Why is the Holy Spirit symbolised by water?

Question 4151.

The Spirit symbolised by water is a picture that would have spoken instantly to people who knew what it was to be thirsty. We turn a tap and water appears, so the force of the image can pass us by. In a dry land, water was the difference between life and death, and that is exactly the weight the Bible wants the picture to carry.

When I consider why the Spirit symbolised by water appears so widely, I see three things gathered into the one image: water satisfies thirst, water cleanses what is dirty, and water gives life where there was none. The Spirit does all three, and the prophets and our Lord drew on each of them.

Water for the thirsty

Isaiah hears the promise, ‘For I will pour water on the thirsty land, and streams on the dry ground; I will pour my Spirit upon your offspring’ (Isaiah 44:3). The parallel is laid out for us in the verse itself. Pouring water on dry ground is what pouring out the Spirit is like. A parched soul is a real condition, and the Spirit is the only water that finally answers it.

This is why the Spirit symbolised by water meets us at the level of our deepest need. We are thirsty creatures. We try to slake that thirst with all manner of things that leave us drier than before. The promise of the gospel is that God himself pours out the one supply that satisfies, and he pours it generously.

Jeremiah put his finger on the human problem long ago when he heard God say that his people had committed two evils, forsaking the fountain of living waters and hewing out for themselves broken cisterns that could hold no water. That is the story of every restless heart. We dig and dig at cracked tanks of our own making, and they leak as fast as we fill them. The Spirit is the fountain we abandoned, and the gospel is the invitation to come back to the water that never fails.

Rivers of living water

On the last day of the feast our Lord stood and cried out, ‘If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water’ (John 7:37 to 38). And John adds the explanation so we cannot miss it: ‘Now this he said about the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were to receive’ (John 7:39). The living water is the Spirit.

Notice the abundance. Not a trickle, not a careful ration, but rivers. The Spirit symbolised by water is not a stingy supply doled out to the deserving. He is a flood of life flowing out of the believer for the good of others. The one who comes to Jesus thirsty becomes, in time, a channel through which the Spirit refreshes everyone around.

John tells us this word pointed forward to Pentecost, when the Spirit was given in fullness to all who believed. So the rivers are not poetic exaggeration. They describe the New Covenant reality that every Christian now lives in. The believer is not a sealed reservoir, hoarding a private supply. The Spirit who comes in satisfies the one he indwells and then overflows toward a thirsty world, which is exactly how God has always meant his blessing to travel.

The Spirit symbolised by water cleanses

Water washes. That sounds obvious until you stand under the prophecy of Ezekiel and hear God say, ‘I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. And I will put my Spirit within you’ (Ezekiel 36:25 to 27). The cleansing with water and the gift of the Spirit are spoken in the same breath, because they are two sides of one work.

So the Spirit symbolised by water is the Spirit who deals with our defilement. He does not only refresh the weary, he purifies the dirty. Paul calls it ‘the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit’ (Titus 3:5). The new birth is a cleansing as much as it is a quickening, and the Spirit is the agent of both.

This is a great comfort to anyone who feels too soiled to come to God. The water that cleanses is not the water of our own scrubbing. We cannot wash ourselves clean, any more than a stain can lift itself out of a garment. It is the Spirit who applies the cleansing won by the blood of Jesus, and he reaches the dirt we cannot even see. The promise of Ezekiel is not that we will tidy ourselves up for God, but that he will sprinkle clean water on us and make us clean.

Born of water and the Spirit

This brings us to that puzzling phrase in John 3, where Jesus tells Nicodemus that a man must be ‘born of water and the Spirit’ (John 3:5). I take this against the background of Ezekiel 36 that Nicodemus, a teacher of Israel, should have known. The water and the Spirit there are the promised cleansing and the promised new heart. Jesus is rebuking Nicodemus for not recognising the new covenant promise he ought to have taught.

On that reading, water and Spirit are not two separate births but one. The Spirit symbolised by water is the Spirit who washes and renews in the single act of regeneration. I have written more fully on that work in my answer on the Spirit’s role in regeneration.

What strikes me about the exchange is the gentle rebuke in it. Nicodemus was a teacher of Israel, and Jesus expected him to recognise the language of the prophets. The new birth was not a strange new doctrine invented on the spot. It was the promise of the old covenant Scriptures coming to fulfilment, the clean water and the new heart that Ezekiel had foretold. The water and the Spirit belonged together in the prophets, and they belong together still in every soul that is born again.

Water and baptism

It is worth being careful here, because the water imagery has sometimes been pressed to teach that the waters of baptism themselves convey the Spirit and save the soul. I do not believe Scripture allows that. Baptism in water is the God-given sign of a salvation already received by faith, not the cause of it. I set out the relationship between the two in my answer on how water baptism relates to Spirit baptism.

The Spirit symbolised by water cleanses the heart inwardly, and water baptism pictures that cleansing outwardly. To confuse the picture with the reality is to put the signpost where the destination ought to be. Keep them in the right order and both stay precious.

Get the order right and baptism becomes a glad and powerful thing. The believer who has already been washed within by the Spirit goes down into the water to say so before God and the church, picturing in the open what the Spirit has already done in secret. The water on the body proclaims the water in the heart. That is far more wonderful than any notion that the act itself could save, and it keeps the glory where it belongs, on the Spirit who actually does the cleansing.

A spring that never fails

There is one more note in the water picture, and it is the sweetest. To the woman at the well Jesus promised, ‘whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life’ (John 4:14). A spring, not a tank. A tank empties. A spring keeps rising from a source you did not dig and cannot exhaust.

That is the comfort built into the Spirit symbolised by water. The supply does not depend on your reserves. It rises from God himself, welling up from a source that will not run dry through all eternity. You can come back to it morning by morning and find it as fresh as the first day.

Remember too that the Spirit symbolised by water is a living spring and not a stagnant pool. A pool sits still and grows stale, but a spring keeps moving, keeps rising, keeps offering itself fresh each morning, and that is exactly how the Spirit means to be to the soul that keeps coming back to drink.

So, now what?

Are you thirsty? That is not a complaint to be ashamed of, it is the very thing the gospel is addressing. The invitation has never changed. ‘Let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who desires take the water of life without price’ (Revelation 22:17). The water is free, and the supply is the Spirit himself.

So come and drink. If your soul has gone dry through neglect or through grief or through plain hard living, the spring is still rising. Why drag yourself through another week of parched effort when there is living water on offer? Come to Jesus, drink deeply, and let the rivers begin to flow again, not only into you but out of you to others who are just as thirsty as you once were.

On the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood up and cried out, If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. (John 7:37, ESV)