WHERE THE WATER OF LIFE FLOWS
CHANNELS AND WATERSHEDS
“He who believes in Me, as the Scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.” But this He spoke concerning the Spirit, whom those believing in Him would receive… (John 7:38-39a)
Though autonomous and diverse in its working, the Spirit of God is also restrained and channeled through Jesus’ followers. One strong analogy in Scripture is that of the flow of water; the Spirit is the living water, and you and I are its channels. In this month’s essay I would like to explore two extensions of this metaphor: 1) the formation of a channel and its course, and 2) the concept of the watershed.
The prevailing view of old-earth geologists throughout has been the “uniformitarian” interpretation of canyon and riverbed formation. Overlooking catastrophic events such as Noah’s Flood or relatively recent ice-age melt-off dynamics, these geologists have explained major canyon and river systems as the product of gradual, million-year processes. For example, the Colorado River, though miniscule as compared to the Grand Canyon, is given credit for forming this vast chasm over millions of years. A similar story is repeated at visitor centers and roadside reader boards for numerous natural formations, whether canyons, petrified forests, limestone caves, or fault-block mountains: Slow processes, huge time spans.
Though such uniformitarian explanations have opposed those with a biblical creation/flood understanding, even long-age geologists are now incorporating catastrophic events to help reconcile the actual evidence. These “neo-catastrophists” are seldom affable to a biblical timeline or a worldwide flood, yet they recognize that even millions of years would not account for many of these features. As a case in point: if the Colorado River had run its present course, it would have had to erode uphill through the Kaibab Upwarp. The uniformitarian explanation for this is that erosion began before the region uplifted, and then continued ever so slowly as the region uplifted in sync, never outpacing the work of the river. And this fortuitous event occurred uninterrupted for tens of millions of years. Other geologists that admit this too fanciful have devised explanations involving ancient lakes and new-versus-old sections of the river merging due to more rapid events. These are closer to the truth but still incorporate long ages.
The fact is that more reasonable explanations are emerging for these major features, involving large bodies of water suddenly breaching natural dams. Picture a little lake built out of sand on the beach; as soon as one of its retaining walls is compromised, the water rushes out and erodes a channel backwards to the stored water, and the flow accelerates exponentially until the water is drained to a much lower level. Such “backwasting” or “sapping” events are regarded increasingly as the mechanism for the formation the Grand Canyon, the Columbia River Gorge, the chasm of Victoria Falls in southern Africa, and so on. Large U-shaped canyons (as opposed to V-shaped, which uniform flow would produce), 
especially when cut through hard rock, indicate that rivers often follow rather than form the channel in which they flow. As Elihu said in Job 38: “Who cuts a channel for the torrents of rain, and a path for the thunderstorm, to water a land where no man lives, a desert with no-one in it, to satisfy a desolate wasteland and make it sprout with grass?” (vv. 25-27, NIV) The Psalmist also pronounced it: “You who laid the foundations of the earth, So that it should not be moved forever, You covered it with the deep as with a garment; The waters stood above the mountains. At Your rebuke they fled; At the voice of Your thunder they hastened away. They went up over the mountains; They went down into the valleys, To the place which You founded for them” (Psalm 104:5-8).
Though I could say more on the so-called “young earth” aspects of this, I briefly bring it up here to bear upon the spiritual aspect of you and I as channels of the Holy Spirit. We are each created and regenerated purposefully for God’s water of life to flow through us. The Spirit does not etch out our destiny by slowly taking the path of least resistance, but rather, He gets right to work on us. We might say that our acceptance of Jesus Christ was the initial catastrophic event, destructive to the old life, which made a new way for Him to flow. Sure, the River continues to carve and take some debris away, but, truth be told, it is the floods and torrents that ensure that the River runs the right course. We’ve all been overwhelmed, and God works through the seeming chaos.
One of the world’s renowned watercourses is not natural at all, but the product of human engineering: Jerusalem’s ancient aqueduct, built by King Hezekiah, is mentioned as a significant accomplishment or landmark in 2 Kings 18:17, 20:20, 2 Chronicles 32:30, Isaiah 7:3, and 36:2. Likewise today, the Panama Canal, the Suez Canal, the canal connecting Lake Superior with the southern Great Lakes chain, the aqueducts running water into New York City, and the massive pipe from the High Sierras supplying Los Angeles County all exemplify the purposeful channeling of water. So whichever channel formation metaphor we prefer: God’s erosive torrent carving a canyon, or of His engineered brilliance crafting a canal or aqueduct, we realize that we don’t so much follow a course in life, we are that course—a channel, created to simply allow the River of Life to flow through us.
What is mind-boggling, furthermore, is how so many natural channels of water converge along their way into other channels, producing larger and larger flows of water. Seen from the air or on a map, a river system looks much like plant roots uprooted and laid on their side. Rivers seldom divide and take separate courses, and if they do, those courses usually merge again. Rather, small streams merge into larger ones, and into small rivers, and ultimately much larger ones. A region can be well defined physically (and often politically) by the entire “catchment area,” also known as a “drainage basin” or “watershed.” (Technically, the watershed is the boundary, such as the mount
ain ridge system that contains the catchment area, but typically “watershed” is used to denote the whole area.) The mainland United States has 18 major watersheds, or in a broader sense, three major areas: water flowing east of the Continental Divide into the Atlantic Ocean or Gulf of Mexico, water flowing west of the Divide into the Pacific Ocean, and water flowing west of the Divide and east of the Pacific into the Great Basin. The world’s largest watershed is the Amazon Basin, draining 4.2 million cubic feet of water per second into the Atlantic Ocean (over 48 Olympic-sized swimming pools per second!). It is mind-boggling to think that a single cupful of water from the mouth of the Amazon River contains water molecules from thousands and thousands of streams, many over 1500 miles away. And though much smaller, the Columbia River mouth at Astoria, Oregon is a collection of water from Jackson Lake, Wyoming, Flathead Lake, Montana, parts of Nevada, most of Washington and Oregon, and several hundred miles into British Columbia, Canada.
More than any artificial or natural criterion, the watershed concept best defines a common geographic area. The Amazon Basin is nothing like the Mississippi River Basin, and neither is similar to Germany’s Rhine region, or Eastern Europe’s Baltic Sea drainage basin. Spiritually, Christ-confessing churches are like watersheds: the biblical “church” is universal or local, not to be divided or associated along doctrine or practice. The universal church is every believer everywhere, throughout time, whereas the local church is contiguous. The collection of believers in a given region, or more specifically, among a people group, must work together—and indeed do flow together, whether or not this is recognized. Pristine waters, polluted waters, cleansing wetlands, gentle, rushing, ground, surface, intermittent, and perpetual waters all converge. The confluences of the Holy Spirit take on unique “geographies” as it were, throughout this planet. God’s churches throughout Earth are all watersheds of the same Spirit, and yet appear much different from one another. And from the vast storehouses of the oceans the water is redistributed via the water cycle again and again to all mankind, as it is with the storehouses of God’s Spirit and the watersheds of His churches: “Ask the LORD for rai
n in the time of the latter rain. The LORD will make flashing clouds; He will give them showers of rain, Grass in the field for everyone” (Zechariah 10:1). “God thunders marvelously with His voice; He does great things which we cannot comprehend. For He says to the snow, ‘Fall on the earth’; Likewise to the gentle rain and the heavy rain of His strength” (Job 37:5-6).
Sixteen of Earth’s largest rivers account for about one-half of the world’s flow of fresh water. Similarly, there are places on Earth where God’s Spirit seems to be poured out in greater measure. There are Christ-saturated places and spiritual deserts. Yet everywhere that water flows it is efficacious. In any measure, it is living water to those who will drink of it. Keep your channel clear of debris and enjoy the pristine flow of the Spirit through your life. It may seem just a trickle or headwater, but you are in a watershed, and River will run far.
© 2009 Chard Berndt
All Scriptures NKJV unless otherwise indicated.
July post soon
Hey blog readers, I didn’t forget about putting together an essay this month…summer’s just a bit crazy with camping, projects, odd jobs, taking kids all over the place, running races, etc. Hardly a routine for writing! But I am finishing up a piece that has to do with water–specifically the flow of water. I had the ideas “percolating in my headwaters” for a while, and they were solidified when Carrie & I had to remove our boots to cross a confluence of three streams on a backpacking trip recently. At the base of an off-trail drainage we finished our descent by forging the cold, fresh merging of several streams into upper Redfish Lake Creek, preparing to hike up a steep bench to a lake that also fed this same creek. This reminded me of a number of aspects of my July writing; you’ll know what I mean when you read it. Come back, as I’ll post it tonight or tomorrow.