The Spring That Never Stopped

In 1888, a cholera outbreak swept through Hamburg, Germany, killing over eight thousand people in ten weeks. The city's water supply had been drawn from the polluted Elbe River, and no amount of boiling or filtering could keep pace with the contamination. But just upstream, the smaller city of Altona drew its water from a deep artesian spring — clean water rising from bedrock, unpolluted by anything on the surface. While Hamburg buried its dead, Altona's residents drank freely and lived. The boundary between the two cities ran down the middle of a single street. On one side, death. On the other, a fountain that never stopped flowing.

The prophet Zechariah had watched his people return from Babylon carrying the invisible weight of generations of unfaithfulness — idol worship, injustice, broken covenants. No amount of ritual washing addressed what festered beneath the surface. So when Yahweh spoke through him of "a fountain opened to the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem, to cleanse them from sin and impurity," this was no ordinary promise. This was artesian grace — purification rising from the deep bedrock of God's own character, not dependent on human effort to pump or filter or boil.

The people of Jerusalem could not purify themselves any more than Hamburg could will its river clean. But the Almighty opened a spring from beneath — inexhaustible, unbought, flowing still. The only question Zechariah leaves us with is which side of the street we are standing on.