The Emperor Who Abandoned the Aqueducts

In 312 AD, Roman engineers completed the Aqua Claudia, one of the most magnificent aqueducts ever built — forty-six miles of precisely graded channels carrying fresh mountain spring water into the heart of Rome. For centuries, these aqueducts sustained over a million people with clean, flowing water. But as the empire crumbled, successive rulers neglected the infrastructure. Rather than maintaining the aqueducts, medieval Romans dug shallow wells and carved crude cisterns into the ground. The results were catastrophic. The water stagnated. Disease spread. A city that once had abundant fresh water flowing freely now struggled with contaminated puddles collected in cracked stone basins.

The prophet Jeremiah stood before Judah and voiced the Almighty's astonishment at precisely this kind of exchange. "My people have committed two evils," God declared. "They have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters, and hewn themselves cisterns — broken cisterns that can hold no water."

God was not some distant deity they had outgrown. He was the source who had carried them out of Egypt, sustained them through the wilderness, and planted them in a fruitful land. Yet they turned from the living spring to worship Baal — gods as cracked and useless as those Roman cisterns rotting in the mud.

Every generation faces the same temptation: to abandon the inexhaustible source of El Shaddai for something we construct with our own hands. And every substitute eventually leaks dry.