Watch What You Worship (Part 2)

One of the more interesting and enlightening interactions Jesus has with a person during His three plus year ministry on earth is found in John 4:1-42.  Here we have Jesus initiating a public interaction with a woman, and not any woman but a Samaritan woman. His doing so would have made this a highly scandalous event, surely front-page news in the “Jerusalem Enquirer”.   Its scandalous nature stemmed from the fact that in that culture women were considered second class citizens, to be seen and not heard, and for a man to initiate conversation with a woman other than his wife or family member in public, it was assumed that his intentions were not honorable. What made this interaction even more scandalous and worthy of front-page news was that this woman was married five times and the guy she was presently living with was not her husband, and everybody in the town knew it (John 4:16-18).

And then we have the fact that this woman was a Samaritan, a “half breed Jew”, thus an outcast living in a region of Israel (Samaria) that no self -respecting “pure” Jew would have traveled to or through nor sought out interaction with one of its residents.

Samaritans were the remnant – the descendants of the tribes of the Northern kingdom of Israel that had been conquered by the Assyrian army 700 years earlier as God’s judgement for their idolatry.  Assyria took some Israelites into captivity, but strategically brought men and women from other conquered nations and had them intermarry with the remaining Jews to prevent any nationalistic revolt that may evolve.  Although the present Samaritans retained some aspects of the worship of the one true God (Exodus 3:13-16), their beliefs and rituals were mostly pagan. They established a place of worship, Mt. Gerizim, in the place of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem.  This would become a minor point of contention in Jesus’ interaction with the woman. However, the real issue Jesus would be addressing with her is not necessarily where one worships but who and how (John 4:21-24).

This woman would be the poster child for Jesus’ expressed purpose in coming into this world which He tells us in Luke 19:10 was to seek and to save that which was lost – which was the worship of God in the hearts of His people (Psalm 96:7-9).  In Luke 19:1-9 we have the account of a chief tax collector, a man reviled by all Israel named Zacchaeus, who upon encountering Jesus, goes from being a worshipper of money to a worshiper of the one true God.

In the instance of the Samaritan woman, she is revealed to be a worshiper of religious idols and of false conceptions of the one true God, as well as a worshiper of that which she believed would bring to her, her greatest joy, her greatest pleasure, her greatest significance, her greatest security and ultimately her greatest fulfillment and satisfaction, and that was her idol of the love of a man and marriage – a good thing given to mankind by God, which she had pursued in place of God (Genesis 2:24) (Romans 1:25).

This idol had failed her on at least five occasions such that she came to now settle for shacking up.  She was likely used, abused, shamed and discarded by the men she had put her trust in. However, on this day she would meet a man – the God-Man who would love her with an everlasting love, never leave her nor forsake her, undo her guilt and shame and fully satisfy her deepest needs and desires forever in ways she could not conceive of nor imagine at that moment (Jeremiah 31:3) (Hebrews 13:5-6) (Psalm 37:4).

Jesus comes to her, not as a sinful man who would use her to satisfy his idolatrous lusts and passions, but as a sinless man who will, in love, give His life as a ransom to save her from the eternal consequences of hers (Mark 10:45) (1 John 3:5).

He presents Himself to her metaphorically as the source of “living water”, water that will wash away her ever-present guilt and shame – water that will fully satisfy her thirst for true love and acceptance, fulfill her desire for significance and security and bring her into a relationship with Him in which she will one day know only fulness of joy and pleasures forevermore (Ezekiel 36:25) (1 John 3:1-2) (Psalm 16:11).

Jesus goes on to make clear to her, and to us, that the worship of God is not about a place, nor does it consist of rituals and ceremonies, but that true worship is an affair of the heart, a heart that has been transformed by the Spirit of God, through whom we come to know the truth of God and all that makes Him worthy of our singular worship (Jeremiah 24:7) John 16:13).  He is essentially telling her that true worship is expressed in the lifestyle of someone who is spiritually alive – whose mind clearly  understands that God is Spirit, the eternal self-existent, self-sufficient, self-determining, infinitely wise, all powerful creator and sovereign ruler of the universe (Isaiah 45:5-6); the One who upholds all things in the universe by the power of His word (Hebrews 1:3); the One in whom we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:26-28); the One who owns and orders and numbers our days, to whom at the end of those days we  will give an account for how we lived those days (Daniel 5:23) (Hebrews 9:27); the One  who is the most glorious, most desirable, most excellent being in all of the universe, and as such is the very source and substance of our present and eternal joy (Revelation 15:3-4) (Isaiah 35:10).

This is the kind of worshiper God is calling the Samaritan woman to be, graciously revealing Himself to her as the promised Messiah, the one who will reveal to her and all who will come to Him for salvation, the truth of God’s infinite worthiness to be known intimately, loved supremely, trusted explicitly, obeyed perfectly, glorified unashamedly and pursued passionately as the object of our deepest love and source of our eternal joy (John 4:25-26) (John 1:14).

And with this truth in her heart, she unashamedly goes out to call her neighbors to be such worshipers (John 4:28) (John 4:39-42).  And that is what Jesus is calling all who are true worshipers of Him to do in the midst of this wicked and idolatrous world around us, that we would call them to worship God as He has revealed Himself in Jesus – as the one alone who cares for their soul, as the one alone who can save them from their sin, and as the one who alone can and will satisfy the deepest needs and desires of our heart, fulfill the most noble longings of our soul, partially while in this world, and in ways we cannot presently conceive of or imagine in the world to come (Matthew 28:19-20) (Acts 4:10-12).

In my next post, God willing, we will look more closely at what it means to worship God in Spirit and in Truth.

Grace and Peace x