this chapter stands on ground soaked in the history of Israel. The well belonged to Jacob. The field was bought by the patriarch and holds the bones of Joseph. The city sits in Samaria, the old heartland of the northern kingdom that Assyria tore away and scattered among the nations. The woman who comes at noon with her waterpot is not a random stranger; she stands in the wreckage of that scattered house, worshipping on the mountain her fathers had chosen in the centuries after the kingdom split and the exiles were carried away. When Yahshua sits down on the stones of Jacob's well and asks her for a drink, heaven is reopening a conversation with the lost sheep of Israel that had gone silent for seven centuries. This lesson walks through John 4...