Welcome to 10 minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work.

I'm Jensen Holt McNair. Are there certain types of people that you think aren't

likely to be Christians? Maybe you think people of a certain political group would never be a Christian, or a certain ethnicity or race.

I'd be willing to bet that there's probably a good chance that you can think of someone in

your life that would make you think they would never become a Christian.

And you wouldn't be alone. Many of us probably have a particular vision of who we think

Christians are and that person probably looks a lot like us. See Jews in the

time of Jesus would have most certainly believed that God's coming Messiah was

coming to redeem Israel, that he would save God's chosen people, the Israelites.

John is on a mission to let his audience know that Jesus came not to redeem just Israel,

but to redeem all of creation.

You see, in the previous chapter, we saw Jesus sharing the truth of his kingdom with the Jewish

leader Nicodemus. And from that, we learned that Jesus did indeed come to save those

from Judea, the Jewish people. But in Chapter 4, John opens letting us know that Jesus will now be traveling through

Samaria to get to Galilee. In verse 4, we read that Jesus had to pass through

Samaria. And it is true that the shortest most direct route would have been through

Samaria. Although this didn't stop Jews from oftentimes taking a longer route to avoid going through

Samaria. The Jewish people saw the Samaritans as unclean. They were

descendants of Jews who had married foreigners and they did not follow the laws strictly.

So there was strife between these people groups. They hated each other. They did everything they could not to interact with one another.

But John tells us that Jesus had to go through Samaria.

The translation of this phrase from the Greek always indicates a divine necessity or requirement in the book of John.

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