Broken Cisterns: Forsaking God and Finding Empty Substitutes
Welcome to this week’s message. You can also watch the full sermon video embedded directly below. Today’s Scripture centers on Jeremiah 2:13 and the haunting image of “broken cisterns.” What does it mean when people forsake the living God and try to create their own sources of meaning, belonging, and worth? What and read below!
Idolatry in Scripture: Turning from the Living God
Question:
Will people make their own gods?
Answer:
Yes. But they are not gods.
Jeremiah 16:20 (NIV)
In other words:
For although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man—and birds and four-footed animals and creeping things… And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a debased mind, to do those things which did not improve their lives…
Romans 1:21-23, 28
In other words:
All we like sheep have gone astray; We have turned, every one, to his own way; And the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.
Isaiah 53:6
In other words:
But these, like natural brute beasts made to be caught and destroyed, speak evil of the things they do not understand… enticing unstable souls, [with] hearts trained in greediness… They have forsaken the right way and gone astray… These are wells without water, clouds carried by a tempest… For with great sounding and empty speeches, they appeal to the base nature of humanity… Promising freedom, they themselves live as slaves to corruption; for people are slaves to whatever has mastered them.
2 Peter 2:12-19
In other words:
And they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top is in the heavens; let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad over the face of all the earth.” And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men had built. And the Lord said, “Indeed the people are one and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do; now nothing that they propose to do will be impossible. … So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they ceased building the city. Therefore its name is called Babel…
Genesis 11:4-9
In other words:
And then the lawless one will be revealed… with all power, signs, and lying wonders… because they refused the love of the truth, that could have saved them. So God will send them a strong delusion, and they will believe the lie…
2 Thessalonians 2:8-11
In other words:
The serpent was the most crafty of the creatures which the Lord God had made. And he said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree of the garden’?”
And the woman said to the serpent, “No, we may eat the fruit of the trees of the garden; It’s just the tree in the center of the garden that God said, ‘You shall not eat it, nor shall you touch it, lest you die.’ ”
Then the serpent said to the woman, “No, you won’t die. For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and pleasing to look at, and desirable to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate. She also gave to her husband with her, and he ate. And their eyes were opened… But all they saw was their own weakness…
Genesis 3:1-7 (my paraphrase)
In other words:
When you are invited … to a wedding feast, do not sit down in the best place, because one more honorable than you may have been invited; and then your host may come and say to you, ‘Give up your seat to this man.’ So, in shame, you will have to move to the worst seat… For whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.
Luke 14:7-11 (this morning)
In other words:
See if there has ever been such a thing before: Nations do not forsake their gods even when they are not real gods. But My people have exchanged their actual Glory for empty things that do not even make their lives better. Be astonished by this, O heavens, and be terribly afraid…
Jeremiah 2:10-12 (this morning – my paraphrase)
In other words:
For I do not do the good things that I want to do; but harmful things—these I keep doing. Now if I do the things I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. I find as a rule, then, that evil is present with me—a person who wants to do good. For I delight in the law of God… But I see another law in myself, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin… with the mind I serve the law of God, but with the body the law of sin.
Who will deliver me from this body of death? I thank God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!
Romans 7:19-25 (my paraphrase)
Or, in other words:
My people have committed two evils:
They have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters,
And made for themselves cisterns—broken cisterns that can hold no water.
Jeremiah 2:13 (this morning)
The Double-Edged Sin: Forsaking God and Broken Cisterns
Broken cisterns—or the other title for this morning’s sermon was always “the double-edged sin…” A reference to this thing that just automatically happens when we allow something else to take control of our lives—something, anything, really, that is not God.
The Dark Presence in Scripture and Human Desire
In what has become probably his best known—non-Narnia—work, Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis makes the comment that, when he finally did sit down and read the Bible, he was surprised by how insistent it was about there being a “dark presence” at work in this world…
And here’s the thing—you don’t have to call that dark presence Satan. You don’t have to believe that an individual creature we know as “the devil” actually exists. You can take these stories literally or not—Christian faith is not dependent on the literal reality of these concepts. In fact, I would argue that the stubborn clinging to the idea of a literal Satan has distracted us in the past from the fuller message these stories meant to get across to us…
Because the “dark presence” presented in the bible as at work in this world—the “law of the flesh” that Paul speaks about in Romans, this thing that controls him even though he does not want or choose to be controlled by it—is in fact bigger, in the bible, than the devil.
And if Satan does exist as an actual, literal being, then he is just another servant of the Dark Presence—not its entirety. And we see that, in fact, in what has become “Satan’s origin story,” Genesis 3, where the snake is just “the cleverest of the creatures God made”—not some all pervasive presence of darkness compelling or forcing the woman into sin…
Human Desire and the Fall in Genesis 3
No, the woman makes her own choices beneath that tree in Eden. And notice, the way in which the story is worded, it is her own desire—egged on by the serpent, yes—but her own desire, already present in her—this “other law” warring against the law of God that Paul describes—not some power that the snake somehow created or unleashed, but the woman’s own desire to “become like God” and the naivete to think that is actually possible is what actually pushes humanity over that line into sin.
So, what is this dark presence? If we can’t just conveniently blame everything on the devil, then on what do we blame evil? And what in the world does any of this have to do with “broken cisterns” and trying to make yourself look more important than you are at a dinner party?
Let alone all those other verses I just brought up…
Broken Cisterns: Choosing Substitutes for God
“My people have committed two evils:
They have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters,
And made for themselves cisterns—broken cisterns that can hold no water.”
Jeremiah 2:13
This is the doubled-edged sin, the thing that leads automatically to the other thing. Because let’s look at what’s happening here, two evils—
Forsaking God, which can take many forms, but boils down to any way in which God is decentralized from your life…
And digging broken cisterns…
And, okay, let’s understand first that the cistern thing is not meant literally. Any more than God is a literal water fountain. The point of the verse is that, walking away from God the metaphorical source of living water, human beings still need water—still need the things that they would otherwise get from God—and so they are forced by the first evil to “dig” the second evil, cisterns which are in ground repositories for water—but when people dig these repositories for themselves, the repositories end up broken…
And look at all the other verses I gave you this morning, and they all follow the same pattern. God is decentralized as a source of meaning and belonging and purpose, and people are left scrambling to find their own systems of meaning and purpose, and into that vacuum, the dark presence inevitably sweeps in and takes control.
Because one of the great insights from early Christian theology that we would be wise to recover is that this dark presence in the universe is exactly that—a Void.
A nothingness.
Where meaning and purpose cannot exist, because the source of existence itself has been turned away from.
When we walk away from the meaning provided by God, we are forced to make our own meaning.
When we walk away from the belonging we find in God, we are forced to find our own belonging.
When we walk away from the justice of God, we are forced to make our own justice.
When we walk away from the value God gives us, we are forced to prove our own value, and this all inevitably leads to futile and embarrassing situations like trying to prove your worth and worthiness by taking a seat at the head table at a wedding reception even though you are not part of the wedding party…
And you know if we were not seeing the actual living proof of all of this right now today in real time I would be tempted to follow the more liberal branches in the church which say we should not hold ourselves so tightly to the idea that all meaning is found in God and we should try to embrace and accept and acknowledge other forms of meaning and purpose in life. But The thing is, we’ve tried this experiment.
The Grand Experiment of Self-Made Truth
My entire lifetime has been a grand experiment in “make your own truth” “follow your own heart pursue” “your own dreams at the expense of anything else…” These aren’t new or novel concepts to me. This is in fact what I was raised with…
And now my generation is raising children, my generation is now looking at the 20 something year old generation, and what we’re seeing is the horrifying conclusion of this experiment. The mental health crisis, the loneliness epidemic, the inability to find romantic partners or even friends, the extreme animosity and hatred that both sides of the political spectrum display toward each other the inability to listen or even accept that other people have an opinion separate from your own—an ironic conclusion for the generation that was told truth is relative and pursue your own truth but it is the conclusion that we’ve come to. Moral relativism has not in fact resulted in everyone being able to get along better, the actual result has been: hate anyone who disagrees with your truth.
Addiction: The Modern Broken Cistern
The single largest symptom of decentralizing God from our lives.
Addiction.
And not just addiction to illegal drugs not just addiction to alcohol those things are prevalent and a huge problem.
But there’s so many other forms of addiction too that have taken control of our entire society. Food, pornography, swearing and other forms of lazy speech, lazy entertainment, lazy living…
And now AI.
A disturbingly large number of people are now in emotional, romantic relationships with artificial intelligence… If you think about it it’s really just another form of pornography.
And here’s something fun… I was using the dictation software in Microsoft Word to write this sermon—so I was speaking the words aloud and it was writing them in the text writer. And it would not write out the word “pornography.” It replaced it with all asterisks.
Our technology in which we have placed so much trust and hope and meaning, literally is not allowing us to talk about the very things that are most negatively affecting our lives.
Censorship on the internet is very real, and it is not the government doing it. It’s our own social platforms, under the banner of inclusion and freedom of expression…
If that’s not an example of a broken cistern I don’t know what it is.
The Bible’s Witness About Addiction
One thing that has struck me recently, just from the texts that we have been reading in worship on Sundays this summer, is just how much the bible actually has to say on the subject of addiction. Even though there’s no word for addiction in the bible—even though the concept of addiction as we know it did not really exist in the ancient world. There was certainly no concept of it being some kind of medical or psychological condition…
And yet a very accurate portrayal of the what we now understand as addiction is portrayed throughout the bible, for more frequently than I realized even a few months ago.
In fact, I’m now tempted to say that the main conception of sin in the bible may boil down to this concept of addiction. And when I think about it, that’s not really a new notion to me. It’s something I’ve had in my head for a while—I just hadn’t really thought through the terminology yet…
But it makes a lot of sense to me because I think we were created to be dependent on a lot of things to be reminded that we are not self-contained entities in the universe, we are dependent on our environment on precise measurements of pressure and heat and cold and gravity… we are dependent on oxygen on food on water…
there’s a reason God is so often compared to oxygen and food and water.
Because in addition to these physical dependencies we are also dependent on things emotionally intellectually and spiritually. We are addicted to the concept that there is justice in this world. We are addicted to the concept that there is meaning in life. And when we remove God as the source of justice and meaning we have to fill that void somehow.
And we end up filling our lives with things that do not actually improve our lives. That’s what the great 40 year experiment now has proven.
And here’s the thing you know as Christians as the church we cannot expect the outside world to know or accept or acknowledge or live by any of this. I’ve come to the conclusion, personally, that convincing the outside world of the error of its ways is just not my job—not right now, at least. My operational concern in life, at least right now, is the church, and the tragic degree to which we have decentralized God from our churches.
The Church and the Broken Cistern of Politics
And this is a universal church problem. Both liberal and conservative extremes in positions of political or academic power of the church have dug cisterns for themselves, decentralized God from what they are doing. And now all churches everywhere are living with the aftermath.
This is not a liberal problem this is not a conservative problem this is a both end problem both the liberal and conservative spectrums in the church have found their own ways in the modern world to decentralize God to make other things more important to dig cisterns for themselves and now our pews are empty our name is mocked openly literally everywhere and we spend all our time now even now trying to get back in the good graces of the world rather than stepping back and thinking wait what do we have to fix in ourselves before we even talk about them.
Ironically, the number one thing that both conservatives and liberals have put in the place of God the number one broken cistern that we have dug in the modern age in this country, is politics. So, I don’t know, maybe the first step is to acknowledge that this is an all of us problem, that this is something we all have to fix, take a breath, and figure out how we personally can do better, before even talking to or about the other side.
Finding True Worth and Belonging in God
Because if there is one takeaway here, one thing I encourage you to keep with you this week, it is that: That it all starts on the individual level, on you finding your personal worth and belonging in God First. And from there, it spreads to communicating to other people how they can find their worth in God too—but it has to start with each one of us, inside ourselves.
Conclusion
The Bible’s warnings about broken cisterns are as urgent today as they were in Jeremiah’s time. When we forsake God, we end up filling the void with addictions, ideologies, and broken systems that cannot give life. But in Jesus Christ we are invited back to the true fountain of living waters.
If this message encouraged you, I invite you to read more of my sermons on the Sermons category page.
