THE OLD WELLS
Elder T. L. Webb, Jr.
“And Isaac digged again the wells of water, which they had digged in the days of Abraham his father; for the Philistines had stopped them after the death of Abraham: and he called their names after the names by which his father had called them” (Gen. 26:18).
The Philistines had stopped up the old wells which Abraham had dug in the past, and as water was a most precious possession in an arid and dry land, it was necessary to dig wells for the herds and flocks of these early travelers. Death would soon come to the many flocks and herds that Isaac possessed unless these watering places could be found.
There seems to be some kind of symbolic lesson in this scripture for us to meditate upon. Isaac desired to “dig again” the old wells his father had dug and to call them “by the same names” his father had called them by. They brought forth water in the days of Abraham and would they not be sufficient for Isaac in his day? In every age of the Church it seems there have been those who were not satisfied with the “faith of their fathers,” but who wanted some “new wells” and to call their practices by some “new name.”
There is NO generation gap in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It has been sufficient in every age of the Church. The old wells of gospel truths which fed His people in days of old are still as streams in the desert, and even little children can drink from these good wells of divine truth. We need not try to find anything better than what our fathers had – we only wish we could possess that same spirit of love and devotion and faith which they possessed. We should be satisfied with the Lord’s house and use Bible names for our practices in the Church.
Another thought in this lesson – it takes a long time to dig a well but not very long to stop one up. A servant of God may spend his lifetime digging, and someone come along and by false teaching and heresy stop up the wells that have been dug. Too many times His people are like Jeremiah described them in Jer. 2:13: “For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.” [from an old copy of Baptist Witness] Submitted by Elder Mark Green.