Two Evils, and Only One of Them Is the One Everybody Talks About

A man can walk away from something without ever deciding to.

That is not how anybody expects it to go. Everybody assumes there is a moment. A crisis, a wound, a night with a bottle where a decision gets made and a man knows he has made it. And for some people it does happen that way.

For most it does not. For most it is a slow substitution. Something else starts doing the job. Work does it for a while, because work returns a number and a number is satisfying. Then it is the house. Then it is a project, or a hobby that grew, or a screen at eleven at night, or the low steady hum of managing other people's expectations.

Nothing here is even wrong, most of it. That is what makes it hard to see. A man could describe every single one of these to his own father without embarrassment.

And he still could not tell you when he last drew anything out of God that he actually needed.

The sentence with two halves

Here is the verse, in the King James Version, and the arithmetic in it is the point:

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)

Two evils. He counts them.

The first one gets preached constantly. Forsaken me. Left. Turned away. That is the sermon everybody has heard and it is a true sermon.

The second one almost never gets mentioned, and it is the one that describes how a man actually lives: he went and built something else to draw from, and the thing he built does not work.

Cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water. Notice he says it twice. Cisterns, then broken cisterns. And then he says the same thing a third way, that can hold no water, as though he wants nobody to be able to misread it.

A cistern is a hole cut in rock to catch rain. It is real work. Somebody stood there with tools and made it. It was a reasonable plan, and it was expensive in effort, and it does not hold.

That is not a description of a man being wicked. It is a description of a man being tired and thirsty and industrious.

You are not being called wicked here and you were never accused of anything but hauling from something that does not hold. Jeremiah 2:13 names the cistern as the second evil and calls the first one leaving, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than an improvement in your attendance who makes a hard verse read as a diagnosis instead of a charge.

What He calls Himself in that same sentence

There is an easy thing to miss in verse 13 because the cistern half is so vivid.

He does not say they forsook the rules. He does not say they forsook the building. He says they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters.

He is the fountain in that sentence. Which means the alternative on offer is not a better routine. It is Him.

And a fountain is not a cistern. A cistern holds what fell last spring. A fountain is fed from somewhere else and does not depend on the weather, and the entire difference between the two is where the supply comes from.

Jesus picks the same picture up and puts it in the second person:

But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life. (John 4:14)

A well of water springing up. Inside the person. Not a tank they have to keep filling.

You have a spring inside you rather than a tank you are responsible for filling, and you were given it rather than digging it. John 4:14 puts the well inside the man and Jeremiah 2:13 calls God the fountain of living waters, and it is His Spirit who is the one making that an experience and not a metaphor.

The invitation is addressed to the people who already left

The thing that makes Jeremiah 2 bearable is what happens one chapter later. This is a book with a great deal of hard language in it, and then this sits in the middle of it:

Return, ye backsliding children, and I will heal your backslidings. Behold, we come unto thee; for thou art the LORD our God. (Jeremiah 3:22)

Return is addressed to people who are gone. That is the only kind of person the word can be said to.

And what is promised is not that they will be admitted on probation. I will heal. The condition itself is what He offers to deal with, which means the returning does not have to be accomplished before the healing starts.

And in the very last chapter of the whole Bible, the same picture, with the door held open:

And the Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely. (Revelation 22:17)

Whosoever will. Freely. No price is attached to it anywhere in the sentence, and the Spirit is named as one of the two voices doing the inviting.

You have an invitation with your condition written into it and you were never required to arrive fixed. Jeremiah 3:22 says return to people who have already gone and I will heal about the going itself, and it is the Holy Spirit named in Revelation 22:17 who is one of the two voices saying come.

And if what is underneath the dryness is something heavier, if it has gone as far as not wanting to be here at all, that is not a thing to hold alone. A doctor, a counselor, somebody you trust who will pick up the phone. In the United States the 988 crisis line answers day and night. Nobody is being asked to carry that by himself.

What He remembers about the beginning of it

One more piece, and it is the tenderest sentence in the chapter, and it comes before the cistern verse rather than after it.

Go and cry in the ears of Jerusalem, saying, Thus saith the LORD; I remember thee, the kindness of thy youth, the love of thine espousals, when thou wentest after me in the wilderness, in a land that was not sown. (Jeremiah 2:2)

I remember thee, the kindness of thy youth.

Before He says one word about cisterns, He says He remembers what it was like at the start. And He does not remember it as evidence against them. He remembers it the way a man remembers something he loved.

That reframes everything after it. The hard verse is not spoken by somebody who has gone cold on them. It is spoken by somebody who opened the same speech by saying he remembers.

You are remembered at your best by the same God who names the cistern, and you were never reduced to your driest stretch in His accounting. Jeremiah 2:2 has Him recalling the kindness of their youth eleven verses before the broken cistern, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes those two verses one voice rather than two.