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Japanese Water means life in the Bible, the life only God can give. It also means washing from sin, which is why Christians baptize with it, and the gift of the Holy Spirit, whom Jesus called living water. Deep water and the flood mean the opposite, danger and death, and Scripture shows God ruling over them.
Most of those meanings meet in one complaint God makes through Jeremiah. He speaks of his people with grief: “they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water” (Jeremiah 2:13). We know those cisterns. We dig them out of money, praise, plans and pleasures, and they crack and leak. God calls himself the spring that keeps running, and all through Scripture water keeps bringing us back to him.
What is the “living water” in the Bible?
In Hebrew, “living water” is an everyday phrase, mayim chayyim. It means water that moves: a spring or a stream, as opposed to water that has been standing in a cistern. The same two words are translated “running water” in the law of cleansing (Numbers 19:17) and “springing water” for the well Isaac’s servants found (Genesis 26:19). When Jeremiah calls God “the fountain of living waters”, he takes that ordinary phrase and gives it to God himself.
Then the fountain comes to a well. Jesus is tired from his journey and sits on Jacob’s well about the sixth hour, the middle of the day, and a woman of Samaria comes to draw water. “Give me to drink,” he says (John 4:7). She is surprised that a Jew would ask a Samaritan for a drink, and he answers, “If thou knewest the gift of God, and who it is that saith to thee, Give me to drink; thou wouldest have asked of him, and he would have given thee living water” (John 4:10). She points out that he has nothing to draw with and the well is deep. He tells her, “Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again: But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life” (John 4:13–14).
The God whom Israel had left for broken cisterns sat down beside a woman with a water jar and asked her for a drink, so that he could give her a drink only he can give: his Spirit, as John explains three chapters later (John 7:39). John tells us what she did next: she “left her waterpot, and went her way into the city”, saying, “Come, see a man, which told me all things that ever I did: is not this the Christ?” (John 4:28–29). She came for water from the well and went home with the spring.
Is water a symbol of the Holy Spirit?
Yes, and the Gospel of John says so in plain words. On the last day of the feast of tabernacles, Jesus stood up and cried out, “If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink. He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.” John adds at once: “But this spake he of the Spirit, which they that believe on him should receive” (John 7:37–39).
The prophets had already joined the two. “I will pour water upon him that is thirsty, and floods upon the dry ground: I will pour my spirit upon thy seed, and my blessing upon thine offspring” (Isaiah 44:3). The Spirit is poured as water is poured, on dry ground and dry hearts. Jesus speaks of being “born of water and of the Spirit” (John 3:5). And the water he gives does not stay still. It flows out of the believer as “rivers of living water” (John 7:38), out to others.
Why does the Bible begin and end with water?
The King James Bible says “water” or “waters” 683 times, and the first time is in its second verse: “darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters” (Genesis 1:2). God divides the waters to make room for the sky and the dry land, and a river goes out of Eden “to water the garden” (Genesis 2:10). The early Christian writer Tertullian, in his book On Baptism, marvelled at it: “Water was the first to produce that which had life, that it might be no wonder in baptism if waters know how to give life.”
At the far end of the Bible the river comes back. John is shown “a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb” (Revelation 22:1). Ezekiel had seen a river like it, flowing out from under the threshold of the temple, and he was told that “every thing shall live whither the river cometh” (Ezekiel 47:9). Between Eden’s river and the river of the throne, God waters the earth with rain from heaven in its season, and every spring and stream in the land is his gift.
How is water a symbol of cleansing?
Washing comes into Israel’s worship from the start. A bronze basin stood between the tent of meeting and the altar, and the priests were to “wash their hands and their feet” there before they served, “that they die not” (Exodus 30:19–21). Someone who had touched the dead was cleansed with ashes and “running water”, sprinkled on them with a branch of hyssop on the third day and the seventh (Numbers 19:17–19). Even here the water had to be living water: the Hebrew of “running water” is the same phrase Jeremiah used of God. Washing could heal the body too. Naaman, a Syrian general with leprosy, “dipped himself seven times in Jordan… and his flesh came again like unto the flesh of a little child, and he was clean” (2 Kings 5:14).
Israel learned from these washings to ask God for a cleaner heart than water can reach. David prays in his psalm of repentance, “Wash me throughly from mine iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin,” and, “Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow” (Psalm 51:2, 7). And through Ezekiel God promises the washing he alone can give: “Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean… A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you” (Ezekiel 36:25–26).
What does the water of baptism mean?
Christian baptism gathers all of these meanings into one act. It is washing: God saved us “by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost” (Titus 3:5). It is burial and rising: “we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:4). Peter even sees it in Noah’s ark, in which “eight souls were saved by water. The like figure whereunto even baptism doth also now save us” (1 Peter 3:20–21).
Very early, Christians were told that any water would do. The Didache, a short manual of Christian practice from the late first or early second century, tells believers to baptize “in living water. But if you have not living water, baptize into other water”. Running water came first, as in the old law of cleansing, but no one was to be kept from baptism for want of a stream.
Churches differ on what baptism does, and each says it in its own words. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that “Through Baptism we are freed from sin and reborn as sons of God” (paragraph 1213). Luther’s Small Catechism, used by Lutherans, asks, “How can water do such great things?” and answers, “It is not the water indeed that does them, but the word of God which is in and with the water, and faith, which trusts such word of God in the water.” The Southern Baptist confession, the Baptist Faith and Message, calls baptism “the immersion of a believer in water” and “an act of obedience symbolizing the believer’s faith in a crucified, buried, and risen Saviour”. The verses each tradition reads are gathered in Bible verses about baptism.
Why do deep waters stand for danger in the Bible?
Water gives life, and water also drowns. The psalmist cries, “Save me, O God; for the waters are come in unto my soul. I sink in deep mire, where there is no standing: I am come into deep waters, where the floods overflow me” (Psalm 69:1–2). In Noah’s day “the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth” (Genesis 7:19). At the Red Sea they stood back for Israel, who “walked upon dry land in the midst of the sea; and the waters were a wall unto them on their right hand, and on their left” (Exodus 14:29), and then they “returned, and covered the chariots, and the horsemen, and all the host of Pharaoh” (Exodus 14:28). The Catechism puts the two sides of water together: “If water springing up from the earth symbolizes life, the water of the sea is a symbol of death and so can represent the mystery of the cross” (paragraph 1220).
The disciples were afraid of the storm, and they were more afraid after it, when Jesus stood up in their boat and “said unto the sea, Peace, be still. And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm.” “They feared exceedingly,” Mark says, and asked one another, “What manner of man is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?” (Mark 4:39, 41). The sea that frightened them was his. God does not promise that we will never go down into deep water. He promises to be there with us: “When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee” (Isaiah 43:2). And in the new creation John sees, “there was no more sea” (Revelation 21:1).
Even baptism holds that danger. Luther wrote that baptism signifies “that the old Adam in us should, by daily contrition and repentance, be drowned and die with all sins and evil lusts”. In baptism the water that drowns becomes the water that gives life.
Why did water come out of the rock?
In the wilderness the people were so thirsty that Moses cried to God, “they be almost ready to stone me” (Exodus 17:4). God told him, “thou shalt smite the rock, and there shall come water out of it, that the people may drink” (Exodus 17:6). Paul says of that day that Israel “drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them: and that Rock was Christ” (1 Corinthians 10:4). At the cross, the Rock was struck. “One of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side, and forthwith came there out blood and water” (John 19:34).
Does water in a dream have a biblical meaning?
No verse in the Bible says what water means in a dream, and it would be unkind to pretend otherwise. What Scripture does say about water is all here: God gives it, cleanses with it, pours out his Spirit like it, and rules over its depths. If a dream of deep or rushing water has stayed with you, there is more in what the Bible says about dreaming of floods, and the promise of Isaiah 43:2 holds just as surely when we are awake.
Jesus said that whoever gives “a cup of cold water only” to one of his little ones “shall in no wise lose his reward” (Matthew 10:42). So the gift goes on in our own kitchens, at a bedside or at the door, every time we hand someone a glass of water in his name. We can give it gladly, because we have been given so much more. The Bible’s last invitation is spoken to every one of us who is still thirsty: “let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely” (Revelation 22:17).
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