Tehillah Generation Chapel
Daily Manna | Monday, January 8, 2018 | Reading: Exodus 33:1-11, Exodus 4, Gen 3:1-21
Topic: The Tabernacle of God 325
Scripture: But Christ being come an high priest of good things to come by a greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made with hands, that is to say not of this building. (Heb 9:11)
Note: 2Cor 5:1, “For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.” In the encounter with the woman at the well in Samaria from John 4, Jesus was the first of the two to extend a hand of fellowship, when He tried engaging the woman with a simple request. The request from Jesus to the woman was this: “Give me water to drink.” Ordinarily, this request was supposed to pass off as a request that wasn’t going to make lots of demands on the woman with regards to her time, energy and resources at her disposal.
This benign request from Jesus was going to cost this woman next to nothing, were it to be simply an issue of just water to drink from a neighbour. It was something complex beyond what the ordinary eyes could behold. It was a request that tickled the raw nerves of the woman who had been birthed into a society of the Samaritans, whose skewed religious practices and cultural beliefs made her a person belonging to a people who were seen as living in desecration of the laws of Moses by their neighbours, the Jews, and hence were to be avoided like the bubonic plague by any Jew.
The stiff bigotry of the Jews, coupled with their generally unbending attitude to people and practices that were considered forbidden by their laws, did not stand any Jew the slightest chance of being ever accommodative to their neighbours from Samaria. The greater one’s distance was kept away from any kind of interaction or communication with a Samaritan, the more emboldened one became of his own sanctity, purity and holiness before God.
These were the pathetic undertones that quietly began to ring in the ears of the Samaritan woman. She was so shocked that a Jew could request for water to drink from her, an impure woman from Samaria. Furthermore, the man trying to engage her was a Rabbi. He wasn’t supposed to be ever seen in public talking to a Jewish woman not even his own sister, let alone a Samaritan woman with a history of five failed marriages. What therefore began as a straightforward issue, had suddenly evolved into a full blown, complex, intellectual battle involving the might of the strongholds of religious and cultural barriers.
Food for thought: Cultural barriers and religious beliefs are powerful strongholds that are usually deployed against the move of God in any generation.
Declaration: Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ. 2Cor 10:5
©Author: Rev Fred Aboe
