![crossing the jordan river bible verse crossing the jordan river bible verse](http://www.johnpratt.com/items/docs/lds/meridian/2006/images/jordan_crossing.gif)
So when he returns to Syria, he takes several bags of Israelite dirt with him (v17), wanting to ensure that wherever he was, he had something of Israel with him. ‘Now I know that there is no God in all the world except in Israel’, he says (2 Kings 5:15). This teaches Naaman that - whatever we may think - he cannot divorce geography from theology. After some grumbling that there’s nothing special about the river, Naaman eventually consents, and his flesh is restored as if he’d been given a new life (2 Kings 5:14). This Syrian general came to Elisha to be cleansed of leprosy, and Elisha sends him to bathe in the Jordan. The life-giving properties of the Jordan are seen symbolically in the story of Naaman. The river formed the border of the promised land, and even today, the Jordan is a formidable barrier - you have to cross a minefield to use the only bridge across it! A life returned In biblical times there were no bridges over the Jordan (in fact, not a single bridge is mentioned anywhere in the Bible).
![crossing the jordan river bible verse crossing the jordan river bible verse](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/1wZeA2y9X7g/maxresdefault.jpg)
Like most great rivers, it served as a boundary. It’s for that reason that for millennia people have chosen to live on its banks.īut the Jordan is also a great barrier. It rarely rains in the Jordan Valley - but thanks to the river, plants grow in abundance. It’s a source of life in a similar way to the Nile, though on a much smaller scale. In biblical times, the river Jordan was both a source of life and a great barrier. For example, Jesus couldn’t have been baptised in the Jabbok river - it had to be the Jordan. I began to realise that the places weren’t incidental to the story - they were a vital part of it. That changed for me when I visited Israel and Jordan a few years ago. So apart from a few familiar places like Jerusalem and Bethlehem, most of us know very little about the places in our Bible. We want to know what happened precisely where it happened doesn’t seem that important. But we tend to skip over the places as if they’re incidental to the Bible’s story. There are more than 1,000 different places mentioned in the Bible, from Abana (2 Kings 5:12) to Zuph (1 Samuel 9:5).