The Fountain of Living Waters

The fountain of living waters is a name God used for Himself through the prophet Jeremiah. It means a spring of fresh, flowing water that never runs dry, and it comes from a sad complaint: God's people had walked away from that spring and dug holes in the rock that could not even hold rain. You can read it in Jeremiah 2:13, one of the first messages in the book of Jeremiah.

A young prophet and a heartbroken message

Jeremiah was a young man when God called him, in the thirteenth year of King Josiah of Judah (Jeremiah 1:2), which historians usually place around 627 BC. Judah was the southern kingdom of the Jewish people, with Jerusalem as its capital. For many years the nation had been mixing the worship of the true God with the worship of idols, and Jeremiah's job was to tell them the truth about it.

Chapter 2 does not open with anger. It opens with memory. God looks back to the early days, when Israel followed Him out of Egypt, and He speaks like someone remembering a wedding: I remember thee, the kindness of thy youth, the love of thine espousals. Espousals is an old word for an engagement or marriage.

Then the tone turns. God asks a question that sounds more hurt than harsh: What iniquity have your fathers found in me, that they are gone far from me? Iniquity means wrongdoing. In other words, "What did I ever do to you?" God points out that other nations stay loyal to gods that are not real, while His people traded away the God who is (Jeremiah 2:11). It is so strange that He calls on the sky itself to be shocked (Jeremiah 2:12).

Then comes the picture that gives us this name:

For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.

Jeremiah 2:13

Springs and cisterns in a dry land

To feel the weight of this verse, think about water in ancient Judah. Rain falls mostly in the winter, and the summers are long and dry. People had two main ways to get water. One was a spring, water rising up out of the ground on its own. A good spring kept flowing all year, and it cost nothing.

The other was a cistern. A cistern was a pit people cut by hand into the rock, often shaped like a bell, then lined with plaster so it could catch and store the winter rain. Archaeologists have found many of them across the land. Digging one took hard labor. The water inside was whatever drained in off the roofs and ground, and it sat still in the dark. If the plaster cracked, the water seeped out into the stone, and in the heat of summer you might climb down and find only mud.

So God's complaint is almost shocking in how plain it is. His people had a free spring, and they left it to sweat over a hole that leaked. It was not only wrong. It made no sense, and it cost them more work.

The Hebrew words, one at a time

In Hebrew the name is meqor mayim chayyim. Here is what each word means:

• Maqor (in the phrase it becomes meqor) means a spring or fountain, a source. The King James usually translates it "fountain," and sometimes "spring" or "wellspring."
• Mayim is the ordinary word for water.
• Chayyim means living or alive. When it describes water, it means fresh water that moves, like a stream or a spring, not water that sits.

Put together, the phrase means "a spring of living water." It has two layers. On the surface it is simply fresh, running water. Underneath, it is water that gives life, coming from the God who is alive. The same word for living shows up in the name the Living God.

The other words in the verse matter too. "Cisterns" translates bo'r, which Strong's defines simply as a cistern. A close cousin of this word, bor, means a pit, and it is the word for the pit Joseph was thrown into, where the pit was empty, there was no water in it (Genesis 37:24). "Broken" comes from shabar, a verb for something cracked or shattered.

Notice too that God counts two evils, not one. Leaving Him is the first. Replacing Him is the second. People rarely stop at the first, because thirst does not go away. If we walk away from the spring, we will start digging somewhere.

Key King James verses about the fountain

Jeremiah came back to this name later in his book, and this time he joined it to another name:

O LORD, the hope of Israel, all that forsake thee shall be ashamed, and they that depart from me shall be written in the earth, because they have forsaken the LORD, the fountain of living waters.

Jeremiah 17:13

"Written in the earth" is a picture of something that does not last, like words scratched in dust that the wind blows away. Leaving the spring leaves people with nothing lasting.

The same chapter holds a picture of what it looks like to stay near the water:

Blessed is the man that trusteth in the LORD, and whose hope the LORD is. For he shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth out her roots by the river, and shall not see when heat cometh, but her leaf shall be green; and shall not be careful in the year of drought, neither shall cease from yielding fruit.

Jeremiah 17:7-8

"Careful" here means anxious or worried. A tree with roots by the river does not panic in a drought, because its water does not depend on the weather.

A psalm says the same truth in one short line:

For with thee is the fountain of life: in thy light shall we see light.

Psalm 36:9

And the prophet Isaiah gives an open invitation to anyone who is dry inside:

Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money; come ye, buy, and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.

Isaiah 55:1

Notice the words "without money." The spring was always free. That was the part God's people found hardest to believe.

There is a sad echo later in Jeremiah's own life. When his preaching made him unpopular, officials lowered him into a pit, and in the dungeon there was no water, but mire: so Jeremiah sunk in the mire (Jeremiah 38:6). Mire means deep mud. The man who warned about dry pits ended up stuck in one. Yet he kept trusting the spring.

Putting down the pick

Most of us know what a broken cistern feels like, even if we have never seen one. It is the thing we keep working on to feel full: being popular, getting the next purchase, a relationship we hope will fix our loneliness, a screen we scroll at midnight, a paycheck that is never quite enough. Some of those things are good gifts. The trouble starts when we ask them to do God's job. Then they drain away, and we go back and dig some more.

This name says there is a better way, and it is not more effort. It is coming back to the source. You do not have to earn spring water. You just have to come and drink.

• Ask yourself honestly: when I feel empty, what do I run to first?
• Name one "cistern" in your life that keeps leaking, and tell God about it plainly.
• Set a daily time to read a psalm and pray, the way you would go to a well every morning.
• If you are fighting an addiction, reach out for real help from a doctor, a pastor or a recovery group. Nobody has to climb out of the pit alone.

If you are young, you have an advantage. You have not spent years digging. You can learn now where the real water is.

The Fountain of Living Waters is name 67 of the 70 in the book. In the same verse where Jeremiah repeats it, he also calls God by the next name on the list, the Hope of Israel. You can see all of the names on the names of God in the Bible page.