John 4:1-10 (Christ The Living Water)

John as the Chief Gospel: Literary Beauty, Doctrine, and Mission

All right. We're going to be in John chapter 4, verses 1 through 10 is where we'll be at today. If you want to put a ribbon or a marker in your Bibles, and I don't know if the word's going to be up on the screen or not.

And they might not exactly correspond, because I know typically you use the NASB, and I am using the ESV. And I know they're very close, so we will be able to figure it out. Well, as Kendall asked you to give him grace while doing music, I'm going to ask you to give me grace as well when preaching, because this is the first time in, I think, since March, to be honest with you, that I've preached in a traditional or a typical, I should say, a typical manner of being able to actually just stand up in front of a congregation and not have a screen separating me and others, as we had been going through our COVID days and trying to figure out how to be able to preach and to deliver the word through that.

So yes, let's get in to the gospel. As I mentioned, the gospel, according to John, is one of the greatest works of literary mastery in the history of philosophy, theology, ethics, evangelism, missiology, and just straight up historical, factual chronicling, for that matter.

Martin Luther was so taken with this gospel and the book of Romans that he said, this is the unique, tender, genuine, chief gospel. Should a tyrant succeed in destroying the Holy Scriptures and only a single copy of the epistles of the Romans and the gospel, according to John, escape him, Christianity would be saved.

Now, Luther is making the argument there that all essential theological and doctrinal truth can be discerned from both the gospel of John and the epistle to the Romans. Now, he may very well be correct here.

I'm really not taking him up on the task in actually examining these for detail by detail by detail to see if it actually has the fullness of a systematic theology within just the gospel of John and the epistle to the Romans.

But I'm just going to take him at his word, for that matter. And I do believe that in reading through the epistle to the Romans and the gospel of John, that it does hit on all the core essential theological truths that we need to be able to live the Christian life.

And when we consider the way that God's word was written and recorded for the church in the first couple of centuries, that was actually an essential reality. Because you see, for the first couple hundred years of the church history, they did not have a nice leather-bound work to be able to read through every single thing that was recorded and written in the New Testament.

They had single letters. Or they had single gospels. Some churches had the gospel of Matthew. Other churches had the gospel of Luke. Others had John. Some had the epistle to the Romans. Some had the epistle to the Corinthians.

Some had Ephesians and so on and so forth. And then what happened that brought the word of God together is the churches shared those different gospels and the different letters. And they began to bring them together and bind them together into codex form, which is the early form of the Bible as sewn together and bound like it is.

And so the gospel of John, the epistle of Romans, I would agree that it has all the essential doctrine that we need to be able to understand the Christian life and live that out. But I think Luther's on to something else here.

When he talks about this gospel being the chief of gospel accounts, I think he's also tapping into the beauty of the gospel, the literary brilliance of the gospel, the readability of it. Now, why is it, I think, the chief of gospels along with Martin Luther?

I think there's three reasons. Number one, there's a simplicity to the text. It's very easy to follow. It's easy to comprehend and to understand. The narrative flows smoothly over the pages. There are these beautiful, long dialogues.

There are climactic events. There's an ever-growing tension brewing to a volcanic explosion. You get caught up in the story. And John is fantastic at weaving all of these narratives together. He's a master worker of transitions in his gospels.

You always know where he is taking you. He's a fantastic storyteller. That's what he is. The second reason I think this is the chief of the gospels is there's a perfect blending of theology and practice.

See, when John writes about biblical doctrine, he always, always has at least one episode and typically multiple episodes in the life and the ministry of Jesus that brings the doctrine to life. He helps to, sort of in his own words, flesh it out.

So we see normal, everyday men and women from every spectrum of the social level engaged by the person of Jesus, hearing, heeding, rejecting, and even hating the instruction he came to give. This is one of the central theses John lays out in his opening paragraphs.

He talks about the Word. And I'm sure Kendall went into some depth here when he started off in your study in John chapter 1. John opens up talking about the Word. And I'm sure Kendall told you that that Word, the Word, the logos, is so loaded with meaning that there are books upon books written about the Word.

It's loaded with meaning from a biblical perspective and from a Greek and Roman philosophical perspective. It is just so heavily loaded with doctrinal, philosophical, theological, biblical meaning. But does John just talk about the Word in some kind of metaphysical entity, some kind of just spiritual, unseen, unknowable reality?

No. He talks about the Word becoming flesh and dwelling among us, among humanity. So what John opens up with his gospel saying is that the conceptual becomes tangible, the theoretical becomes realized, the unseen becomes seen, the unknowable, as far as our finite minds go, makes himself known.

This is why the gospel of John is both a wading pool for little infants and it's also a vast, galactic, unlimited ocean that is always demanding further exploration no matter how mature we grow in our faith.

The third reason I think this is the chief gospel, and I'm a fan of this one, John's not the only gospel writer to do this, but he does it in such a great way. He always brings us back to the main point.

He has a mission statement lodged at the end of his gospel. He summarizes everything for us in a few short words. Does anybody know what John's ultimate mission statement is and where it's found in his gospel?

Does anyone know? No? It's in John chapter 20, verses 30 through 31. Does that ring any bells? John says here in chapter 20, verse 30 through 31, he says, now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples which are not written in this book, but these, so he's saying I select these, these are written so that, here's the purpose and the intention, you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.

John summarizes the entire purpose for which he writes everything in his gospel in these couple of verses. Really, it's in verse 31, but verse 30 sets up verse 31, so it's important to include that there.

He says that he purposely selects what he does. He leaves some elements out and includes others. And then his intention is to write meaningful, impactful truths that you, the reader, now I know we're millennia later, but we are part of the reading crowd, the reading group.

So you, the reader, will grasp, and more importantly, believe, experience a cognitive, willful, and emotional transformation of your life. And that belief would be in the object, the person of Jesus as the eternal son of God who's the anointed and chosen savior, and there is no other person, method, religion, or pathway that then leads to the ultimate intended goal and purpose, eternal life.

So you, believing in Christ, may receive eternal life. That's his purpose. Everything that's written in the gospel is written with that intention. You, believe in Jesus, leading to eternal life. I'm gonna take this off real quick.

It's very restrictive on my arms at this point. I feel like I'm limited in my wingspan with it. So let's keep this mission verse, this, if you will, this mission statement, this vision, this purpose, this intention of John, and whenever we're reading anything in his gospel, that's the lens through which we wanna look through so we can understand his meaning.

The Why of Jesus Passing Through Samaria

So let's keep that in mind as we turn to our passage today in John chapter four, verses one through 10. In this passage, Jesus is shifting the geographical focus of his ministry from Jerusalem and Judea, which is in the south, and he's going to move into the north, into Galilee.

That's about an 80 to a 100-mile journey, about a three-day journey in the ancient Jewish world, depending on where you're going from and where you're going to. It's the region of his upbringing. Nazareth was in Galilee, in the north.

It's the region where the Sea of Galilee is, which we read about quite extensively in the gospel accounts. But before we turn to his actual ministry in the north, John gives us a very long, detailed, intentional snapshot of a unique event in the life and ministry of Jesus.

And you'll only find that event here in John's gospel. It's not in Matthew, Mark, or Luke. Yet this riveting, unique narrative between Jesus and an obscure woman is often one of the most remembered and beloved gospel moments.

People connect deeply with this story. They find themselves sitting by the well. They find themselves in the person of that Samaritan woman. They find themselves as one of the 12 disciples, if all 12 were there with Jesus.

We don't really know for sure, but anyways, that's an aside that I don't want to run down. It's a little trail rabbit hole. We find ourselves with the disciples as they're returning back to the well, and they're bewildered and befuddled.

What is Jesus doing talking with this woman, this Samaritan woman? And we then find ourselves amongst the crowd of the Samaritans hearing the gospel announced for the first time amongst non-distinctly Jewish individuals.

It's a narrative that we get caught up in. We find ourselves in. It's almost as though we are standing side by side, seeing it take place. So let's read verses one through 10. Now, when Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John, although Jesus himself did not baptize, but only his disciples, he left Judea and departed again for Galilee, and he had to pass through Samaria.

So he came to a town of Samaria called Sychar, near the field that Jacob had given to his son, Joseph. Jacob's well was there. So Jesus, wearied as he was from his journey, was sitting beside the well.

It was about the sixth hour. A woman from Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, give me a drink, for his disciples had gone away into the city to buy food. The Samaritan woman said to him, how is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria?

For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans. Jesus answered her, if you knew the gift of God and who it is that is saying to you, give me a drink, you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.

Heavenly Father, I thank you for your word today. I thank you for this gospel that has been passed down through millennia. I thank you, Lord, that we don't just have the gospel of John and the epistle to the Romans, but we have the full counsel of your will.

We have the full divine inspired inerrant word from Genesis through Revelation, from poetry to history, from songs to tragedies, from heroes to villains, and most importantly, in all of it, Lord, your sovereign work of redemption through Christ by the power of your Holy Spirit, from death in the early pages to eternal life at the end.

And Lord, I am so, so grateful that we are recipients of your divine truth. May we always humbly approach you with a desire to know more of you, to know more of ourselves, know more of this world, to know more of eternal life, and to be good witnesses and stewards of the time and the resources and the word that you have given to us today, amen.

So we're setting the table for the rest of this narrative. It continues on to, I think, verse 45, yeah, verse 45. So it's a long section. If we were to do the whole thing today, it would take a significant portion of time.

So Kendall is gonna be able to pick up where I leave off. We're gonna stop with a cliffhanger in verse 10, as you can sort of already see, and we're gonna just touch upon the living water at the end of it.

And I'm gonna let him pick up on the dialogue and the more fullness of that living water starting next week. But what we're going to do today is to set the table to understand what's happening throughout the rest of this narrative.

Because as I mentioned, John is not only a fantastic literary writer, he's not just a good storyteller, which he truly, truly is, but he's a fabulous historian as well. I mean, Luke gets all the praise for being the historian extraordinaire.

And I mean, believe me, he was. He was the best writer when it came to actually using the Greek language in the New Testament. And he probably was the best historian out of all of them. But John, he's no novice himself.

He understands how to set the historical stage so that we can have a fullness and a richness of understanding the dialogue that takes place and the events that take place between Jesus and the Samaritan woman, the disciples, and the rest of the Samaritan people.

And so that's my job today. And because I was a fabulous third grade student, I know the four W's of appropriate exegesis. Did I say four? See, apparently I wasn't. The five W's of extraordinary exegesis from third grade.

Who can give me the five W's of extraordinary exegesis? I know you know them, come on. Who, what, when, where, why? Yes, who, what, when, where, why? And then there's in one H, that's right. How? Yes, I mean, I make a joke about that, but in all reality, if you actually ask those questions, you will understand the biblical text more than most preachers who stand up in a pulpit.

I mean, that's just the reality of it. Those are great questions to ask. So what we're really gonna touch upon today is the why, the where, and the who, and then we're gonna tease the how, or excuse me, the what.

We're gonna tease the what that Kendall will pick up on next week. So let's start with the why. We find the why in verses one through four. Why is there a movement from Jerusalem to Galilee? And why is it that Jesus has to move through Samaria?

Let's ask that question. We're trying to discern the motivations that drove Jesus from his current place of ministry to his next place of ministry and a pass through in this region that this narrative takes place in.

So let's look at verses one through four. We see two things. We see two motivations. The first is political, and the second is spiritual. The political takes prominent place in verses one through three.

In verses one through three, we read about a growing conflict between Jesus and the boogeyman of the gospels, the Pharisees. You just have to say that with like a hushed voice. The Pharisees. Everybody knows the Pharisees are bad.

Everyone knows the Pharisees are bad, right? Do we agree with that? If everyone, yeah, they're the villains of the New Testament. You wanna know how we know the Pharisees are bad? There's actually a telltale marker.

We know that the Pharisees are bad because whenever you're in a theological dispute with someone or a debate, and you have no response, just call them a Pharisee and you win the argument. That's the way it works.

Those are the rules of Facebook. That's how it happens. You get this argument. You say, wait a minute. You don't hold a pre-trib, half-wrap, part-mill, most-dis interpretation of revelation? Pharisee.

And then you win. That's what you do. That's how you win your doctrinal battles on Facebook. The first person to call the other one a Pharisee, they get the gold medal. No, well, we know that the Pharisees are the bad guys.

And I use that in quotation marks because it's really unfair. It's not as though all the Pharisees were bad guys. We just read about a Pharisee in chapter three whose name was Nicodemus, who eventually became a believer in Jesus Christ.

And he's actually someone who's shown in a positive light, even though it's darkness, interesting stuff taking place there, right? But yes, we have this kind of positive view on some of the Pharisees.

But as a group overall, the Pharisees, they really are the boogeyman living in the cellar of the gospel. They're the dungeon masters who you're like, we want to stay away from the Pharisees. They're the scary guys.

And the reason why they're cast in that light is because the Pharisees, they twist the scriptures, that's what they do, to suit their own agendas, to increase their own power, to increase their own following.

And they end up doing so, heaping up burdens on other people that they don't take upon themselves. They're hypocrites, they're twisters, they're liars. And again, they take the beautiful, pure, glorious, holy word of God and make it suit their own agenda, their own legalistic tendencies and agendas.

And so they don't like John, the baptizer, and they don't like Jesus because John and Jesus both call them out for their twisting of the scriptures. We see one of these places in Matthew 3, 7 -10. John the Baptist is sitting back in the Jordan River, munching on a locust.

His hair's a little disheveled and wild. And he just looks at the Pharisees who come, for whatever reason that's motivating them to come see John. John looks right through them. He can see to their soul.

He sees that they're disingenuous and he yells out some of the greatest words in the opening of Matthew's gospel. You brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come. Bear fruit in keeping with repentance and do not presume to save yourselves.

We have Abraham as our father. For I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children of Abraham. And then he says to them, a pronouncement of judgment and woe, even now the ax is laid to the root of the trees.

Every tree, therefore, that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Let me summarize that woe pronouncement of John against the Pharisees. You're going to hell. That's the summary.

As of right now, without true repentance in your soul, it doesn't matter if you come here and I baptize you or dip you in the water because you don't have true repentance in your soul. And John as a prophet is able to see spiritually into their souls.

He says, Pharisees, you're false, you're fake, you're liars, you're snakes, and you're going to be judged by God for it. So the Pharisees don't like John. They also don't like Jesus. They don't like Jesus because back in chapter two, Jesus shows up to Jerusalem and he decides to make a whip.

It's always a fun word to say, whip. Even as you say the word whip, it hurts. It sounds painful. Jesus made a whip and drove out the money changers who were a part of this Pharisaical system, who's part of this Pharisaical elites, mostly the Sadducees system, but the Sadducees and the Pharisees who didn't see eye to eye on many things, they ended up seeing eye to eye on Jesus and John the Baptist because they were threats against their power, against their religious elitism, against their basically setting themselves as a class above the rest of the Jews.

So they don't like Jesus, they don't like John the Baptist, and there's a conflict that is brewing as John is decreasing and Jesus is increasing in the amount of people in the crowd that's following him.

And so what Jesus does here is he knows it's not yet his time to have that conflict with the Pharisees brew to a boiling point. And so he being led and prompted by the Holy Spirit decides to leave the place of high tension and hostility.

There might've been other reasons, but I think that's the primary one. He knew that it was not his time to have that conflict with the Pharisees come to a full head. The time would come. We know that when we get to the end of the gospel.

So that's the political reason for Jesus to move from the South to the North. But I said that there was a spiritual reason. Where do we see that? It's in verse four. In verse four, it says, "'And he had to pass through Samaria.'".

Another way of reading that would be, it was necessary for him to pass through Samaria. Now that's an interesting phraseology. The reason that's interesting is because as biblical scholars and geographical scholars and even historical scholars have pointed out, he actually didn't have to pass through Samaria.

There were alternative routes he could have used. Now there was a main road that went from Judea in the South to the North in Galilee that went through Samaria. There was a main road system there. And a lot of people used it.

A lot of trade caravans and military movements and stuff like that. But for pietistic, holy, rabbinical Jews, religious leaders, they didn't use that road. They didn't use that route because they didn't like the Samaritans.

They didn't believe that the Samaritans were, well, very good neighbors. They had a lot of hostility and animosity towards the Samaritans. We'll talk about that a little bit in a little bit. By the way, Jesus did not necessarily have to go through Samaria.

You know, and the interesting part is when we actually read this preceding aspect of the narrative and when we take into consideration the ministry of Jesus Christ, there's another indication that he didn't have to pass through Samaria.

So if Jesus is baptizing, that's what he's doing. And that's what leads to the political conflict. Where was it that he was most likely baptizing? The Jordan River. The Jordan River is where John baptized.

The Jordan River is where the majority of the baptism seemed to have taken place. And so if Jesus, and I admit that I'm speculating here, the scripture does not tell us that he was baptizing in the Jordan.

So this is a step, an interpretive step that I'm taking. But if Jesus was, and I think it's likely that he was baptizing in the Jordan River and the place of ministry that he typically went to in Galilee was at the Sea of Galilee, then the eastern route actually would have been the straightest shot.

That would have been the straightest route to actually get from Judea to the north. So for him to actually pass through Samaria, if he's at the Jordan River, he'd have to go west and then north rather than directly up the eastern border of the Jordan River.

Now, why do I say this? I say this because it seems to be the case here. And this is what Craig Keener concludes in his magnum opus on the Gospel of John. He says that the necessary that compels Jesus to take this route is most likely his mission.

It's not a geographical compulsion. It's not because he has to take the road that goes through Samaria because that's the traveling purpose, but there's an actual internal compulsion by the Holy Spirit to lead him in that direction.

The Holy Spirit, by the direction of God the Father, who is leading Jesus in his earthly ministry, is actually bringing him on that pathway because he has a mission along that route. Because there is someone in Samaria who needed to believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing, they would have life in his name.

Now, don't miss the incredible significance of this. Please don't miss the incredible aspect of this in John's Gospel. If Keener and other astute biblical scholars are correct in their analysis, and if I'm interpreting this correctly as well, think about what this tiny little phrase, it was necessary, means.

It means that out of the hundreds of thousands living in Palestine at that time, tens of thousands of Jews, rabbis, Pharisees, politically, materially elite, intellectually astute, biblical scholars who've memorized much of the Old Testament in multiple languages.

John is saying that it wasn't necessary for Jesus to go to any of them at that time. He's saying that the first person who would hear Jesus declaring with his own mouth, I who speak to you, I am he, that's what Jesus eventually pronounces to the Samaritan woman.

When the Samaritan woman is getting close to understanding the nature of who Jesus is because she actually has some biblical training, believe it or not, Jesus ends up pronouncing to her what he has not pronounced to anybody else yet in the Gospel of John.

Yes, I am the one who's sent by God to save the world. I am the anointed one. I am the Messiah. John is saying here that it was necessary for this unknown woman to hear that before anybody else in the region.

For consider your calling, brothers. Not many of you were wise according to worldly standards. Not many were powerful. Not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise.

God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God.

Some really smart individual named Paul wrote that in a letter to the Corinthians, chapter one, verses 26 through 29. In case any of us would ever become proud, boastful, arrogant because of our salvation, because of our Christian identity, because of our historical, theological, doctrinal knowledge, our intellect, these things literally, it's nothing special about us.

There's nothing special about us. Why would God save us? Why would he be so gracious to guide events in history that brought about our hearing of the gospel, that brings about our hearts being open to receive the gospel?

It's not anything in us. If someone else were writing this script, and this was all just a made up narrative, there's no way that the first person who would hear Jesus essentially say an I am statement in the gospel of John would be this strange, unknown, unnamed Samaritan woman.

Somehow it would have been Caesar taking a vacation in Palestine, or at least some kind of a general, a Lord, someone like that. But the true Lord, the true God works in these ways where he brings about salvation in weakness.

He brings about gospel intelligence in our foolishness because he and his love, grace, and mercy simply deemed it necessary. Hallelujah, hallelujah, amen to that. So that's the why question. But now we're gonna move to the where.

Jacob’s Well, Samaria, and the History of Hostility

Chapter four, verses four through six. Well, we've already mentioned Samaria, and we've spoken a bit about it, but let's dive in a little more at this point. First, we notice a couple of other geographical identifying features.

Number one, we read about Jacob's well in verse six. It just simply states this. Jacob's well was there in Jacob's field. I love this statement because if you were to travel to Israel today, you can actually go sit by Jacob's well.

We know exactly where it is. We know where this conversation took place. You can put your hand upon the stones that Jesus himself rested against. You can actually drop a bucket in and pull out, well, there's still a lot of water there.

And we know that the well is very deep. We know that there's a stream that runs under it that feeds it. You can draw water out of it. A lot of people have actually like thrown stones into the well because apparently that's just something that we do.

I don't really know why we throw stuff into wells, but it's what we do. You can go there. You can see it. This well is something that is historically rooted all the way back to Genesis 33. That's when Jacob purchases the land and he purchases the well that's there.

And then he hands it on to Joseph in Genesis chapter 48. It is near this territory that Jacob and Joseph are buried in the land of Shechem. I love that we can actually go to these places where these events took place.

I've never had the blessed opportunity to go there, but just the idea that I could actually step upon that ground, bring so much life and richness to these gospel accounts. So in the time of Jesus, where the well was, there was a literal fork in the road.

Funny enough, there's a crossroads. Well, not a crossroads, there's a fork in the road. And one went Northeast towards the Sea of Galilee. One went Northwest to the Mediterranean Sea. And it would have been a natural spot to stop and rest.

Furthermore, the town of Sychar, which is modern day village of Askar, is a little bit under a mile to the East of the well's location. So we're trying to get an orientation of that there. So let's deal with the greater picture, the region of Samaria.

What was it and why was it so important for proper Jews to avoid it at all costs? Well, the name Samaria comes from the city that was built by King Omri. Who's heard of King Omri? Who knows about King Omri or the Omride Empire?

So King Omri recalled that the Israelite people separated into a Northern and a Southern kingdom in the Old Testament. The North was called Israel. It was composed of 10 tribes. And the South was called Judah.

It was composed of two of the 12 tribes. This happened only a few short years after King Solomon's reign. There was, Walter Kaiser wrote a history on Israel. Lamentably, he said, what took 80 years to build only took five to 10 years to deteriorate.

How sad is that? Well, eventually, one of the Northern dynasties came from this man named Omri. He was a morally corrupt and wicked individual. But he was politically and militarily astute. He built a beautiful, strong, defensible capital city, and he called it Samaria.

I don't know why, but that's what he called it. And then Omri had a son. His name was Ahab. Perhaps you've heard of him. Samaria became a den of vile corruption in the days of Ahab. Yahweh worship was outlawed.

The prophets of Yahweh were massacred. And any who survived had to run into hiding. Baal worship became centralized. And child sacrifice became one of the key components of worship. Quite literally, in the city of Samaria, people were sacrificing their children to Baal in order to have physical prosperity.

And that was their way of worship. Furthermore, beyond that, as if it can get any worse, there was constant usury, greed, theft, cult prostitution, murder, and assassination. That all became the rule of the land.

Well, eventually, of course, the Lord promised to destroy Ahab, Samaria, and the rest of the northern kingdom for their reprehensible behavior. You can read about this in the prophet Amos if you would like to.

Well, the Lord carries out his promises. In 722 BC, we know the exact year that this took place, the Lord raised up a terrifying might of the Assyrian empire. This empire was cruel, but effective in their conquests.

They demolished the northern kingdom. And the once glorious city of Samaria crumbled into ashes. But besides just their destructive prowess, there was something else that the Assyrians did that was unique in that time, but very effective.

They had a strategy of repopulating the territories that they conquered. That's what they did. So what the Assyrians would do is they would rip families apart from amongst the peoples that they defeated.

And they would take some of those individuals and place them into this territory, some and place them into another. They would have taken many of the Israelites, grabbed them, pulled them out, and put them into other cities throughout the Mesopotamian region.

And then they would have taken other conquered people groups and taken them from their Mesopotamian cities and brought them into Israel. And they had a justification for this. It was smart. It was intelligent, but again, cruel.

They wanted people to lose their religious, ethnic, racial, familial identities. And they wanted them to be separated from the land of their birth. Because in their thinking, again, it was wise. In their thinking, well, if people don't have that kind of common identity together, then they won't revolt against us.

And so what ended up happening after 722 BC is the Israelites in the north ended up being dispersed and spread throughout all of the other nations throughout the Middle East. And all the other nations of the Middle East were brought to live in the north.

And some of the Israelites remained and intermarried and were interwoven with these other people groups. And what ended up happening is the Samaritans, they became known to be the Samaritans, were born from that intermixing.

Believe it or not, there's actually still some Samaritan groups to this day if you travel to that region. So the interaction between the Jews and Judea, which were in the south, and the Samaritans in the north were cool, to say the least, and outright hostile at other points for the next 700 years.

We read about the Samaritans as adversaries in the reconstruction of the temple and the walls of Jerusalem in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. Records show constant land and trade disputes between the Samaritans and the Jews during the days of the Roman Empire.

One of the appeals even went all the way to Caesar in Rome. And he sided with the Jews and just had the Samaritan dissenters executed. So Samaritans didn't like Jews. Jews do not like Samaritans. So now we fast forward to this day, the day that Jesus is traveling through Samaria.

The Samaritans are considered to be a half-breed corrupted seed of Abraham by most in Israel. They are always considered to be ceremonially unclean and idolatrous. There might be some truth to this, but honestly, it was an unfair and inaccurate way to label all of the Samaritans as such.

A lot of the Samaritans by the time of Jesus were actually quite strict, believe it or not. Many of them were devoted to the worship of Yahweh. They did not accept the whole Old Testament as scripture, but they did accept the first five books.

They accepted the Pentateuch as scripture, the law of Moses. They observed food laws. They observed ceremonial cleanness. They had feast days in accordance with the Pentateuch. They practiced the Sabbath.

And they often did so with almost as much zeal and tenacity as the Pharisees, believe it or not. They did not embrace Jerusalem as the capital because that was not laid out in the first five books of the Bible.

They had their own Temple Mount on Mount Gerizim. I'll let Kendall talk about that one. But they did believe that a Messiah, one who was greater than Moses, was going to come. So they believed in the first five books.

They practiced a lot of the ceremonial. We read from Leviticus about slander. They would have taken that as authoritative. Many of them. I can't say all the Samaritans. It's so hard to lump an entire ethnic group together, but many of the Samaritans did.

And they believed that Yahweh was going to send a Messiah, a greater prophet, probably the way that they would have labeled him at that time. That's what sets the background for this discussion between Jesus and the woman.