Looking For A Great Man

"You are not greater than our father Jacob, are You, who gave us the well, and drank of it himself and his sons and his cattle?" (John 4:12)

Evidently, in this woman's mind, the proof of the greatness of Jacob was somehow demonstrated by not only his ability to dig a good well but to provide satisfaction for the needs of his family and even his livestock. What she seems to be trying to say her is that Jacob proved himself to be a good provider, a real man, because he did a good job of looking out for his family and all that was dependent on him for sustenance.

This was in contrast to the words of Jesus who appeared to her to be quite helpless in this capacity. She made it a point of noting that His claim to be able to provide water for her could not readily be substantiated. He obviously didn't even have the wherewithal to get water out of a well that was already in place, much less dig a well Himself. And of course, everyone knew that if you wanted to get water you needed to dig into the ground far enough to get it. And the difference between a good well and one not so desirable was a well that was dug very deep so that when the water level dropped in times of dryness that there would still be plenty of water in the well, even if people had to use a longer rope to reach it.

So what was this Man really trying to claim for Himself? Was He trying to make braggadocios claims to impress her by claiming that He could give her some kind of new “water” called living water? She was getting used to picking up on the attempts by men to impress women with outlandish claims that they could not deliver on. So was this yet another man looking to impress a woman by stretching things far beyond reasonability?

In her challenge to Jesus this woman was following the logic that most all of us use, the logic based on outward evidence and physical realities as we perceive them. She was looking for proof that this Man could deliver on his promises. She had already known too many men who failed to deliver what she really needed. She was not going to be a pushover this time. She had not been born yesterday and she was ready to demand more than just promising words if yet another man was going to try to impress her, especially since this man was a Jew.

We all tend to believe that the things that will bring us satisfaction are the things that make us feel good physically and that meet our bodily needs and desires. When God comes along and alerts us to the fact that we have far more important needs and cravings that are rooted in a different dimension, we often at first try to discount them or deny that we actually feel them. We are afraid of being exposed, of having our true vulnerabilities made public, of having our souls revealed to the light of reality, for that is where our greatest pains reside.

This woman's life had already proven that she had some very deep desires that were quite unsatisfied. But she was certainly not keen to talk about those things for she considered them too shameful and too painful for public discussion, especially with a man. She knew that she had deeper thirsts than just for the water from Jacob's well, but she had also been hurt and taken advantage of by men too many times to easily trust yet another man, a suspicious stranger who suddenly begins talking about very personal things that people just don't talk about right off the bat.

Maybe she had fantasized about what the ideal man would look like for her life, the one who might really meet her deepest desires, the one who might satisfy the deepest longings of her soul. As she thought about the life of Jacob, one of the common ancestors that the Samaritans shared with the Jews, she saw in him someone she could identify with. This was a man who had made a lot of bad choices but still kept trying to do what was right, a man who provided for his large family even though he had been tricked into marrying two sisters who ended up deeply jealous of each other. This was a man who kept on pursuing a relationship with God even through many setbacks and difficulties.

This woman may have admired the fact that Jacob had worked hard to overcome the many difficulties that had come his way, had done everything possible to overcome negative circumstances and tried to make his family happy as far as he was able. She may have thought that if she could just find a man who had the integrity that Jacob displayed and could marry him that life would finally be worth living. If she could just find the right man she could really thrive and flourish and feel genuinely happy. She might even be willing to share this man with another woman if necessary if only the man had the character that she saw in Jacob.

But maybe there just weren't any men left like Jacob. Maybe the human race had just sunk too low to produce anyone who had the strong ethics and tenacity that Jacob displayed in the face of repeated difficulties. By the time she was in her sixth relationship with a man she had pretty much given up ever being able to find a man anything close to Jacob's caliber and so she was ready to just live in survival mode from here on out. Her reputation by this time was covered with humiliation and shame from her unsuccessful attempts to find the ideal man. She had become a social pariah and instead of a life of thriving she was now only surviving.

But Jesus knew this woman's heart long before He even arrived in Samaria. Her situation was the very reason that He had stopped here at this well and was the very reason that God had arranged all the circumstances that brought these two together at this place and time. Men look on the outward appearances but God looks at the heart. And knowing her heart, God was intent on introducing her to the real object of her desires which could never be found in a human man like she had thought. The only human who could really sympathize and understand her heart and fill her life with the satisfaction and joy that she longed for so deeply was the man who was in fact God Himself. And this man was ready to offer her the gift of Himself, His love, His compassion, His understanding, His kindness, His acceptance and His provisions. Yes indeed, He really was greater that her ancestor Jacob.

This Man was in fact the desire of Jacob's heart himself. This was the Man who had shown up to impart to Jacob the deepest longing of his own heart, the love that he had longed for and sought for so hard all of his life. But when this Man showed up to give Jacob a hug and reassure him of heaven's forgiveness and love for him, Jacob mistook the initial touch as an act of aggression and turned in fear and terror to fight off this Man all night long. What Jacob was really fighting against was not just a stranger in the night who aroused his worst fears, but Jacob was really fighting with his own internal distorted notions of how God felt about him.

This is always the case with us. It is the many lies about God, both obvious and subtle that keeps us from easily coming to Him to receive the nurture and love, the healing and wholeness that we so long for. And everyone of us are immersed in many more lies about God than we can ever imagine. The most religious among us are often the ones who have the most lies but are in more ignorance that what they believe is not really true. This is why Jesus found it much easier to connect with the open sinners than with the religious leaders of His day, because the flagrant sinners did not have so much baggage to let go of in their minds about what God was like. They were not so firmly entrenched in false pictures of God encased by religious pride and self-righteousness. And while they certainly still had many false notions about God's attitude towards sinners, many of those ideas were pushed on them by the religious instructors and were more easily dispelled when the presence of Jesus revealed the real truth about God's forgiveness, compassion and kindness toward all men.

Just so, this woman may have been considered by society to be a more open sinner using their standards of measurement. But what they failed to discern was that many of her “sins” were actually attempts by her heart to find the real love that only God could provide, a love that would satisfy her deepest longings. She, like the many other “open” sinners that Jesus hung out with so often, were actually much easier to reach and responded more quickly because they were already more honest and open about what was the real condition of their heart. They had chosen to turn away from the fake life of pretended religion and piety and pursue whatever it took to satisfy the longings of their souls. This often led them into socially unacceptable choices and elicited condemnation on them from the religiously pious. But in God's eyes they were much closer to the Kingdom of Heaven than were most of the religious and those who claimed to be the most righteous.

Sometimes I have been a little envious of those who, in the eyes of the church, have gone out and really sinned it up big. Not because I just wanted to “enjoy” the pleasures of sin and then get back into the arms of grace before the game was over, but because it seemed almost easier for open sinners to comprehend and appreciate the grace and goodness of God than it was for a person who had grown up viewed as a religious kid and had been relatively socially correct all of his life. I sometimes calculated how much of a risk it might be to just go off the deep end so to speak and really sin it up big, and then return to be forgiven so that I could better appreciate God's love for me.

But I was repeatedly assured by people who had come in from that side that it was not worth it. And besides, my own mind was too afraid that, knowing what I know about how the devil works, I would end up losing my own life before I had a chance to return to repentance. On top of that, since repentance is a gift of God and not something a person can work up on their own, I might lose my capacity to repent in the process of “living it up” and then my whole experiment would prove to be a catastrophic failure. So even though that doorway into the kingdom seemed so much more desirable and reliable and effective, I decided early on that I was going to have to take a different route and try to find out the real truth about God without indulging in all the pleasures of sin that many others were choosing around me. I would have to blaze what looked like a much harder trail – the route of finding a genuine and dynamic experience with God from the starting point of a confirmed Pharisee. This route seems much less documented and far less glamorous than the door that the open sinners use to enter into grace. But I decided that for me it seemed to be the right thing to do, to search for God without throwing out everything I already had learned.

I knew that much of the religion that I had was riddled with serious flaws and misleading information. But instead of throwing it all out and coming from a completely different direction, I decided to try to sort through everything I believed and ask God to show me what was really valid and what was false. This has been an ongoing process for many years now, but I have to say that it has not been without much good fruit. Instead of a dramatic conversion event however, like as seen in the experience of this woman of Sychar, my experience has been one of incremental growth, creeping awareness and sometimes an almost imperceptible deepening of my appreciation of God's real character.

I am still sometimes tempted to be jealous of those who have dramatic conversion stories that make for spell-binding television shows or compelling testimony sessions. But God is leading me down a different path. I want to be able to appreciate and affirm those who come to God through the dramatic ways, but I also want to appreciate the struggles of those who like me are being drawn to God through the long slow way. Is my approach more stable than others? That is not for me to decide or judge. God is the one who is responsible for drawing all unto Himself and whatever means is most effective in the long run is what He is going to use with each person.

But the same lessons need to be learned about God whether one is coming on the slow road or is on the fast track. I am coming to believe that the bottom line is that we are all in great need of releasing the lies about God from our hearts and allowing the real truth about Him, the good news of the real gospel to fill our souls with hope and love and joy. And the closer we get to knowing the real God of heaven at the heart level, the more we are going to find ourselves in close fellowship and love with each other. Like the spokes on a wheel, the closer we get to God the closer we inevitably come to each other.