Sometimes I read the prophets and it feels like a morality play, a kind of after school special in ancient garb. The prophet’s voices are a little too booming, the teeming masses are a little too evil, and the morality is a little too mathematical to seem at all real. But because I really do believe its God’s word, I often have to remind myself that these stories are never just historical curiosities that I can abstract myself from. As far as God is concerned, the history of Israel is the history of the world. The Old Testament is a record not simply of what Israel did, but of what we do. If you would know the way your heart bends, peruse the Old Testament.
And a passage like this helps me remember that the prophets have us moderns squarely in their sights. To forsake water is to forsake life. And to forsake water in the desert is a special kind of folly. Living in Dallas I see people broker there sorts of lopsided deals all the the time. I see people gnaw on discarded bones, as if they were fat and rich food, when the feast is spread before them. I see people pluck out tunes on warped instruments, calling them songs, while symphonies rise and fall in their hearing. Everyone here has whiffed the musk of American abundance and become a coordinate on the suburban grid.
This is all to say that I have stopped wondering if it is true, and moved on to wondering why it is true. Have people imagined God to be something he is not, imagined him not as good and true, but as too good to be true? Do they see him as a snake-oil huckster whose potions do no heal, a back-alley dealer whose watches never wind, a flushed faced, TV-racketeer whose goods never arrive? Maybe so. In the case of Israel, the promise of living water, that is, an actual moving stream, would be so rare as to seem like magic.
But I think it’s the second half of the passage that points the way. To store water in containers that cannot hold it has a willful, snot-nosed arrogance to it. It’s not that people have shot the moon on God and come up short. It’s that people would rather wave the tattered flag of their own independence, then come on bended knee to the embassy of God.
So if that’s true, then maybe my aversion to the prophets is not their cartoonishness at all. Maybe I just don’t want to meet my own gaze in the mirror of their words. In that case, I am the one in the alley who refuses shelter simply because I did not build it. And when it comes down to it, it seems that most of our unwillingness to read the Bible at all revolves around this truth. It is not simply that the Bible is hard to read; it is that the Bible’s truth is often hard to hear. But where else can those who thirst come and find true drink, or those who hunger come and find true food?