Are You Thirsty?
On the last and greatest day of the Feast, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.” By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive. Up to that time the Spirit had not been given, since Jesus had not yet been glorified John 7:37-39
On each of the first six days of the Feast of Tabernacles (7:2), the priests would fill a golden flagon with water from the Pool of Siloam and carry it back to the Temple. When they reached the Water Gate, three blasts on the shofar (ram’s horn) were sounded. Once in the Temple, the priests marched around the altar singing the Hallel (Psalms 113-118) while the people and the priests shook their lulabs (bundles of myrtle, palm and willow). The flagon was given to the head priest who poured the water into a silver bowl. He had already filled another silver bowl with wine. The water and the wine were then poured over the altar. On the seventh day, the priests walked around the altar seven times instead on the once on the first six days before the water and wine were poured out. The Feast technically went for one more day but without the priests in procession or the water and wine. So the ‘last and greatest day of the Feast’ was probably the seventh day. The actions of the priests would have been the perfect backdrop for what Jesus had to say.
“If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.” This can be understood in two ways and both fit the original wording. The first, and the one followed by the NIV here, sees the streams of living water flowing from within those who come to Jesus and drink (from within those who believe in Him). The second would translate the verse like this ‘If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink, whoever believes in me. As the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.’ Read this way the first part retains Jesus’ invitation to those who believe to come and drink but the second sees the streams of living water flowing from Jesus Himself. In both cases the living water (identified by John as the Holy Spirit) is given by Jesus to His followers.
There is no obvious scripture that Jesus is quoting here (‘as the Scripture has said’). He may have been thinking of Isaiah 12:3 ‘With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation’ or possibly from Ezekiel 47:1-11. This Ezekiel passage describes the Temple and Jerusalem restored after the exile with a river running under the temple threshold all the way down to the Dead Sea. There it turns the putrid water fresh, so much so that fish thrive in it and fruit trees grow around it. John picks up this same imagery in Revelation 22:1,2.
‘Up to that time the Spirit had not been given, since Jesus had not yet been glorified.’ John is speaking of Jesus’ death and will refer to it more and more in these terms in his gospel. The moment of His true glory will be when Jesus is ‘lifted up’ on the cross. Only through the work of the cross, when God’s Lamb takes away the sins of the world, can human hearts be made fresh and clean and fit, like a renewed Temple, for the Spirit to flood them to overflowing by His very own Presence.
We have already been washed and cleansed, and like the Tabernacle or Solomon’s temple, made fit to be indwelt by the presence of the living God.
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