UNBLOCKING THE WELL OF THE LIVING WORD

DAY 4 MORNING   Read John 4:7-30

NUMBERS: JESUS CHRIST IS A WELL OF LIVING WATER

The Israelites wandered in the desert for 40 years. It was in the desert, in a  place of barrenness and no water, that the children of Israel gathered together and sang to  “the well that  the princes made , that the nobles of the people dug with their sceptres and their staffs.” Jesus is a well of living water, meeting the desperate dryness of a people lost in sin rebellion and disobedience. The posture of worship and intercession that God’s people can adopt when crying out for seasons of refreshment, revival and renewal, is an expectation that life might spring up in the desert places. Hebrews 9:27 says “Just as man is destined to die once and after that to face judgement, so Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many people and he will appear a second time not to bear sin but to bring salvation to those who are waiting for him.” Jesus is a well of salvation, a well of living water. Also, the cross is prefigured in Numbers, when the children of Israel sinned, and they were dying from poisonous snakes and they cried out to God.  God said to Moses,[1] “Make a snake and put it up on a pole; anyone who is bitten can look at it and live.” In John 3:15, Jesus says “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness so the Son of Man will be lifted up.”  

MISSIONARY MONKS: BASIL OF CAESAREA 330-379

Basil of Caesarea came from a nominal Christian family and was educated in the classical tradition. After his baptism in 357 he went to his family’s estate with Gregory Nanzianus to pursue a communal monastic experience. His sister Macrina persuaded him that a monastic path was better than the academic way. Although he would have preferred to have remained an ascetic he was ordained primarily because of the threats posed by the Arian heresy. He became a monk bishop serving in the Roman capital of Cappadocia, that is Caesarea. Basil faced a number of challenges. The political challenge was the apostate Roman Emperor Julian who tried to revive paganism. The main theological challenge was the Arian heresy that had been condemned in 325 by the council of Nicaea. A third economic challenge was posed by the severe famine in 368 that caused much distress from poverty in Caesarea.[2] “The monastic vision of Basil of Caesarea seems to signal a turning point in the relationship between monasticism and mission”[3]. “When he (Basil) was made a bishop he sought ways to adapt the monastic vision of radical devotion to God to life in the city. The solitary life of prayer would be complimented by the active life. Contemplation and service would go hand-in-hand.”[4] Four ways Basil’s missionary monasticism were expressed were through, preaching and evangelism, prophetic discourse, advocacy for the poor and response to famine. The lifestyle he chose was one of voluntary poverty while living with others in community. Basil unapologetically preached the pursuit of righteousness to rich and poor alike and also to his Roman leaders. He advocated for those suffering in the city of Caesarea during a four-year season of famine.[5]Although Basil died young at 49, his was a full life, “a theologian par excellence who also presented a winsome model for Christian leadership.”[6] He chose a lifestyle of poverty and put into practice the gospel through word and action in extremely challenging circumstances.

CLICK ON BOLD and you will be directed to Joshua Project website with more information for prayer. 

PRAY for “the Jewish, English-speaking in  United Kingdom  the 22^nd largest unreached people group in Europe whose language is English   and whose primary religion is the Jewish faith. There are 288,000, 0.5% Christian and 0.1% evangelical. ”[7] Lord, The United Kingdom is home to the world’s fifth largest Jewish population, reveal Jesus the Messiah to the Jews in the UK. Open up the well of living water as you did to the woman of Samaria in John 4, we pray.  

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DAY 4 EVENING Read Psalm 16-20, Re-read Psalm 19

PSALM 19: JESUS CHRIST THE LIVING WORD IS OUR HEAVENLY BRIDEGROOM 

Psalm 19: 1-6. ^“The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. ² Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge. They have no speech, they use no words; no sound is heard from them.Yet their voicegoes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world. In the heavens God has pitched a tent for the sun.It is like a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, like a champion rejoicing to run his course.It rises at one end of the heavens and makes its circuit to the other; nothing is deprived of its warmth.” In C.S. Lewis’ The Magician’s Nephew, Narnia was created. C.S.Lewis writes “In the vast, formless void of this new world, (there is) a mystic song. From the darkness, a lion emerges, his voice resounding through the emptiness. This is Aslan, the great lion and the embodiment of good and creativity. Aslan’s beautiful song starts painting brushstrokes of creation, bringing light, landscapes, and creatures to life.”[8]  C.S. Lewis is clearly inspired by the bible, with Aslan “a type” of Jesus the Living Word, but it might surprise us that the Orthodox bible footnotes interpret “the word” in Psalm 19, as Jesus. “Creation bore witness to the glory of God revealed in Jesus’ incarnation (verses 1-5) and in his birth from the womb of the virgin. He was likened to the Sun rising from the east, to a bridegroom coming from his chamber, and to a strong man ready to run a race, to bring salvation to the world (verses 6-15).”  Is this a bit of a stretch for the Orthodox church to interpret scripture this way?

When the apostle John used the word “logos”, in John 1:1 and 1 John 1, he was using a word that had profound meaning. Greek philosophy had such a strong prevailing influence on the world. A fundamental concept for Heraclitus, an early Greek philosopher, was the concept of logos which he coined to mean, a universal law that unites the cosmos.[9] When John used the word “logos” in John 1:1. “In the beginning was the Word” he was saying “Jesus is the spoken word that created everything” and also “Jesus is the reason why.” This developed the church fathers reading of the Old Testament and the Psalms.  For the early church we know from the story of Cleopas in Luke, that the death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus was a huge paradigm shift.  Rowan Williams says[10]  It took 100 years to come to terms with the truth that the Messiah of the Old Testament came as a man and suffered and died a horrifying death. There had been two puzzles in the prevailing classical Greek understanding of the world that were solved in the coming of Jesus, “The first puzzle was the relationship between what the Greeks called the intelligible and the sensible what we call the spiritual and the material. The other great unsolved puzzle arose from the relationship between what the ancients called virtue and fortune. It seemed that human life even at its bravest and most heroic is finally a losing battle against the irresistible power of fate or fortune.” [11] Through the coming of Jesus, the divine logos, the puzzle was solved, the material and spiritual were one in Christ and a perfectly virtuous God become man and conquered fate….” [12] and the puzzle was solved. “The early church fathers began to see that the gospels portrayed Jesus using the psalms to explain his identity, his message and above all his passion and Christians began to read the Psalter as the book of Christ in another way, not only as an objective account that fulfilled prophecy but also as spiritual revelation of his soul, in fact as a virtual transcript of his inner life while accomplishing the work of redemption. Paul particularly taught Christians to read the Psalms as echoes of the voice of Christ.” [13] If Paul did this, can’t we?.. or are we disciples of the Enlightenment Epicurean world-view and are we unwilling to change? 

PRAYER

Lord Jesus… the picture of a champion rejoicing to run a race to bring salvation to the world to bring the Gospel to the world, here in psalm 19, resonates with Hebrews 12:2. Help me to run the race you have marked out for me, to fix my eyes on you Lord Jesus, the author and perfector of my faith… may your Gospel go out to the ends of the earth, I pray. Show me my part that I can play in this epic divine romance. 

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[1] Numbers 21:9

[2] Smither, E.L.Missionary monks, Cascade books, 2016drawn from 27-32.

[3] Smither, E.L. Missionary monks, Cascade books, 2016, 24.

[4] Wilken,R. First thousand years, : A history of Christianity  Yale University Press, 2014, 105.

[5] Smither, E.L.Missionary monks, Cascade books, 2016 drawn from 32-41.

[6] Smither, E.L. Missionary monks, Cascade books, 201641.

[7] Data provided by Joshua Project https://joshuaproject.net/people_groups/12347/UK

[8] https://www.blinkist.com/en/books/the-magicians-nephew-en  Lewis, C.S. Magician’s Nephew.

[9] https://www.davidpawson.org/resources/series/unlocking-the-new-testament-1 Gospel of John.

[10] Williams. R, The wound of knowledge, Dartman, Longman and Todd, 2014

[11] Newbiggin. L, Faith in a changing world, St Paul’s Theological Centre 2012, 39.

[12] Newbiggin. L, Faith in a changing world, St Paul’s Theological Centre 2012, 40.

[13] Cameron. M, Christ meets me everywhere, 167-8, quoted in Carter, C.A. Interpreting Scripture Baker Academic, 2018