Beloved, listen with your spirit to the word of God: “Therefore you will joyously draw water from the springs of salvation,” (NASB, Isaiah 12:3).
Beloved, your Heavenly Father creates perfection. Every detail to the utmost expanse of eternity and to the most minute microcosm contained in subatomic particles in the Heavens and on earth are artfully designed in beauty, precision, and abundance.
Father planted a garden in the earth He so masterfully created. He richly watered this magnificent garden in Eden; an abundance of water existed there from a head river, and if proximity to water was not enough, Father prepared a brilliant in-ground, automatic irrigation system (Genesis 2:10; 6).
Water sustains life. People can only live a few days without it. Father provided it in abundance and beauty to nourish life in people, creatures, and the entire earth.
When sin entered mankind through Adam and Eve, so did death. This impacted all humanity afterward and Creation as well. Instead of an abundance of water, which nourishes life and is symbolic of Holy Spirit, there came increasing division between people and resources which Father designed and gave to people for their own life as well as the good of the earth and its creatures.
With time, this division with life-giving resources, a fruit of death’s reign through sin, increased. It increased to the point that beautiful, well-watered land became desolate waste.
Abraham, the father of faith, faced plenty of contention over water. The need for water for their herds and flocks is a key reason that the patriarchs – Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob – journeyed through their Promised Land as nomads; they had to pursue water for the life of their families and flocks.
The physical location where wells were dug were places of life, often causing communities and cities to spring up around them. Further, they were a place of meeting with Father God. As such, they were most often contested. Scripture says that when a person’s ways are pleasing to the Lord, He makes their enemies live at peace with him or her (Proverbs 16:7). Abraham pleased Father with his faith. Father caused the nations – yes, heads of nations – to live at peace with Abraham. After Abimelech, king of the Philistines, made peace with Abraham over Abraham’s well at Beersheba, Abraham planted a tree and called on the name of the Everlasting God (Genesis 21:32–33). Father’s name marked that place in the presence of water that gives life; there, His peace existed in and through relationship with His faithful son, Abraham. There, life and peace could flow in the water, physically and spiritually.
As the Lord prophesied to Abraham, his descendants lived in Egypt as slaves for four hundred years. Egypt is a physical nation that Father loves and has good plans for. Like all people and all nations, it has gone its own way, like a sheep, and fallen short of the glory of God.
The children of Israel lived in Egypt and were well-familiar with the amazing and imposing Nile river. Father is the giver of all good gifts, and He placed every person in their time and geographical location in history with the intent to make it available for them to find Him, though He is not far (James 1:17; Acts 17:24-28). However, Egypt fell prey to a universal sin — idolatry. They worshiped the gift (water) rather than the Giver (Father).
In its fallen state, Egypt is a symbol of the world and its corrupt systems, which are built in sin and death interwoven with idolatry.
Father led the children of Israel out of Egypt (the world) and into the desert (the place of knowing God and changing), where He formed them into a new nation. In the desert was little to no water. Father designed “moments” where the children of Israel would feel their need. Once their need was felt, the point was to ask Father for provision and come to know Him in the first-person as He supernaturally met the needs of a huge corporate body. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob all experienced Father in their own personal lives. Several generations removed from these patriarchs, their children had no personal experience of Him. This was the purpose of the desert – to know their God by personal experience and to be formed into a new identity.
In that process were water crises.
Faithful servant Moses struck the rock at Father’s direction. Before their eyes, the children of Israel witnessed Father causing a very hard place – a rock – to supernaturally open and pour out water as rivers, streams in the desert (Psalm 78:16, 20; 105:41).
By virtue of desert-dwelling for over forty years, the nation of Israel respected water and still does to this day. As Moses prepared Israel to enter the Promised Land, Father directed him to specifically address the difference in how they would receive water.
“For the land, into which you are entering to possess it, is not like the land of Egypt from which you came, where you used to sow your seed and water it with your foot like a vegetable garden. But the land into which you are about to cross to possess it, a land of hills and valleys, drinks water from the rain of heaven, a land for which the LORD your God cares; the eyes of the LORD your God are always on it, from the beginning even to the end of the year. And it shall come about, if you listen obediently to my commandments which I am commanding you today, to love the LORD your God and to serve Him with all your heart and all your soul, that He will give the rain for your land in its season, the early and late rain, that you may gather in your grain and your new wine and oil,” (NASB, Deuteronomy 11:10-14).
Father continued His instructions through Moses that if they kept Father in first place, there would be plenty of rain and much physical provision. However, if they reverted to idolatry as in Egypt, the Heavens would be closed and the lack of rainwater would soon dry up their provisions and drive them out of their land.
This is an updated edition of a post originally published on Hope Streams
Featured Image by Jimmy Chang on Unsplash
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