Holy Week Devotional 2022Sample

Water is the most precious resource and the precondition of life anywhere it is found. At any given moment, around 60% of our body is water. Sometimes, even the premature wrinkles we fear are forming on our foreheads will disappear if we’re properly hydrated, showing up again when we’re too parched. Everything in our life depends on water and that is by design.

In the beginning, the earth was formless, void, and dark, and the Spirit of God hovered over “the face of the waters” (Gen. 1:2). Before Adam was created, we are told that certain plants had yet to spring up because “the LORD God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground” (Gen. 2:5). In truth, Adam is no different than the plants that require water to live. What is a righteous man? “He is like a tree planted by streams of living water” (Psa 1:3). To make Adam, God gathers “dust”—waterless soil—and brings him to life by “breath[ing] into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature” (Gen. 2:7). With our breath we fog up mirrors or clean our glasses. Breath is both water and air. The world begins in water and all life that comes up from the earth depends on water, including our dusty forefather.

It should not surprise us that the giving of water is a symbol of salvation. The way to salvation is always by way of water. In the flood, God returns the world to its original state, covered by water, and Noah and his family step out of the ark into a “new” world. Israel passes through the Red Sea, out of the house of slavery in Egypt. Later, they cross the Jordan into the promised land—the land “flowing with milk and honey [which] drinks water by the rain of heaven, a land the LORD your God cares for” (Deut. 11:9, 11). The prophets speak of the coming of the Messiah as the day in which God would “pour water on the thirsty land, and streams on the dry ground; I will pour my Spirit upon your offspring… they shall spring up among the grass like willows by flowing streams” (Isaiah 44:3-4).

Yet, on the cross, Christ took on the full reality of mankind under the curse. In the beginning God plants a garden, showing Adam what humanity was to do, before giving the world into the care of Adam and Eve. As the streams that flowed from the garden went out from God’s presence into the world, they were to work the ground, bringing life wherever they went. But in sin, the ground was cursed to bring forth thorns and thistles. Instead of gardens, the world was filled with desolate places, dry and cracked. Christ, crowned with cursed thorns, died a thirsty man.

Christ is the one who gathered up dust to form Adam’s body, and he also stooped down to spit on the ground, making mud to give the blind man new eyes (John 9:6). Christ is the one who breathed into Adam, bringing him to life, even as he breathed upon his disciples to give them the Holy Spirit (John 20:22). And the God who made us in his image came to bring life to the world through his death. The saving work of Jesus goes well beyond forgiveness for sin. Indeed, even the very earth itself will one day “be set free from its bondage to corruption” (Rom. 8:21) when Christ returns.

All thirst and every desire we have is, at its core, a desire for God. In sin, those desires become twisted. In sin, we forsake God, “the fountain of living waters” (Jer. 2:13), settling for water that does not satisfy. But in Christ, we never need to thirst again. In Christ, we pass through the waters of baptism, out of darkness and into the kingdom without end. Even more glorious, in Christ, each of us becomes a source of water for the dying world. “Whoever believes in me,” Jesus said, “out of his heart will flow rivers of living water” (John 7:38). Because Christ thirsted, he now invites all: “Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters” (Isa. 55:1).