““My people have committed a compound sin: they’ve walked out on me, the fountain of fresh flowing waters, and then dug cisterns— cisterns that leak, cisterns that are no better than sieves. “ (Jeremiah 2:13, The Message)
Blaise Pascal famously said that we humans were created with a God-shaped hole in our souls. This longing/desire can only be filled by God. When we walk out on God, we try to fill the void with other things (that’s what Jeremiah is talking about here and is the topic of our sermon this Sunday).
Rather than turning to God (the spring of Living Water) to quench our spiritual thirst, we instead dig our own wells. We find them dry. The God-shaped hole can’t be filled except by God.
Some of our wells are well-intentioned: we make idols of our kids or our spouse or relationships or even our churches. We become legalists or moralists or social critics. But we find that these avenues don’t ultimately fulfill.
Some of our wells are less noble: we pursue fame, fortune, power, pleasure. We turn to human-centered philosophy or politics, but we find those wells dry, too.
What we discover is that a man-made well – dug from good intentions or bad – cannot compare to fresh flowing water. Ultimately, only God can quench the human’s spiritual thirst. Only he can fill the God-shaped void in each of us.
