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life of John's Gospel is to unending life, eternal life, and there is no Scripture that teaches
this will ever be experienced by those who reject the Son of God. Yet the One Who
called Himself the Truth (John 14: 6) declared that all that are in the graves shall hear
His voice and this must be universal or words are useless for revelation. But this
resurrection affects two classes, one to eternal life and the other to condemnation. The
latter cannot possibly refer to the unsaved because Christ states plainly that the saved
person has eternal life and "shall not come into condemnation but is passed from death
unto life" (5: 24). In this, as in all things, the only safe thing to do is to believe all that
God reveals in His Word. We shall then be saved from error and disappointment.
Chapter 4:
The chapter commences with Christ withdrawing from Judaea and returning to
Galilee. This was possibly in order to avoid a cleavage over the baptism of John and His
own, carried out by the disciples, which we have been considering, and also to avoid
bringing the coming conflict with the Pharisees to an issue yet. Thus He mainly avoids
Jerusalem and Judaea till the end. The authors of the Synoptic Gospels give us no details
of this early work in Perea (John 1: 19-51), Galilee, or Judaea (2: 13- 4: 2). The apostle
John supplements their records purposely:
"Now He had to go through Samaria. So He came to a town in Samaria called Sychar,
near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob's well was there, and
Jesus, tired as He was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about the sixth
hour" (4: 4-6, N.I.V.).
Samaria lay between Judaea and Galilee and the direct route to Galilee was through
Samaria, unless one was prepared to make a detour through Transjordan. In coming
south from Galilee travelers usually crossed the Jordan and came down through Perea to
avoid the hostility of the Samaritans to people who passed through their land to go to
Jerusalem for the Feasts. The Lord Jesus once experienced this bitterness on going to the
Feast of Tabernacles (Luke 9: 51-56).
At the disruption of Israel's kingdom after the death of Solomon, the ten tribes made
their capital city, Samaria, and built a rival Temple on Mount Gerizim. This made a deep
split between north and south which explains the statement, "Jews have no dealings with
Samaritans", especially as a Jew would run the risk of incurring ceremonial defilement by
having dealings with Samaria and its inhabitants.
It was about midday, if reckoned by sunrise, and Christ, feeling tired out by His long
walk, sat down on the well-side and feeling thirsty as well, asked a woman who had come
to draw water if she would give Him a drink (4: 7). The request amazed the woman, for
He would have to drink from her vessel, having none of His own, and this would have
risked ceremonial pollution, apart from the fact that no Jew would have bothered to speak
to a woman, and a Samaritan at that.