Yesterday, our water stopped! We had it fixed in no time by our local well-man. But I could not help thinking what it would be like to be without a dependable source of water for good! It’s amazing how many things depend on it—not just the normal uses for drinking, toilet purposes, and cooking.

Think, for instance, how ripe you’d begin to smell after a few days! Back in Biblical times, in many places baths were very few and far between. That’s one reason why oil was poured on the head, or formed into little cakes that sat on the head and slowly dissolved. One odor out-smelled the other!

Water. In the Scriptures it was at a premium—take your handy, exhaustive concordance and notice how many references there are to water. Surprise you? Well, people were so hard up for water in some areas that they were even willing to put up with drinking the sickening, lukewarm water, that Jesus noted when writing to Sardis.

Wells were trysting places—sorta’ like the office water cooler (or coffee machine). People gathered around them and chatted before returning home with their precious commodity in a clay-fired pitcher. There’s Jacob’s well, for instance. And the oasis was a place where small communities developed around wells (e.g., Beer-sheba—the first word in that double place name means “well”) or gatherings took place.

So, when rain was withheld from Ahab’s Israel in judgment, that was a very serious matter.  Crops didn’t grow without the early and latter rains, people were without access to the wadis that ran dry and baked hard in the Palestinian sun—it meant famine, and often – – -death! Water is essential to life.

No wonder Jesus called Himself the Water of Life—without Him, there’s nothing but barrenness here and now and, eventually, eternal death. Have you trusted Him for salvation and come to know the refreshing knowledge and experience of becoming one who has drunk deeply of Him?