The Spring at Lifta

In the abandoned village of Lifta, just outside Jerusalem's western edge, a natural spring still flows from beneath the limestone. For centuries, families carried clay jars down the worn stone steps to draw water — water that ran clear even during the driest summers when every cistern in the hill country had gone chalky and stale. The spring never asked who came to it. It never ran dry for the unworthy or surged stronger for the righteous. It simply poured, year after year, from some deep and hidden source beneath the rock.

The prophet Zechariah spoke to a people who knew what defilement felt like — not as an abstraction, but as a weight they carried through exile and return, through compromise and idolatry, through years of spiritual drought when no amount of ritual washing seemed to reach the stain. And into that weariness, God declared something extraordinary: "On that day a fountain will be opened to the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem, to cleanse them from sin and impurity."

Not a basin to be filled and emptied. Not a rationed supply requiring a priest's permission. A fountain — continuous, inexhaustible, opened by God Himself. The Hebrew word for "opened" suggests something unsealed permanently, like a well whose capstone has been rolled away for good.

What Zechariah glimpsed from a distance, we now see fulfilled. The fountain flows from a cross on a Jerusalem hillside, and it has never once run dry.