Biblion Bible Commentary
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Rivers of Living Water
John 7:37-44
37 Now on the last and greatest day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried out, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink! · WEB
On the great day of the feast, standing where water has been poured for a week, he shouts an invitation.
Now on the last and greatest day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried out, "If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink!" John 7:37.
The setting is everything. Each morning of Tabernacles a priest carried a golden pitcher down to the pool of Siloam , filled it, and brought it back through the water gate to be poured out at the altar while the crowd sang from Isaiah about drawing water from the wells of salvation Isaiah 12:3. The rite remembered water from the rock in the desert and looked forward to the rivers the prophets had promised.
On the last and greatest day, with all of that just performed in front of tens of thousands of people, a man stands up in the court and shouts.
The verb is deliberate: he cried out. Everything else in this Gospel is taught or said; here he raises his voice over a festival crowd, and what he offers is himself as the thing the ceremony has been pointing at all week.
If anyone — no qualification. Is thirsty — the only requirement, and it is a lack rather than a credential. Come to me and drink — two verbs, both simple, and the second is what the woman at the well was offered John 4:10.
"He who believes in me, as the Scripture has said, from within him will flow rivers of living water" John 7:38.
No single verse says this in those words; what he refers to is the whole current of prophecy about water in a dry place — a river from the temple deepening as it goes Ezekiel 47:1–9, living waters going out from Jerusalem Zechariah 14:8, the promise of water on the thirsty ground Isaiah 44:3.
And the direction is the surprise. At the well the water became a spring inside a person; here it flows out of them. The believer becomes a channel rather than a reservoir, which is the difference between being satisfied and being useful.
But he said this about the Spirit, which those believing in him were to receive. For the Holy Spirit was not yet given, because Jesus wasn't yet glorified John 7:39.
The writer explains, which he does rarely, and the explanation carries a chronology. The Spirit is the water; the giving waits on the glorifying; and glorified in this book means the cross John 12:23. So the rivers cannot flow until he has died, which is why the farewell discourse spends so long telling frightened men that his going is to their advantage John 16:7.
So a division arose in the multitude because of him John 7:43.
The word is schism. Some say prophet, some say Christ, and some produce the objection about Galilee and Bethlehem John 7:41–42 — which is correct doctrine applied to a fact they never checked. Two minutes of inquiry would have told them where he was born.
Some of them would have arrested him, but no one laid hands on him John 7:44. For the second time in one chapter.
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