Reflection for the Week – 15 September 2026

By Fergus McGinley

Posted Sep 15, 2026 in Faith

There is a river ...

 

“There is a river that flows from God above,
there is a fountain that's filled with His great love.
Come to this water, there is a vast supply,
There is a river that never shall run dry.”

The beautiful words of the old Gospel song. Ezekiel 47, our focus scripture for this Season of Creation, imagines such a river, flowing from the restored temple in Jerusalem, eastwards, through the Judaean desert to the lower Jordan Valley, or Arabah, and the Dead Sea. Natural watercourses do indeed exist between Jerusalem, at about 800 m above sea level, and the Dead Sea at 430 m below, although they are dry for most of the year.

An angelic guide takes the prophet on a visionary journey in which he first sees many trees growing on the banks of the river, then the guide tells him of a remarkable transformation that will occur:

“When [the river] enters the sea, the sea of stagnant waters, the water will become fresh. Wherever the river goes, every living creature that swarms will live, and there will be very many fish once these waters reach there. It will become fresh, and everything will live where the river goes.”

Ezekiel is speaking to fellow exiles in Babylon; Jerusalem, including the temple, having been burned to the ground in 586 BCE by Nebuchadnezzar’s forces – all of which, according to Ezekiel and all the old prophets, was divine judgement on the people for their sinful turning away from God’s Law. Now, through Jesus and the Gospel, we understand God’s nature and action differently, but the truth of what the prophets had to say was that individuals behaving selfishly and unjustly towards each other always weakens us as a community, making us more vulnerable to internal and external pressures – God doesn’t need to judge and punish us, in other words, we’re perfectly capable of doing that to ourselves!        

Back to the river, fountain and water of the old song. The songwriters may well have been channelling Old Testament prophecies, including Ezekiel’s, in the story they were telling, but it is Jesus at the well in John 4, telling the Samaritan woman about the “living water” he will give that will become, in those who drink it, “a spring of water gushing up to eternal life”, that more readily comes to mind.

Now, the Dead Sea is the terminal basin of the Jordan River, with no outlet to an ocean, and its saltiness is natural, not due to human impacts. Nevertheless, it is true that God, through Jesus, now through the Spirit, is very much in the business of ecological healing and renewal. Not by direct intervention, of course – the Dead Sea remains salty to this day, despite Ezekiel’s prophecy – rather indirectly, through the impact of the Gospel in our individual and collective lives. How so, exactly?

Well, it’s very simple. The cause of all our ecological woes is the same as the cause of all our woes generally: common-or-garden, natural-born human selfishness, the very thing that God’s law sets out to remedy, and which Jesus provides the ultimate antidote to. Through the Spirit now we can receive grace, giving us the faith and courage to let go of our self-centred ways, and begin to undergo metanoia, becoming better, more selfless people in the process. And this new selflessness absolutely includes working to restore ecosystems that have been damaged by our selfish actions in the past – all of which is part of the wider work of incarnating God’s kingdom on earth! Happy days!

– Fergus McGinley

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Image: A river in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Photo by the author.

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