"For My people have committed two evils: they have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters, and hewn themselves cisterns - broken cisterns that can hold no water."

The Lord brings a charge against His people. It is a reasoned argument that is intended to bring to men to their senses. It challenges the backslider. If a man backslides, he has known the truth and exchanged it for delusion. He has experienced that which is precious and turned from it to what is worthless. How foolish is the backslider. That is true not only of an individual but of a church or of a nation which has known the influence of the Gospel and rejects it in favour of some other worldview.

The Lord charges His backslidden people with having:

1. Forsaken the Fountain of living waters

In the ancient middle east a constant supply of fresh water was a great blessing to a man. He could drink, wash, refresh his stock and irrigate the land. He was made! The image is taken up by the Saviour in John 4:10, 14: "If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who says to you, 'Give Me a drink,' you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water... whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst. But the water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life." God is represented as the source of the refreshing, cleansing, life-giving flow. An abundant stream flows from the cross and the Christian, who stands in the way of the cross, is blessed. If you drink you will overflow with the abundance of blessing. On the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried out, saying, "If anyone thirsts, let him come to Me and drink. He who believes in Me, as the Scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water." (John 7:37-38) How can anyone trade this in the for something far inferior?

2. Hewn themselves broken cisterns

This is such a feeble alternative. If a man had no fresh supply of water on his property, he would have to dig out a pit in which water would collect when it rained. It was a poor second best. Those who turn away from Christ serve another. It may be some strange cult, the heresies of liberalism, the world view of humanism or pure hedonism. There is one fountain but many cisterns which compete with each another as alternatives to the fountain. They are conspicuously inferior. They are:

(i) Man-made. The fountain is not: God-revealed truth, God-given salvation. But the cistern is artificial.

(ii) Potentially poisonous. Whatever good might be seen in the content of the cistern it is not healthy and probably will prove to be undermining to the soul, spiritually dangerous, even lethal.

(iii) Eventually empty. The cisterns always turn out to be terribly disappointing, if not immediately, certainly in the end.

Yet have we not as a nation committed these foolish evils. What sense is there in turning from the fountain of living waters to hewn cisterns that hold no water? The modern novel Disgrace illustrates the point well. The main character shamelessly denies the existence of God and lives a scandalously immoral life of promiscuity. The story is of his descent into pathetic tragedy. Many other novels would serve to illustrate the same point, because it accurately reflects what has happened to our society and to individuals within it. Why choose disgrace?

Let us note the wisdom written by the Rev'd W M Thomson, DD in The Land and the Book: "The best cisterns, even those in solid rock, are strangely liable to crack, and are a most unreliable source of supply of that absolutely indispensable article, water; and if, by constant care, they are made to hold, yet the water, collected from clay roofs, or from marly soil, has the colour of weak soap-suds, the taste of the earth or the stable, is full of worms, and in the hour of greatest need it utterly fails. Who but a fool positive, or one gone mad in love of filth, would exchange the sweet, wholesome stream of a living fountain for such an uncertain compound of nastiness and vermin!"