awe_oluwadamilare

If you grew up in Nigeria in the late 90s and early 2000s, you remember the water crusades. Bottles lifted in the air by the thousands. Buckets, sachets, kegs. Rivers where people queued at dawn. Testimonies the following Sunday.

To be honest, those years made me question a lot. Not God. Us. Something in me couldn't settle. Why water? Why this particular water? What exactly were we holding up?

Then the book I'm reading listed who else has holy water. Hinduism. Sikhism. Buddhism. Shinto. Judaism. Rome. The Orthodox. The Lakota, the Maya, the Māori, the Yorùbá, the Akan.

Everybody has magic water.

And that was when something clicked. The water was never the point. It was a confession. Every bowl at every shrine is a people saying, "we are thirsty for something we cannot name."

Coming back to the scriptures with that question, I noticed a pattern that runs through the whole Bible: men latch on to a symbol faster than they seek the reality the symbol points to.

Moses lifted a bronze serpent and the people were healed. Seven hundred years later Hezekiah had to smash it, because Israel was burning incense to it. 2 Kings 18:4. The sign had become the god.

That is the core of religion. And it is the core of idolatry. Not that we worship nothing, but that we stop at the pointer and never follow it home.

Then I saw John 7.

The Feast of Tabernacles. For seven days a priest carried water from the Pool of Siloam and poured it beside the altar while the crowd sang, "with joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation." Seven days of holy water. A prayer for the Spirit the prophets promised.

And on the last and greatest day, at the ritual's climax, a carpenter from Nazareth stood up and cried out:

"If anyone is thirsty, let him come to Me and drink. Whoever believes in Me, rivers of living water will flow from within him." John 7:37-38

He waited until the water was being poured. Then He said: everything this has pointed at for centuries is standing in front of you.

"A shadow of the things to come; the reality is found in Christ." Colossians 2:17

A shadow can tell you something is coming. It cannot quench your thirst.

And notice what He promised. Not water carried from someone else's well and poured on you at a crusade. A spring. From within. "By this He meant the Spirit." John 7:39

So the question for all of us, whatever bottle we once lifted:

Have you been sprinkled, or have you been filled?

Holy water can't heal this. He can.

Come to the Fountain, not the shadow of it.

#BeyondWorldReligions #Faith #Jesus #LivingWater