First and foremost,

Happy Birthday to my lovely wife. I thank God for you every day.
I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Jeremiah 1-3.

    In Chapter 2 verse 13 Jeremiah uses a metaphor which illustrates the main point of this entire passage. Jeremiah tells us that people abandon God, the fountain of living water, and dig cisterns which will not hold water to use instead. The first aspect of this metaphor is that just as people do not have to be told to drink water they do not have to seek spiritual things. They will do so. The prophet compares the spiritual libation provided by God to water from a cold mountain spring. He then compares spiritual libations which we obtain from other sources to water from a cistern. Most people today are unfamiliar with cisterns so they fail to understand the full extent of this metaphor. Water from a cistern is warm and flat, often with a taste which can best be described as “muddy” or stale. However, not only do we exchange God’s spring of fresh water for a cistern of stale water, it is a cistern which will not hold water.

    I want to unpack this metaphor a little further. Francis Schaeffer refers to the way in which human philosophies refer to the spiritual aspects of human life as “borrowing spirituality”. What he means by this is that human philosophies lack any actual spiritual element. As a result they use words borrowed from religion, often from Christianity, to imply a spirituality which they do not actually possess. Christianity uses a lot of words which derive their meaning from where they fit into Christian theology. Take away the theology and they lose their meaning. This is why the spiritual “cisterns” built by humans are broken. They get their spiritual “water” by borrowing words from Christianity. These words seem to provide a spiritual element to life for awhile, but the longer they are removed from the theological context which gives them meaning the less useful they are for satisfying the spiritual needs of people. As a result people who reject God have to constantly create new philosophies because the previous ones quickly run dry.