The Gospel of John, (Continued.)
In each of the two chapters last before us there was “a feast of the Jews,” which furnished a sort of keynote to the meaning of it. In chapters 5 the sabbath, wherein God rested not, and man had no real rest. In chapter 6 the Passover. Now in chapters 7 we have yet another, the “feast of tabernacles,” the memorial of the tent-life in the wilderness by those who could look back from their triumphant enjoyment of the land of promise, to see the way by which the hand of the Lord had led them thither.
But alas, they had failed. That rich and pleasant land was under the heel of strangers. The yoke of bondage was upon their neck. If now they could keep the feast, it was but a “Jews’ feast,” not, as once, Jehovah’s.
Yet they did go on with it. Under Divine displeasure, and in the midst of the ruin which sin had made, they could be merry without God and without care for Him, though manifested in their midst. Hence the Lord goes not up to the feast. As He says to His brethren, it was but the world enjoying its own, and before He could manifest Himself to it for blessing, both atonement must have been wrought, and also judgment break the pride and expose the condition of man. His hour was not yet come.
Nevertheless, of to the feast has begun without Him, He goes up, but secretly; not to sanction it by His presence, or share the merry-making there, but to call to Himself hearts conscious of their need amid all this pretension to abundance.
His presence is a complete exposure of the state of things. The moral reason for those words, “Mine hour is not yet come,” is evident. All sorts of men and minds are there. Curious speculators as to the mysterious knowledge of an uneducated man; ignorance that prided itself upon its wisdom; open and violent opposers; clear-headed men convinced in mind, perhaps never changed in heart; some more deeply-stricken by His words; some using the very truth itself with falsest application to escaper; their own convictions; the great men and religionists united as one man in unreasoning enmity and blind rejection of his claims: all this comes to the surface in the chapter before us. Amid all the confusion a Voice in distinct, direct challenge of the heart and conscience, convicts, exposes, yet invitee. It is the Voice of One standing between God and man, from God to man, for God and yet for man. He who utters it has well-nigh done His errand and is going back from whence He came. For blessing the world His hour is not yet come. But there are already, nevertheless, “rivers, of water in a dry-place,” and the thirsty are welcome. “In the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried, saying, if any man thirst, let him come unto Me and drink.”
This is the doctrine of the 4th chapter, or little more. What He had said there to the Samaritan woman, He reaffirms here in the midst of Jerusalem. For there was no “living water” anywhere but in Himself; Judea was as dry ground as Samaria.
But the Lord’s words do not end here. He adds as to him that should come and drink according la His invitation: “He that believeth on Me, as the Scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.”
He was leaving the world in unchanged evil, and therefore in unchanged misery. It had rejected Him in whom alone the springs of life and healing were to be found. Yet although thus the general condition of things went on unaltered, testimony to Him and His grace was to be perpetuated in the world throughout the time of His absence. That testimony, the fullness of hearts filled so completely, so over-abundantly with the wondrous gift He spake of, that it should flow forth from them again, and out of the belly, the innermost part of man, in “rivers of living water.” It is added, “This spake He of the Spirit, which they that believe on Him should receive: for the Holy Ghost was not yet [given], because that Jesus was not yet glorified.” The Spirit sent down, after the completion of atonement by the cross, and as a witness of the acceptance and glory of the One who had made it, would he the power of all this in the soul of the saint; and thus he would become the representative in the world of the absent Saviour; the confirmation of His words to the souls of others; in that he could, having come and drunk himself, and found abiding satisfaction, bear witness of where that fullness was that he had found.
And the feast of tabernacles waits for its fulfillment at His coming again. It is during the millennial day that. Israel will keep it in full reality; when once again their wanderings shall have ended, and they shall be planted in their own land, never again to be cast out. There too, the nations of the earth will enter into it in measure also; for pilgrim ship shall, to one and all, be a past condition (see Zech. 14:1616And it shall come to pass, that every one that is left of all the nations which came against Jerusalem shall even go up from year to year to worship the King, the Lord of hosts, and to keep the feast of tabernacles. (Zechariah 14:16).) Only its moral lesson shall remain. Its “humbling” and its “proving,” its “hunger,” and it manna-food, shall be the memorial of how, not by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God, doth man live (Deut. 8:2, 32And thou shalt remember all the way which the Lord thy God led thee these forty years in the wilderness, to humble thee, and to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart, whether thou wouldest keep his commandments, or no. 3And he humbled thee, and suffered thee to hunger, and fed thee with manna, which thou knewest not, neither did thy fathers know; that he might make thee know that man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord doth man live. (Deuteronomy 8:2‑3).) A blessed result! for which it will be worth while to have known the pilgrimage.