whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst. (John 4:14)
We ought to have a song entitled “Never, No Never.” Wait. I just checked online, and there is a song with that title by Joseph Habedank. But his song says, “I’ve never, no never, seen the righteous forsaken.” That’s different from what I have in mind.
I found another song titled “Never, Never, Never.” It is by Shirley Bassey. I love that title, too. However, she was singing about “I never, never, never want to be with anyone but you.”
Greek sometimes uses double negatives. The expression ou mē (literally not not) occurs sixteen times in John’s Gospel and is typically translated never or by no means. There are five different never promises that the Lord Jesus makes to anyone who believes in Him. Whoever believes in Him will never 1) thirst, 2) hunger, 3) be cast out, 4) perish, or 5) die [spiritually]. We will consider each of those five never statements in five blogs.
The first never promise by the Lord Jesus is that whoever believes in Him will never thirst. It is found in John 4:14 and again in John 6:35.
When the Lord Jesus spoke with the woman at the well, He told her,
“If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who says to you, ‘Give Me a drink,’ you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water” (John 4:10).
Then, to explain what the gift of God is, He added:
“whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst. But the water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life” (John 4:14).
Everlasting life is the gift of God. Paul said the same thing in Eph 2:8-9.i Another way to refer to everlasting life is to say that whoever believes in Jesus (i.e., drinks the message of life) will never thirst. He will never have to drink the living water again because one drink will forever quench his thirst.
The woman at the well understood He was promising that one drink would quench her thirst forever. She said, “Sir, give me this water, that I may not thirst, nor come here to draw” (John 4:15). She was wrongly thinking of literal water. But she rightly understood that one drink would forever quench her thirst.
After Jesus fed the 5,000, He gave a discourse about His being the Bread of Life. In this discourse, He used two figures for believing in Him: eating bread and drinking water. He said, “I am the bread of life. He who comes to Me shall never hunger, and he who believes in Me shall never thirst” (John 6:35).
We will consider the promise of never hungering in part 2. But notice that in John 6:35, the Lord Jesus makes it clear that to drink the living water is to believe in Him.
In His evangelism, Jesus promised that the one who believes in Him has everlasting life and that He will never thirst again. The moment one believes in Him, he is eternally secure. Of course, the expression everlasting life by itself makes that point. But the Lord wanted to emphasize the eternality of everlasting life by giving five promises about what would never happen to the believer. The first of those promises is that once someone believes in Jesus Christ, he will never again thirst for the gift of God.ii He has it once and for all.
Keep grace in focus, and you’ll never lose sight of the fact that you will never again thirst for the gift of God.
i While Eph 2:8-9 speaks of salvation as the gift of God, we know that Paul was talking about everlasting life because three verses earlier, he said, “He … made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved)…” To be made alive is to be born again, to be given everlasting life.
ii The Lord was not saying that we do not need to keep on believing His promise of life. His point was that we can receive the gift of God only once. Continued belief in the promise of life is not necessary for the believer’s security. But it is necessary in order for the believer to have ongoing assurance of his eternal destiny, and it is the foundation for a sanctified life. If we ever stop believing the promise, our walk with the Lord suffers, but we remain eternally secure.
