Praise the Lord that there is another well—the well for Isaac (vv. 22-34). Many verses in the Bible speak of this positive well. Psalm 36:8 says, "Thou shalt make them drink of the river of thy pleasures." The Lord likes to make us drink of His river of pleasures. In John 4:14 the Lord Jesus said, "Whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him shall by no means thirst forever; but the water that I shall give him shall become in him a spring of water welling up into eternal life." This means that God Himself will be our life. In John 7:37 and 38 the Lord Jesus also spoke of drinking: "If anyone thirst, let him come to Me and drink. He who believes in Me, as the Scripture said, out of his innermost being shall flow rivers of living water." Moreover, in 1 Corinthians 12:13, the Apostle Paul says that we have all been made to drink of one Spirit, that is, of one well of water. Even the last chapter of the Bible contains a word about drinking: "And the Spirit and the bride say, Come!..Let him who is thirsty also come; he who wills, let him take the water of life freely" (Rev. 22:17). This divine well must be the source of our living.
Although Christ has been brought forth and has grown up, in the church life we still must learn that there are two sources or two kinds of living. What kind of living do you have—the living of Ishmael or the living of Isaac? It is insufficient merely to say that you have the living of Isaac. You must examine the kind of water you are drinking day by day. Are you drinking of the well for Ishmael? If you are, that well will make you an Ishmael and will cause you to drift into the world. Are you drinking of the well for Isaac, the well which signifies the divine well, the well of Christ, the well of the Spirit? If you are drinking of this well, the divine water which flows out of it will accomplish a great deal.
The well for Isaac was in Beer-sheba, close to the land of the Philistines (vv. 25-32). This well, unlike the well for Ishmael, is not near Egypt but at the border of the land of the Philistines and the good land of Canaan. Beer-sheba was in the land of the Philistines and later became the southernmost part of the Holy Land. When describing the geography of the Holy Land, the Bible even uses the phrase "from Dan to Beer-sheba" (1 Sam. 3:20), because the distance from Dan in the north to Beer-sheba in the south includes the whole land of Canaan. In the Bible the land of the Philistines has a peculiar significance. It is not a place which rejects God absolutely; it is a place which accepts God but handles the things of God according to human cleverness, not according to God's economy. Consider as an illustration the way in which the Philistines handled the ark (1 Sam. 6:1-9). They did not reject it; they received it, but they handled it in a natural way according to their cleverness. Likewise, in Genesis 20 and 21 we see that Abimelech, the king of the Philistines, did not reject God but accepted Him in his own clever way. Abraham took God according to His economy; Abimelech took Him according to the way of human cleverness. This is the significance of the land of the Philistines.