Queen of Many Waters

In the last post, Desert, Torrent and Sea, we looked at a puzzling portrait of a woman who had taken refuge in the desert from a beastly assailant who pursued her.

In Revelation 17, we meet another woman, a glittering prostitute who ‘sits on many waters’ (v.1). This description echoes Jeremiah’s description of Babylon, the city surrounded by rivers and canals (Jeremiah 51:13) and shows her to be a formidable force. In the symbolism of Revelation, ‘sitting on many waters’ means that she has influence over ‘many peoples, multitudes, nations and languages’ (17:15). This presents her as a parody of the Church which is also comprised of people from many languages and nations.

Desert, Torrent and Sea

Woven throughout the puzzling images of the Book of Revelation are the twin themes of victory and suffering.

Half-way through the book, in Chapter 12, John sees ‘a great and wondrous sign’ that illustrates this double truth.

A pregnant woman is on the verge of giving birth, but a fierce red dragon stands in front of her ready to pounce on her infant the moment she delivers. It’s a bizarre picture to be sure, but it's a symbolic portrait of the cosmic battle under-lying the history of the human race.

The woman is a composite of Eve, the mother of all living (who was stalked by the serpent) and Mary, the mother of Jesus, stalked by Herod after Jesus was born. The new-born boy-child, we’re told, “will rule all the nations with an iron scepter.” So we know this is about the reign of Jesus and the hostility of the evil one who seeks to destroy him. The child is no sooner born than he is “snatched up to God and to his throne” (v.5). The story leaps from the birth of Jesus to his ascension to heaven.

Paul’s Shipwreck

The Book of Acts finishes with a crackling good story of shipwreck.

Since the time of Homer 1000 years before Jesus, Greek sea-faring stories invariably included the great adventures of the perils of the sea travel. Such stories not only entertained well, but served as metaphors of the challenge and uncertainties of human life, especially the precarious risk facing human beings pitted against nature and whatever divine powers, friendly or sinister, were thought to over-lap with the natural world.

The Book of Acts takes it place alongside these stories.

Waters of Unity

In the first twenty years after the resurrection of Jesus, thousands of people expressed their faith in him through the water-ritual of baptism. Baptism is laced with connotations of cleansing, forgiveness, repentance, resurrection and new life.

One early story of baptism adds another dimension that speaks especially into our fragmented globalized world.  Acts 8 tells about an African government official who had been on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and was now travelling home by chariot, reading the prophecy of Isaiah. By coincidence he met a Christian named Philip who just happened to be on the same road. He offered Philip a ride and asked him about the text he was trying to decipher.

Geo-Thermal Springs

Among the many wonders of Icelandic waters I experienced the past ten days – glaciers, geysers, waterfalls, rivers and ocean, the one that caught me most by surprise was the geo-thermal springs.

It is a strange sight to behold. Hiking in the hills and seeing steam rising from a hole in the ground. A pungent sulphurous odor pours out with the steam. A few meters away, another steam vent, and on up the mountain, pools of bubbling boiling water or mud – and three kilometers further up the chilly valley between mountains, the reward of a hot-water river with pools that invite leisurely bathing.

To Infinity and Beyond

Yesterday we had a brush with infinity. My wife and I were hiking along the Skógá River above Skogafoss, one of Iceland’s most striking waterfalls.

The falls are post-card perfect – an impressive 60 meter sheer drop (higher than Niagara) into a thundering pool (often with a double rainbow effect). The rugged rocks on either side and the jet-black sand on the flat plain along the river below the falls give a dramatic framing. No wonder legends of buried Viking gold grew up around this place; no wonder tourists shoot a zillion photos.

Climbing 380 steps to see the falls from above drew us into an adventure of discovery. A stile over a fence at the top beckoned us further up and further in. Little did we know the wonders that awaited.

Icelandic Geyser

Last week I promised regular posts from Iceland on the wonder of water, but unfortunately the wonders of technology failed me.

Now that I’m back on-line, here’s a glimpse of one of Iceland’s most famous landmarks – a hot-water spring in the town of Geysir. That name comes from the Icelandic word for ‘gush’ – and gives its name to all geysers on earth.

Geysers occur when geo-thermally heated water becomes trapped in narrow fissures deep in the earth. Cool surface water flows down on top of this hot water and pressurizes it. The super-heated steam builds to the bursting point and then gushes upward, blasting out whatever volume of water lies above it.

Island Get-Away

This week my wife and I are tourists enjoying the delights of Iceland.  The name of this country has nothing to do with ice; it is simply the Icelandic word for 'Island'.  In the history of language the English added an 's' to the Germanic word 'eiland' meaning 'land surrounded by water', but the 's' has never been prounced.

Islands are defined by more than just the water that surrounds them.  Alcatraz and Babados have very different connotations.  Robben Island became known to the world as the prison where Nelson Mandela spent 18 years being shaped into the leader he became. 

A Well-Watered Garden

It frustrated God like crazy.  Folks were praying and practicing their rituals religiously but under the surface they had no heart for what really mattered to God.  God lamented their superficiality -

Day after day they seek me out;
they seem eager to know my ways,
They seem eager for God to come near them -
or as The Message says,
'they love having me on their side.'  Isaiah 58:2

But their hearts were as dry as dust.  Their Sabbath practice was actually mal-practice, observing their fasts but living by their fists; they appeared humble on the outside, but inwardly they were proud, self-serving and exploitive. (v. 3) And God had had enough of it.

Isaiah sketched out for them what a God-honoring faith might look like,

A Large Family Circle

In the previous two posts Fertile Crescent and Beer-sheva, we have followed the journey of Abraham from the rich waters of Mesopotamia to the arid land of the Negev where Abraham settled in response to the call of God. He named his settlement Beer-sheva, ‘the well of the oath’ to commemorate both his treaty with the resident king who recognized Abraham’s legitimacy and his ownership of a contested well that Abraham’s servants had dug.

Gerar Valley

It turns out this was not the only well Abraham dug to sustain his herds and flocks. A generation later when Abraham’s son Isaac settled in the Gerar Valley, 15 miles west of Beer-sheva (about 10 miles east from modern day Gaza) the locals harassed him by plugging all his wells with dirt and debris, ‘wells that his father's servants had dug in the time of his father Abraham,’ Genesis 26:15.

Wells and cisterns were crucial in the Negev for economic survival, and clearly Abraham had invested considerable effort to acquire them as means for prosperity. Wells were an important

Beer-sheva

The previous post, Fertile Crescent, told how Abraham responded to the call of God to leave the good life of Mesopotamia and travel to a place God would show him. Genesis 12 tells how “he set out for the land of Canaan and arrived safe and sound.”

After traveling through the land he settled in the Negev. Why he chose that challenging terrain we’re not told; perhaps because it was more sparsely settled than other areas.

Before long a severe famine in the area forced Abraham to travel east to Egypt in search of food, but he returned when he could to the Negev, settling in the eastern region near Beer-sheva. See Genesis 21:22-34. And to support his cattle and sheep-herding enterprise in an arid land like this, Abraham needed a significant amount of water, which meant he needed wells. So Abraham’s servants did a lot of digging.

Fertile Crescent

The journey of Abraham and four generations of his descendents follows the arc of the Fertile Crescent from the famed Tigris-Euphrates valley in the east, or Mesopotamia as it was known, to the Nile Delta in the west.

Mesopotamia, the land between the rivers, was the cradle of one of the earliest civilizations on earth. It already had two thousand years of commerce, culture and tradition when Abraham was born in Ur on the south bank of the Euphrates. Lying just west of the point where the two mighty rivers joined before flowing into the Persian Gulf, Ur was a prosperous and proud culture, living off the largess of the two rivers.

Mesopotamia was water-rich. The Tigris rises in the Taurus Mountains 1,000 miles to the northwest. Less than a hundred miles away, the Euphrates flows first westerly then it curls around to the southeast and flows in a roughly parallel direction to the Tigris, draining a vast region of hills in their early miles and then meandering a thousand kilometers across the plains. Early settlers in Mesopotamia developed extensive irrigation systems and levees to enhance the use of water for agriculture. Traders brought goods and wealth from far afield and the commercial expertise of the Mesopotamians fostered the development of cuneiform script, the earliest known system of writing.

The name Euphrates derives from the Persian word for 'the good', but the Bible is not particularly impressed with the good life in Ur or the whole Mesopotamian culture. Instead, it tells the story of a man and his descendents who deliberately the cultural and economic amenities of Ur and travelled west in search of a very different kind of civilization.

As Thomas Cahill tells it in The Gifts of the Jews, it would have seemed to everyone in Ur that this was a migration in the wrong direction. But in fact this peculiar migration became 'a hinge of history changing the way everyone in the world today thinks and feels.'

Genesis 12 tells of the summons of a god named Yahweh who said to Abram “Leave your country, your people and your father’s household and go (or come) to the land I will show you. I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you.”

So Abraham left this land of abundance and travelled to a place where water was much less available. In the course of this adventure he would learn that God, the designer of rivers, is also the spring of a different kind of water, living water and the headwaters of every stream that enriches our lives.  Nevertheless, Abraham also had to work hard to support his herds and flocks in a land of minimal rain or surface water.

Image Sources:
Map: Ancient History Encyclopedia 
Euphrates: Ferrell Jenkins
Book: Amazon.com