This past week I received a wonderful new book written by Jim Parratt, a dear friend of ours who is a Scottish medical professor and researcher in Scotland. The book, entitled “A Scent of Water: Adventures in Faith and Science” is available from the Handsel Press Edinburgh.

“A Scent of Water” — what an interesting name for a book. What could it mean? As I read his introduction, he explained that the book’s title came from Job 14:7-9 (NJB): “There is always hope for a tree: when felled, it can start its life again; its shoots continue to sprout. Its roots may have grown old in the Earth, its stump rotting in the ground, but let it scent the water, and it buds, and puts out branches like a plant newly set.”

In this passage, Job is talking about hope. In the midst of his suffering and loss, Job wrestles with the issue of hope. He has lost his family, his financial resources, his farms and farming equipment, and most laborers. He has lost his physical health and is covered with boils on his skin. Where is God when life gets this bad? In the preceding chapter, 13:15 (NLT), Job hopes against hope, saying: “God might kill me, but I have no other hope. I am going to argue my case with Him.”

Job went through a lot worse problems than most of us could even imagine. Yet Job did not curse God nor blame him for his circumstances. In the passage regarding the scent of water, he seems to be implying that even a tree has more hope of regaining life after death than man. A tree can be cut down, its stump rotted, and be declared dead, but at the scent of water, life can again break forth from beneath the ground and new shoots emerge from the soil. Life-giving water can resurrect things thought dead and gone. Job lived thousands of years before the resurrection of Jesus. Yet his faith and logic seemed to be probing into the possibility of resurrection hope for humans. For if a tree can come back alive, perhaps God will make a way for human life to resurrect into new life as well. At the scent of life-giving water, new life can come.

Most of us have had an experience where a plant or bush that we thought was thoroughly dead and gone revived again. Several years ago I thought I had killed my grapevines. I pruned them back to almost nothing but stubs. When spring came, there was no life in them. I was discouraged. I went to Home Depot to buy some new vine starters. Three weeks later, the vines that I thought were dead and gone began to send out shoots, and we had the largest crop of grapes we ever had. If God can bring new life into grapevines that seemed deader than dead, can ge not raise you from the dead? If God can turn around a bleak hopeless scenario for plants or wildlife, can’t he do the same, or more, for we who are made in his image?

When Lazarus was sick and Mary and Martha sent for Jesus to come and heal him before he died, Jesus purposely delayed coming (see John 11:1-44). Jesus waited so that people would see the glory of God and see that God can raise a person from the dead. After raising Lazarus, Jesus said in John 11:25-26 (CSB): “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in Me, even if he dies, will live. Everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die. Do you believe this?”

At the scent of the water that Jesus gives, our dead spirits are revived and infused with God’s living water, and we begin to thrive when God moves into our lives via the Holy Spirit. As Jesus explained to the woman at the well, in John 4:13-14 (NLT): “Anyone who drinks this water will soon become thirsty again. But those who drink the water I give will never be thirsty again. It becomes a fresh, bubbling spring within them, giving them eternal life.”

What area of your life seems dead and beyond hope? Are you spiritually dead? He can make you spiritually alive. Is your hope gone? He is the God of all hope. Are your visions or dreams crushed? He can open your eyes to see new possibilities.

In this New Year, why not tune your spiritual sensors to get a scent of God’s living water, which can infuse you with newness and the ability to live again?

Award-winning columnist Dr. Ed Jordan is pastor of Gwynn’s Island Baptist Church, Gwynn, VA. He can be reached at szent.edward@gmail.com.