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THE KING’S BUSINESS
suggestion in the woman’s thought that He who talked with her was the Messiah, and she may have wished to draw Him out into a specific declaration of the fact. Cer tainly, shortly afterward she expressed to the men of thè city the thought that He might be the Christ (v. 29). She had already acknowledged Him as a prophet (v. 19), but such a truth as He had just declared needed, not ■ only a prophet, but one who was more than a prophet, the Messiah Himself, to affirm it if it were to be believed. That the Messiah really was coming some time she had no doubt. She said, “I know that the Messiah is coming some time.” She evidently thought H'is coming very near, for she said, “When He is come, He will declare unto us all things.” Evidently she expected He would come during her life time..' Her expectation of the Messiah, even as a teacher, was that His teaching would not be partial as the teaching of the prophets had been, but that it would be absolute and complete. It is the same thought of the Messiah as we are given of the Son of God in Hebrews 1 : 1 , 2 . v. 26. "Jesus saith unto her, I that speak unto thee am He." This was the plainest declaration that our Lord had made up to this time to any one that He was the Mes siah. He withheld this plain and explicit declaration from His own nation until He made it in response to adjuration of the High Priest the night before His death (Matt. 26:63, 64; Mark 14:61, 62). He even forbade His disciples declaring it to others when they had come to see that He was the Christ (Matt. 16:16-20). There was no danger of stirring up insurrection and thus hindering His work and bringing it to a premature end by declaring plainly to this ignorant Samaritan woman the truth which He withheld from His own people. It was safe also to declare it to her because her conception of the Messiah was not as an overthrower of Roman power, but as a Teacher of the Truth. The order of words in the Greek Testament is much more expressive than that given in
declaration of this truth. This majestic utterance of our Lord is another proof positive of the genuineness of the record here. Neither John nor any one else in that day could have made up such an utter ance as this and put it into the lips of our Lord, if He Himself had not said it. Indeed, no one of any day could have said it if they had not first learned it from the Lord. Some one has well said, “For four thousand years all the sages of earth could not evolve this one simple but sublime truth . . . . all their learning and thought must pale before the humble Teacher of a female outcast at a solitary well in Samaria. . . . This wondrous- dialogue begins with a cup of water, and ends with the most sublime revelation of the NATURE of GOD and HIS WORSHIP.” While Go
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