What kind of healing do you need most?

“Do you want to be healed?”

(John 5:1-17, Preaching: Pastor Stephen Magee, March 22, 2009)

John 5:1-17 After this there was a feast of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. ² Now there is in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate a pool, in Aramaic called Bethesda, which has five roofed colonnades. ³ In these lay a multitude of invalids- blind, lame, and paralyzed. ^{4 5} One man was there who had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. ⁶ When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had already been there a long time, he said to him, "Do you want to be healed?" ⁷ The sick man answered him, "Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, and while I am going another steps down before me." ⁸ Jesus said to him, "Get up, take up your bed, and walk." ⁹ And at once the man was healed, and he took up his bed and walked. Now that day was the Sabbath. ¹⁰ So the Jews said to the man who had been healed, "It is the Sabbath, and it is not lawful for you to take up your bed." ¹¹ But he answered them, "The man who healed me, that man said to me, 'Take up your bed, and walk.'" ¹² They asked him, "Who is the man who said to you, 'Take up your bed and walk'?" ¹³ Now the man who had been healed did not know who it was, for Jesus had withdrawn, as there was a crowd in the place. ¹⁴ Afterward Jesus found him in the temple and said to him, "See, you are well! Sin no more, that nothing worse may happen to you." ¹⁵ The man went away and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had healed him. ¹⁶ And this was why the Jews were persecuting Jesus, because he was doing these things on the Sabbath. ¹⁷ But Jesus answered them, "My Father is working until now, and I am working."

A very long-term disability (1-5)

The nation of Israel was the creation of God. It was God who made the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to be who they were. He brought them to Egypt for several generations, and He delivered them out of Egypt in the days of Moses. He gave them the Law, part of which included the details of three major feasts when they were to gather every year at the place of God’s choosing. He instituted the sacrificial system and gave them a way of life that was distinct from the other nations. He gave them the land of Canaan and, after many centuries, He brought them out of that land because of their persistent idolatry and wickedness. He even restored them back again to the land in the days of Ezra and Nehemiah, but the story of evil continued to cling to them even after that time. At various points in their heritage they seemed to lose sight of the Word of the Lord entirely, and by the days of Jesus, so many of those who seemed most faithful to the Lord were actually the furthest away from Him, with a complete dedication to their own traditions, and a way of life that pointed only to their own self-righteousness. When the Son of God came to save them, they turned against Him so decidedly that they began to plot His murder. They had a very long-term disability. They had the crippling disease of sin.

The story of sin is much older than the nation of Israel. From the creation of mankind, sin has brought with it misery upon all the nations and peoples of the world. One of the most troubling symptoms of this illness is that those who are afflicted, though they have some awareness of their many symptoms, they are not entirely aware of the underlying disease, and they are not always sure that they want to be cured. Like the man in this account at the pool of water by the Sheep Gate in Jerusalem, many have developed a pattern of life where there is some ritual recognition of sin, but the way that they deal with their misery is so faulty that it only serves to reinforce the hopelessness of their lives. It is easy for people to settle into that kind of life in such a way that they hardly imagine that there could be anything better. This man is taken to a pool where people believe that healings take place, and it seems that He has been coming there for quite some time. Perhaps some of the invalids there receive money from people who would want to be charitable to the desperate, and maybe this is the only way this man can get by. He is not really expecting anything good. He has been disabled for thirty-eight years. Are you expecting anything good ahead of you? Do you have some knowledge of your troubles, and find that you have carved out some way of getting by, that allows you a lifestyle of complaining without being too crushingly disappointed in front of others?

A very important question (6-7)

It is into this sad state of affairs that our Lord arrives, not just that day at the pool by the Sheep Gate, but into this world and into our lives. His question is a very important one for you to consider. “Do you want to be healed?” The man in John 5 answers Jesus in a puzzling way with a reply that has nothing commendable about it that we can point to. There was a practice among those who needed to be healed to gather in that place, where they believed that the first person to get to the pool when the water was stirred up would be healed. This was apparently such a strong understanding among people, that someone copying John in very early days, added verse 4, which was not in the best and earliest manuscripts of John’s gospel. That verse explains what people were thinking there, that if you were the first to get there, you had the best chance for what you wanted. Of course, this man could never get there first, and he had grown used to that situation. When Jesus asks him this important question, “Do you want to be healed?” he assumes that Jesus is talking within the system of the way that people were seeking healing at the pool.

Why was Jesus there that day? Why does He speak to a man who has no sign of faith in him, a man who cannot even give a simple “yes” to a very important question? The Lord has come to this spot of tragedy and strange religious expectation. He has come to a place where people are waiting for the water to stir, with the understanding that the first will be first. The first one to get to the water will be the first to be healed. Jesus is coming as the real answer. He comes to a place where people were used to an answer that could not be the real one for mankind. He is entering into a place of crazy ideas and hopeless religious paralysis. He is coming to a place of some strange sort-of Jewish superstition, and He picks one man who had been there forever, and He says, “Do you want to be healed?”

Walk (8-9)

Jesus power is not the power of ritual or the custom of some superstition. It is definitely not the power that rewards the one who can run the fastest. His power is the power of the eternal Word, a power that is inherent to His divine nature. His power is the power that speaks, “Get up,” and a man is healed. It is a power from heaven, and it is a power that is fully manifest in heaven, but it is a power that came to earth when the Lord came to relieve us of a very long-term disability. It is a power to walk, a power to be freed from the bondage and paralysis of sin.

The human body is designed to do a lot of walking, and we have probably gotten ourselves into a lot of trouble by deciding that we will get much more done if we don’t have to walk quite so much. Walking is the right speed for human beings. When you are able to walk, you get to go from place to place observing things. You can enjoy some of the beauty and the fresh sweetness that might cause you to think about the Creator. You can even walk some when it is night, and gaze into the heavens, and wonder. It is very hard to be stuck some place, in some prison of pain or oppression where you are not able to walk. All of life is a walk, and as those who have not only a body, but also a spirit, we want to be able to walk by the Spirit of God. At our best, we would rather not walk alone. We want to walk with someone, someone who knows us, and who loves us, someone who rescued us because He delighted in us (Psalm 18:19). We want to walk with Him who asks us, “Do you want to be healed?”

It is alright to ask Him questions too. He has His own way of bringing satisfying answers that may not first seem to be answers, but the more that we walk with Him, we find out that His answers were better than our questions. It is alright to ask Him what He means by “healed.” Is it just for the body, or will he heal the heart and the mind? Is it just for now, or is it for more than now? If we believe in Christ only for this life then we are to be pitied (1 Corinthians 15). There is so much more than now, but life is always lived in the moment. Yet Jesus came from heaven to heal us forever. In that forever, not only will we walk without pain physically, we will find that our souls are restored, we will walk with Him beside still waters, when the shadow of death is only a memory. Do you want that kind of healing, a healing that will last forever? Jesus is the only way to have that kind of healing, because He is the only way to heaven, and heaven is the place of the most perfect rest, a rest in God that is active and fruitful.

Sin and the Sabbath – Sin no more (10-17)

If Jesus had just said to the man “walk,” a controversy would not have erupted that day, a controversy that ultimately leads to the cross. He heals a man and tells him to take up his bed. Jesus is confronting more than one false religious system that day. That’s why He instructs the man to pick up his bed. Our Lord knows what He is doing. He is not concerned with general cleanliness and order by the pool at the Sheep Gate in Jerusalem. He is not motivated by civic pride. He is deliberately provoking those who have so twisted the Law of God, as to make simple actions like this one a violation of the Lord’s commandment that we must remember the Sabbath day.

The Sabbath day has always been about heaven. Man cannot really rest until the problem of sin has been fully and perfectly addressed. Christ, in both His first and second coming, is bringing Sabbath to earth. In His first coming He comes to conquer sin through His death on the cross. He kills sin and death through His own death. In His second coming, He carries away the dead carcass of sin and death forever in the fullness of the resurrection that brings us the new heavens and the new earth. Jesus is all about Sabbath, and He really does not understand why you don’t want Sabbath now. It is so good for you. Don’t you want to be healed?

There were many Jews that did not want to be healed with the healing that Jesus was bringing. They had made the day of rest into a day of crazy regulations, designed to show everyone else that you were keeping the Law of God. That’s not rest, and it does no one any eternal good. True Sabbath only begins when you rest in the One who kept the Law of God for you, and who rose again from the dead so that you could know that you don’t have to wait to go to heaven to walk in that rest now. True Sabbath cannot be experienced by those who insist on fighting with Jesus and everyone else about the Law. Sabbath comes from receiving Jesus in His office of Law-Keeper and Debt-Payer, and then in getting up, picking up your bed, and walking in the freedom that is ours in the living and reigning Son of God. Brothers and sisters, sin no more, it will only make you tired. Reject every false system of religious rest, and join our good Lord and Savior in the work that He is engaged in with His Father, a work that is most consistent with our true health and rest. Why should something worse happen to us in this life or the next? Jesus has conquered sin and death. We have been healed forever. Don’t you want to be healed forever?

Questions for meditation and discussion:

1. What was the religious system like that was happening at that pool in Jerusalem?

2. How does Jesus address this false religious system?

3. Why was the bearing of a bed not the same as the kind of burden-bearing that was a Sabbath violation?

4. Do you want to be healed forever? How does that desire show up in the way we live our lives now?