Lesson 5: “The Testimony of the Samaritans”
COLLEEN TINKER | Editor, Proclamation! Magazine
Problems with this lesson:
- The lesson treats Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman as an example of how to do cross-cultural evangelism rather than a revelation of God and His Christ.
- Jesus reveals the true nature of God, of man, and of true worship—the lesson misses the implications.
- The lesson misses the point that Jesus is preparing His disciples for their church-planting work outside the borders of Israel.
The story of the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4 contains one of the most profound theological truths in the New Testament. The fact that the Lord Jesus spoke alone with a woman, let alone a Samaritan, that He told her the true nature of God and of true worship and that He revealed that He was the Christ is shocking. Further, Jesus is preparing His disciples to minister to those who were legally considered “unclean” within the context of Jewish law.
The lesson presents this account from an inside-out perspective, presenting Jesus as teaching effective “marketing” techniques, if you will, and seeing Him as a teacher of effective witnessing strategies. Read in context, however, Jesus was revealing that the work He came to do extended to those outside true Judaism. He wasn’t demonstrating how to practice reciprocity in order to “validate” others and make them feel valued. He was, instead, revealing the truth of who He was and was teaching His disciples that He Himself was the Door, the Way, and the Truth that would change people from unbelieving pagans into worshipers of God. They would carry that truth into the regions outside Judea after His ascension as they made disciples in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the uttermost parts of the earth.
Not An Example of Witnessing Techniques
The Teachers Comments develop the central focus of this week’s lesson: that Jesus came to demonstrate how to practice reciprocity in cross-cultural ministry as a means of building bridges and validating those who would normally look with suspicion upon the “missionary”.
The lesson correctly gives the background of the Samaritans—and this historical reality is important to understand how significant this exchange really was.
Samaria had been the capital city of the northern kingdom of Israel after the kingdom divided into two separate nations: the southern kingdom of Judah (which consisted of the tribes of Judah and Benjamin) was the location where Jerusalem was. The northern kingdom of Israel (which consisted of the rest of the ten tribes) became the first place where Israelites officially incorporated golden calf worship into their worship of Yahweh.
Israel, the northern kingdom, spun into apostasy and idolatry immediately after the separation of the two nations; in fact, the first king of northern Israel, Jeroboam, was the first person to set up false centers of worship (going against the law of God—His command that Israelites go to Jerusalem for Passover, Pentecost, and the Day of Atonement was never abrogated). Furthermore, Jeroboam established a false, non-levitical priesthood and set up golden calves at his illegitimate altars at Bethel and Dan.
In the entire history of the northern kingdom, there were no good, godly kings, and because their apostasy became so dark, God allowed the nation of Assyria to capture Israel and to exile the population in 722 BC. The exiled Israelites were never regathered in Israel, and they ultimately became assimilated with the Assyraians and Mesopotamians who were brought into Israel to inhabit the land.
The Samaritans, as the half-breed Jews mixed with the local Canaanites and pagans became known, worshiped God, but their Scriptures only contained the five Books of Moses. They rejected the prophets and the rest of the Old Testament, so, even though they were expecting a Messiah, they knew very little about Him. Because they rejected the prophetic books which God gave the prophets from Judah, they thought that the Messiah would primarily be a teacher. Their worship was a syncretism of Judaism and Canaanite idolatry.
By the first century, the Jews of Judea avoided the Samaritans as unclean in the same way they regarded the gentiles as unclean. This reaction was not simply an ethnic sensitivity; it was based on the law’s prohibitions of eating and associating with non-Jews. The law had established that the Jews could not have intimate, personal relationships with non-Jews as God’s protection of the godly Seed which He had promised Abraham would come through the promised son Isaac.
The Samaritans and the Jews had a history of hostility and sabotage of one another after the Babylonian exile of the Jews ended and they returned to the land, so the two groups viewed each other as enemies. Yet these historic hostilities were not merely cultural but were spiritual as well.
The lesson, though treats Jesus’ meeting with he Samaritan woman as an example of cross-cultural ministry and overcoming racial tensions. We read this on page 67 of the Teachers Comments:
Jesus practiced reciprocity in His ministry, for He was willing to give and receive help. Such an approach is an effective way to validate others and help them to feel worthwhile and needed. Contemplate how effective this approach proved to be with the Samaritan woman. Jesus asked her for a simple drink of water, which she could provide, and He reciprocated with the gift of the Water of Life, which He alone could give. Then the woman, in turn, shared this good news with her people, and the entire town came to meet Jesus and to believe in Him.
Similarly, our witness should spread from one person to many in ever-widening spheres of influence.
The discussion of Jesus’ practice of reciprocity is followed by these thought questions on page 68:
What hindrances to our witness do we encounter in our inter-personal contacts with others, such as neighbors, colleagues, and friends? What roles, if any, do different languages, racial backgrounds, cultural customs, and economic status have in impacting our witness? How can God help us to overcome such obstacles? How can the example of Jesus greatly help us in this regard?
This shifting of the account in John 4 to make it be an example of overcoming racial tensions completely misses the point. Of course, Adventism does not have the true gospel, and it cannot deal with the real message of the Lord Jesus as He deliberately revealed Truth to a non-Jewish woman and her entire town.
Jesus brought spiritual life and truth to this woman who, He revealed, had an immoral life and reputation. She—and all of her people—expected the Messiah, but they had an incomplete understanding of who He was. Jesus literally revealed Himself to this woman—the only person in the Bible to whom Jesus directly identified Himself as the Messiah before His arrest.
His mission to this woman and to the Samaritan town was for the purpose of His own self-revelation, not for the purpose of teaching the disciples how to ingratiate themselves to them, making them feel “valuable” and validated by accepting hospitality from them. In fact, Jesus made it clear that he was not in need of food; He was being nourished by doing the work of God among them. He was showing them that God had come to them—and He was not demonstrating a form of social manipulation.
Who Is God—and Who Are We?
Perhaps the most important thing we former Adventists learn from this account of Jesus with the Samaritan woman at the well is His clear statement of the nature of God and the nature of true worship.
We have frequently discussed Adventism’s physicalism, the Adventist belief that God has a body and that humans are merely bodies that breathe. In fact, Adventism teaches that humans do not have immaterial spirits that are separate from our bodies; they say that the human spirit is merely breath—literally the air in our lungs that keeps us alive and moving.
When people die, they say, that breath is the spirit that returns to God; the person actually ceases to exist, and God retains the memory of the person’s personality in His memory and essentially downloads His memory of the person into the person’s resurrection body when He returns.
This physicalist belief alters Adventism’s understanding of what it means to have a “sinful nature”, of the nature of Christ, and of the nature of salvation. Since the Adventist worldview says that man is purely physical, then sin is also physical; it is passed on in corrupted DNA and degraded gene pools through the generations, and people are born with “propensities” to sin. Salvation, therefore, requires “accepting Jesus” and somehow relying on His power to become increasingly obedient to the law. Since sin is acquired physically and not by inheriting a spirit that is dead in sin, then salvation is also essentially physical: gaining greater and greater power through the Holy Spirit to avoid giving in to temptation and obeying more and more perfectly.
This physicalism further supports Adventism’s doctrine that the seventh-day Sabbath is necessary for salvation. Adventists will say that keeping the Sabbath is not necessary to be saved, but they would also say they would deliberately give up their possibility of salvation if they deliberately stopped keeping the Sabbath. Thus obedience to the fourth commandment is central to the Adventist “plan of salvation”. True worship, therefore, requires the observance of a specific day, and that created portion of time is considered eternally holy. A physical god and a physical humanity depends upon physical obedience in order to accomplish salvation.
Jesus, however, turned this teaching upside down at Jacob’s well. Not only did He reveal one of the most profound revelations of the nature of God to a woman, but He delivered it to a Samaritan woman who lived an immoral life! The lesson makes much of the fact that Jesus revealed He was the Messiah to her—and that is significant, but even more than that, Jesus revealed to her one of the most powerful facts that shatters cultic teaching about God. Here is what He said:
Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe Me, an hour is coming when neither in this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But an hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers.
“God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.”—John 4:21–24 LSB
Jesus first reminded this woman that the Jews had the truth about the Messiah. He was a Jew, and the Samaritans did not even know who or what they were worshiping. She had asked Jesus if Mt. Gerazim, a holy site to the Samaritans, was the proper place to worship, or if Jerusalem were the proper place. Jesus upended all the suppositions.
He reminded her that salvation is from the Jews—He Himself was a Jew and the Messiah, as He would reveal later—but then He said an amazing thing that shattered even the Jews’ understanding. He said that “an hour is coming, and now is, when true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers.”
In other words, because He had come, a new era of worship had entered the world: true worshipers would not have to gather in holy places—nor, we must add, during holy times. Jesus was ushering in new worship requirements. Days and places would no longer be holy, and people would not be required to worship by gathering in specific places at specific times.
Then Jesus said the most amazing thing: “God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.”
In one sentence Jesus destroyed the idea that God is physical! God is spirit. Furthermore, humans have immaterial spirits! If we are to worship in spirit and truth, then we must be worshiping our God who is spirit with spirits of our own that are made in His image. In fact, if we are created in God’s image and He is NOT physical, then our likeness of Him cannot be physical, either.
True worship is not linked to holy creations of time or space. True worship occurs in the human spirit that has been brought to life through belief in the Lord Jesus. The only true worship of the only true God occurs in the human immaterial spirit which is created in the image of God who is spirit.
Amazingly, Jesus revealed this profound statement of identity to a non-Jewish woman!
Jesus Is For the World
Finally, the Samaritan woman, convicted that the Lord Jesus must be the Messiah and convinced that He knew what only God could know—the secrets of her life—she ran back to her village and told them everything about Jesus. They came to Him and invited Him to stay and teach them. Many of them were convicted that He was the Messiah:
And many more believed because of His word; and they were saying to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves and know that this One is truly the Savior of the world.”—John 4:41, 42 LSB
In the middle of this account, Jesus told His disciples that His food was to do His Father’s will, and He compared the people who were ready to be harvested for the kingdom of God to a grain field that was ripe for harvest. He also emphasized that every one of His laborers in the harvest field of the world was equally important, but their jobs were different:
“For in this [case] the saying is true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’ I sent you to reap that for which you have not labored; others have labored and you have entered into their labor.”—John 4:37, 38 LSB
The Lord Jesus was preparing His disciples for their work in planting the church. He included them in His ministry in Samaria, and He allowed them to see how the true knowledge of Jesus changed even these non-Jews who had been hostile to Judaism.
The true gospel of the Lord Jesus and His death for our sins according to Scripture, His burial, and His resurrection on the third day would yield a huge harvest in the world, and His disciples would be part of planting that harvest.
This visit was not about cultural manipulation; it was about the fact that the truth of the Messiah is the power of God for salvation to those who believe.
Furthermore, this encounter contains the central truth that the Lord God is spirit, and that we have spirits in His image that must worship Him. Even more, it is not enough to worship Him with faulty understanding, as the Samaritans had. They—and we—must worship God in spirit and in truth.
Holding to a false understanding of who God is and who we are does not yield true worship. God alone has the authority to declare what true worship looks like, and Jesus revealed that with His coming, true worship would no longer be associated with holy places or times. It is something that occurs in the human spirit that has been born again through belief in the Lord Jesus.
If you have not believed in the real Jesus and His finished atonement accomplished through His death on the cross as He became sin for us—if you have not believed that He paid for your sin in full and that He rose from the dead because His blood was sufficient to pay for your sin, you need to believe.
Admit that you are a sinner and that you have held yourself above the plain truth of the Lord Jesus.
Bring your sin to Him, and ask Him to be your Savior. Trust His finished work and receive His life in your own spirit. Let Him transfer you out of the domain of darkness into the kingdom of the beloved Son, and you will know what it means to have your spirit brought to life in Him. Believe today, and you will know what it means to be rescued from your sin and to enter eternal life today.†
This weekly feature is dedicated to Adventists who are looking for biblical insights into the topics discussed in the Sabbath School lesson quarterly. We post articles which address each lesson as presented in the Sabbath School Bible Study Guide, including biblical commentary on them. We hope you find this material helpful and that you will come to know Jesus and His revelation of Himself in His word in profound biblical ways.
- We Got Mail - October 31, 2024
- November 2–8, 2024 - October 31, 2024
- We Got Mail - October 24, 2024