Water Fountains
Be appalled, O heavens, at this;
be shocked, be utterly desolate,
declares the LORD,
for my people have committed two evils:
they have forsaken me,
the fountain of living waters,
and hewed out cisterns for themselves,
broken cisterns that can hold no water.
(Jer 2:12-13)
Once Jeremiah took up his appointment as prophet of the Lord, he let loose with both barrels. The excerpt above from Chapter 2 is a sample of his poetic proclaimation. In this passage he recounts how Israel had initially followed Jehovah into the wilderness of the Exodus with holiness. But the history of the nation following this key event has been one of deserting their God to go after false gods of the peoples who neighbored them.
The picture painted in these verses borders on the absurd. Why would anyone forsake a roaring water fountain in favor of a cistern that depends on the vagaries of the weather for filling? In fact the cistern is broken, it doesn’t even hold water if the rains finally come. The mental image is of a group of West Texas ranchers–with their cowboy hats and boots–standing around shaking their heads as they gauze dejectedly at a big open top tank that dribbles water slowly out through a crack at its bottom. In the meantime a few hundred yards away a gusher of water erupts from the ground only to be rendered useless as it drains off into big cracks in the parched soil.
Sadly, this picture is a pretty good approximation of the state of affairs in what are called “Western Democracies.” Western Europe particularly has largely abandoned the Reformation Faith of their Fathers and turned to total secularism. The large churches built in the glory days of Evangelicalism are either empty, or have been sold off or converted to secular purposes. I’m reminded of this whenever I think of standing on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh a few blocks from where John Knox preached. Although his church is still in operation, another magnificent church structure nearby is now a Bank of Scotland. This is a pretty good commentary on the water fountain vs cistern idea of Jeremiah.
Things seem a bit better in the USA, yet we are clearly on the same slippery slope as our cultural brethren across the Atlantic. The academic elite has largely abandoned religion of any sort in favor of a materialism based on the idea that Darwinian evolution now “proves” that we are here by chance and necessity. No Creator had us in mind, but the immutable laws of physics and random fluctuations of matter and energy produced the magnificent complexity that we see all around us.
On this bleak landscape of American pessimism and fatalism there can be heard hoofbeats in the distance. The Intelligent Design movement–headed by lawyer Phillip Johnson (World Magazine’s “Daniel of the Year”)–is starting to make inroads into our secular education system as more and more states decide to “teach the controversy.” That controversy is over deficiencies in Darwin evolution that is helpless to explain structures found in nature–at the microscopic level–that are irreducibly complex, and which are impossible to have arisen by chance alone.
I could go on at length on this topic, but my time is limited. The interested reader is referred to www.arn.org for more details and the latest news about ID.
How, then, do these verses about water fountains apply to us individually? It helps me to think of them in terms of information. We now know that our bodies are basically information processors. Human DNA is actually a huge information-generating machine that, along with other sources–drives all the intricate processes that go on to make us the thinking, moving and reproducing creatures we are. Think of attempting to design a machine like us from scratch. No engineer would dare touch such a project–it is impossibly complex. The Designer of this human machine is clearly of superhuman intelligence. And what He designed was no mere mechanical contrivance like you and I might build out of the nuts and bolts of bio-molecules. He breathed into those machines life-giving spirits that in totally mysterious ways interact with our bodies to generate, transmit and receive “Information.” That spiritual information–unlike the DNA generated type–is eternal. Just like Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is real in itself, even after every symphony orchestra has faded into dust, so our eternal spirits continue to exist even when the DNA itself is long dead.
We Christians believe that same Information Designer came as the Babe in the manger on the first Christmas. He was and is The WORD. And He has left us His inspired word, the Holy Scriptures, as the ever-flowing water fountain from which we need to drink daily. Which will it be? The thirst-satisfying living water from the Gospel, or the broken cisterns of our pop-culture. Jesus Christ or American Idol? The Apostle Paul or Britney Spears? The Book of Revelation or CNN?
Jeremiah was appalled at his fellow citizens. Is this to be our lot, too? Are we part of the problem or its solution?