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every phase of God's gracious purpose in each sphere of blessing is provided for, for
which we give Him thanks.
#26. The Testimony in Jerusalem, Judaea and Samaria (2: 13-4: 42).
SAMARIA.
"The hour cometh." Dispensational changes, true worship,
and the purpose of John's Gospel illuminated (4: 3 - 42).
pp. 139 - 143
As the subject is of such importance to all believers, we postponed until the present
article examination of the Lord's teaching in John 4: concerning the nature of worship.
The commencement of the argument is upon a low plane; it deals with the conflicting
claims of Mount Gerizim in Samaria, and Jerusalem in Judæa, but in the hand of the Lord
the matter is soon raised to a higher realm and, by the addition of the words "and now is",
is made applicable to the period that followed the destruction of the temple in A.D.70.
The argument falls into two parts: (1) the woman's question, and (2) The Lord's
answer.
"Our fathers worship in this mountain; and ye say, that in Jerusalem is the place
where men ought to worship" (John 2: 20).
The words "the place where" reveal the heart of the question; it was a matter of "in"
this mountain or "in" Jerusalem.
From the point of view of Phil. 3: 3, any localizing of the worship of God, or
holding one "place" as more sacred than another, seems childish, but we must not
wrongly divide the word of truth. In the older dispensation it was a matter of extreme
importance to be sure of the "place" of acceptable worship.
"Unto the place which the Lord your God shall choose out of all your tribes to put
His Name there, even unto His habitation shall ye seek, and thither thou shalt come"
(Deut. 12: 5).
In Deut. 27: 4, the Samaritan Pentateuch reads "Gerizim", where the Hebrew reads
"Ebal", and it is this falsification of the original that was at the bottom of most of the
controversy between the Samaritans and the Jews in the matter of worship.
In Neh. 13: 28 we read that the grandson of the high priest Eliashib was banished by
Nehemiah because he was the son-in-law of Sanballat, and Josephus tells us that this man
fled to Samaria, where his father-in-law made him high priest of the temple which he had
built at Gerizim. There was also a revolt of other Jews who had married strange wives,
consequently there would be a strong temptation to justify themselves by altering the