37 On the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood up and cried out, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. 38 Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.’” 39 Now this He said about the Spirit, whom those who believed in Him were to receive, for as yet the Spirit had not been given, because Jesus was not yet glorified.
40 When they heard these words, some of the people said, “This really is the Prophet.” 41 Others said, “This is the Christ.” But some said, “Is the Christ to come from Galilee? 42 Has not the Scripture said that the Christ comes from the offspring of David, and comes from Bethlehem, the village where David was?” 43 So there was a division among the people over Him. 44 Some of them wanted to arrest Him, but no one laid hands on Him.
45 The officers then came to the chief priests and Pharisees, who said to them, “Why did you not bring Him?” 46 The officers answered, “No one ever spoke like this man!” 47 The Pharisees answered them, “Have you also been deceived? 48 Have any of the authorities or the Pharisees believed in Him? 49 But this crowd that does not know the law is accursed.” 50 Nicodemus, who had gone to Him before, and who was one of them, said to them, 51 “Does our law judge a man without first giving him a hearing and learning what he does?” 52 They replied, “Are you from Galilee too? Search and see that no prophet arises from Galilee.”
In verse 37 John tells us that this was the last day of the Feast of Tabernacles, and this is an important detail. Each day during the seven-day feast there was a solemn procession when the priests would bring a bowl of water from the Pool of Siloam. When they arrived there would be a blast of trumpets, and the priests would walk around the altar, while the choir sang psalms of praise.
On the final day of the feast the priests would pour the water in these bowls on the altar, while the people gave thanks to God for His provision, in particular for the anticipated harvest of crops which was about to begin.
The symbolism of the pouring of water was also important. Firstly, it recalled the exodus, when God provided water from the rock for His people. Secondly, the ritual thanked God for the harvest as they prayed for rain in the year to come. And finally, the ritual looked forward to the coming age of the Messiah, as they were reminded of the words of Isaiah 12:3. “With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation.”
By the following day, the feast was over, and the Jews would dismantle the booths in which they had stayed during the feast, and there was a day of celebration and singing of psalms. This was the setting of verses 37 and 38. “On the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood up and cried out, ‘If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.’”
There are seven “I AM” statements that Jesus makes in John’s Gospel. We looked at the first one a few weeks ago where in chapter 6 He says “I am the Bread of Life.” Here, at the end of chapter 7, He doesn’t specifically say that He is the water of life, but what He says in verse 37 is another of His great claims. Just the day before, there had been a great celebration at the water-pouring ceremony, so Jesus now declared that He is the one out of whom flows living water. He is the true spiritual fountain of life.
We need to remember that Jesus made this extremely bold claim at a time and place where He was not popular. It was common knowledge that the religious leaders wanted Him dead, yet He stood very publicly and proclaimed Himself as the only one who could satisfy the deepest of human needs - spiritual thirst.
This is what Jesus offers to the parched souls of this world. The offer that Jesus makes is to come to Him and drink. Nothing and no one else can satisfy our greatest need.
J C Ryle wrote, “The saints of God in every age have been men and women who drank of this fountain by faith and were relieved. They felt their guilt and emptiness, and thirsted for deliverance. They heard of a full supply of pardon, mercy, and grace in Christ crucified for all penitent believers. They believed the good news and acted upon it.”
Notice that Jesus said, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.’” A key word here is believe. Coming to Jesus means believing His claim to be the only Saviour of the world. It means receiving Him as our own Saviour and trusting ourselves to Him by faith. It means bringing our sins to Him at the cross where His blood was shed for our forgiveness. And it means daily walking with Him in obedience to His Word.
He makes a wonderful promise to those who put their faith in Him in verse 38: “Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water,’” and John expands on this in the next verse. “Now this He said about the Spirit, whom those who believed in Him were to receive, for as yet the Spirit had not been given, because Jesus was not yet glorified.”
When He spoke about living water, Jesus was referring to His sending the Holy Spirit on His followers as the result of His glorification. The Cross of Calvary is not the end of the story. As we receive the gift of the Holy Spirit, God now indwells us as He leads us into all truth. He equips Christians to live the kind of lives He calls us to. Justification in God’s sight leads to sanctification, as He enables us to live our lives for Him, and no longer for ourselves.
John says that the Holy Spirit would be given only after Jesus was glorified. In John’s Gospel, the time of Jesus’ glorification is the cross. When Jesus entered Jerusalem for the final time some six months later on Palm Sunday, He said, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.” (John 12:23)
When Judas left the Last Supper to betray Him, Jesus said: “Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in Him.” (John 13:31) This again points us to the centrality of the cross. The Cross of Christ is the pivotal point of human history, because it is here where Jesus is glorified.
As we look around the world today, most people would agree that our greatest need is peace. Well, yes, but the kind of peace Jesus brings is infinitely more than the absence of armed conflict. Jesus offers us peace for the soul. There is no greater peace than to know that your sins are all forgiven and that the debt of your guilt has been paid once for all by the blood of Christ.
Jesus also gives purity to those who drink from Him. Aren’t you tired of the constant struggle with the corruption of your sinful nature? We are constantly bombarded with impure thoughts, unclean lips, and hearts that are defiled with corruption. But Jesus causes a river to flow within us which cleanses our minds and hearts with the holiness of His Spirit. Not that we will reach perfection in this life, but as the Spirit ministers to us, He reminds us of the eternal hope we have in Christ.
There is that wonderful progression we see in the life of those who are saved by Jesus Christ. At the moment of salvation we are free from the penalty of our sin. As we grow in grace, we are free from the power of sin, and one day, when we finally see the Lord of glory, we will be free from the presence of sin forever. Is this what you are thirsting for? Then come to Christ.
This invitation He gives is for everyone, but there is a condition: “If anyone thirsts.” The problem is that so few thirst for the life that Jesus offers to those who turn to Him in faith and repentance. Some think they will miss out on life if they come to Jesus, when the exact opposite is true, because they try to quench that deep, inner thirst with the things of the world.
This is why Jesus remains the most divisive person in history.
Verses 40-43: “When they heard these words, some of the people said, ‘This really is the Prophet.’ Others said, ‘This is the Christ.’ But some said, ‘Is the Christ to come from Galilee? Has not the Scripture said that the Christ comes from the offspring of David, and comes from Bethlehem, the village where David was?’ So there was a division among the people over Him.”
Jesus said in Matthew 10:34, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” The truth is that Jesus was and is the great divider of people.
We are divisive because of our sin, but Jesus divides by His perfect holiness, and we see this happening in the closing verses of John 7. He has just made this wonderful offer of grace and forgiveness, and what happens? The people start bickering once more about who He really is.
Remember that the Feast of Tabernacles was a highlight of the Jewish calendar. It was a time of great celebration, so Jesus brought division by taking the focus of the people away from religious festivities to what really mattered - the reality that salvation comes by grace through faith in Him alone.
Why is Jesus so divisive? The answer is easy. It is found deep in the hearts of men and women, who in their sinful state resent the truth about God and themselves. The prophet Isaiah was given just the tiniest glimpse of the holiness of God, and what was his reaction? “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” (Isaiah 6:5)
This is the point which each sinner must come to before salvation. Unless if you are broken and filled with remorse for your sin, you will never recognise your need for a Saviour, and this is why so many refuse to believe in Jesus Christ. It’s not because they can’t believe. It’s because they won’t believe, because that would mean confessing that their sin presents them with a problem they cannot solve on their own.
So instead of accepting Jesus’ invitation at the temple, the people argued about Him. There were some who were at least moving in the direction of faith in Jesus. Some actually said that He really is the Prophet, but they were shouted down, because of the division caused by the ignorance of who Jesus is.
Most of the people were expecting a military Messiah, who would end Roman oppression. This is partly because they interpreted the Scriptures incorrectly, something which still happens today. Whenever we hear about things like liberation theology or the social Gospel, the people pushing those agendas into the Church are making the same mistake. These things are all red herrings, because they take our attention away from the central message of the Bible, which is salvation through Jesus Christ.
Jesus was standing there, saying to them, “Come to me,” but they refused.
That’s the one thing they didn’t do. No one asked Him about the prophecies, because had they done so, they would have learned about how perfectly He fulfilled them. You’d think that the members of a religion that had been waiting for its Messiah for over a thousand years would take the time to investigate the claims that Jesus had been making for years, yet they didn’t, because of their hardened hearts.
There is a remarkable conversation between temple guards and the Pharisees in verse 45-48. “The officers then came to the chief priests and Pharisees, who said to them, ‘Why did you not bring Him?’ The officers answered, ‘No one ever spoke like this man!’ The Pharisees answered them, ‘Have you also been deceived? Have any of the authorities or the Pharisees believed in Him?’”
Don’t miss the irony and the hypocrisy here. The Pharisees were annoyed that the guards had not arrested Jesus, and when they said the reason was that they’d never heard anyone speaking with such authority, the pious reply of the Pharisees was something like, “Don’t be ridiculous. He’s deceiving you. Look at us - we are highly educated men, and you don’t see us falling for His lies, do you?”
The great irony is that this conversation displays not their authority, but Jesus’ authority. The fearful authority the Pharisees held over the temple officers paled into insignificance in the face of the holiness of Jesus.
The guards were fearful of Jesus, and this is something we would see again in a few months’ time, when the Roman soldiers came to arrest Him in the Garden of Gethsemane. “Then Jesus, knowing all that would happen to Him, came forward and said to them, ‘Whom do you seek?’ They answered Him, ‘Jesus of Nazareth.’ Jesus said to them, ‘I am He.’ Judas, who betrayed Him, was standing with them. When Jesus said to them, ‘I am He,’ they drew back and fell to the ground.” (John 18:4-6)
This is the majesty and authority of Jesus Christ. John Calvin wrote, “Let us therefore learn that the doctrine of Christ possesses such power as even to terrify the wicked.” If you have yet to experience awe at who Jesus is, it is not the Jesus of the Bible you have met.
You’ll remember from last week that Jesus had upset the Pharisees by saying that because they did not know Him, they did not know God, and here we have evidence of it. Because of their spiritual arrogance and ignorance, they were preventing the people from meeting with Jesus themselves. They were meant to be the shepherds of the flock, but instead they were wolves destroying the flock.
But even amongst all of this division and hatred for Jesus, we see a glimpse of hope as we meet Nicodemus once more. In chapter 3 he approached Jesus alone, and was told that he must be born again.
Verses 50 and 51. “Nicodemus, who had gone to Him before, and who was one of them, said to them, ‘Does our law judge a man without first giving him a hearing and learning what he does?’”
This rebuke exposed the arrogance and pride of the Pharisees.
The law was very clear: They had no right to condemn Jesus without a fair hearing, and their unwillingness to do so exposed the sinful motives behind their unbelief. And even when they did put Him on trial just before Jesus went to the cross, they had no evidence to convict Him. They had to call false witnesses in their desperate attempts to silence Him.
When Nicodemus confronted them with their hypocrisy, all they did was shout him down as well. “Are you from Galilee too? Search and see that no prophet arises from Galilee.” (John 7:52) This is so wrong on so many levels. John MacArthur comments on verse 52, “The real ignorance lay with the arrogant Pharisees who did not carefully search out the facts as to where Jesus was actually born. While they accused the crowds of ignorance, they too were really as ignorant. Furthermore, the prophets Jonah and Nahum did come from Galilee.”
Because of their hardened hearts, the Pharisees refused to accept Jesus for who He is, and this is a picture of the blindness and sinful corruption of our fallen world. If you want to bring a social occasion to an abrupt and awkward end, start talking about Jesus as the only means of salvation! Use the name of Jesus Christ as a swear word, and you are just part of the crowd. But tell them that it is only by putting their faith in the saving work of Jesus Christ that they can have eternal life, and you’ll be marked as some kind of religious zealot.
This is what the writer of Hebrews meant when he wrote: “The word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” (Hebrews 4:12)
Nicodemus went to Jesus, and in doing so he drank from the true living water. He found faith and life. On the other hand, there were those who want only to be rid of Him. This is the great divide we still have in our day, and we need to be absolutely clear in our own minds about what this means for our eternal destiny.
For now, we have the opportunity of repenting and turning to Christ in faith. If you have yet to cross that great divide, there is still time, but time is running out, because there is coming a day when that division will be permanent and eternal, and there will be no escape from it.
Jesus said in Matthew 25, “When the Son of Man comes in His glory, and all the angels with Him, then He will sit on His glorious throne. Before Him will be gathered all the nations, and He will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. Then He will say to those on His right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.’ Then He will say to those on His left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.’ And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.” (Matthew 25:31–34, 41, 46)
Love Him or hate Him, Jesus will not go away. Someone once said that whether we like it or not, Jesus backs each of us into a corner, and we have to choose whether to believe in Him or not. There is no third option. There is no neutrality. Shrugging our shoulders and saying “Whatever” about Jesus means nothing more than rejecting Him.
The question is, “Are you thirsty?” Have you been drinking from the cesspools of the world, and found that they are not satisfying? Jesus calls you, as He did all those years ago in the temple in Jerusalem, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink.” (John 7:37) You can come to Him and receive Him as your Saviour.
Homegroup Study Notes
Read John 7:37-52
Although this is not one of Jesus’ 7 “I AM” statements in John’s Gospel, it is still one of the great claims He makes as the Saviour of the world.
Thirst is something we can all relate to. How have you experienced a deep, inner thirst which only Jesus can satisfy?
Instead of accepting Jesus’ invitation, the people continued to argue about who Jesus is.
Why do you think they didn’t listen to Him, and how does this reflect the attitudes towards Jesus today?
Read verses 45-47 again. The Pharisees had been given the task of guiding the people and teaching them about the one, true God, but they had lost their way many years before.
The Church today has much the same role to play.
In which ways do you think the Church succeeds and fails in fulfilling this task?
Why is Jesus such a divisive figure?