1 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 paralysed. 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said to you, ‘Take up your bed and walk’?” 13 Now the man who had been healed did not know who it was, for Jesus had withdrawn, as there was a crowd in the place. 14 Afterward Jesus found him in the temple and said to him, “See, you are well!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.” 18 This was why the Jews were seeking all the more to kill Him, because not only was He breaking the Sabbath, but He was even calling God His own Father, making Himself equal with God.
Today we continue our series on the gospel of John as we take a look at the third of His signs and wonders that John records - the healing of the crippled man at the pool called Bethesda. Chapter 5 is really the beginning of a new phase in the ministry of Jesus, as from here right through to the end of chapter 7, we see the opposition to Jesus among the Jewish authorities coming to the fore. Until now, there has been some doubt and reservation about just who this man was, but by the time we reach the end of chapter 7, there is outright rejection of Jesus as the Messiah, and this began with the very public healing of a man on the Sabbath.
In this third miracle of John’s gospel, we see proof of Jesus’ deity as His popularity begins to grow. From this point on, Jesus is on a collision course with the religious leaders of Jerusalem. As we read in verse 18, “This was why the Jews were seeking all the more to kill Him, because not only was He breaking the Sabbath, but He was even calling God His own Father, making Himself equal with God.” J Vernon McGee wrote in his commentary on this particular verse, “These men never let up until they folded their arms beneath His cross.”
John chapter 5 opens with Jesus back in Jerusalem, at the Pool of Bethesda, which was a gathering place for people with all kinds of physical disabilities. There was a tremendous amount of superstition connected to this place.
Most newer translations of the Bible such as the ESV and NIV do not include verse 4. The ESV goes from verse 3 straight into verse 5: “In these lay a multitude of invalids - blind, lame, and paralysed. One man was there who had been an invalid for thirty-eight years.”
This is the NKJV which includes verse 4: “In these lay a great multitude of sick people, blind, lame, paralysed, waiting for the moving of the water. For an angel went down at a certain time into the pool and stirred up the water; then whoever stepped in first, after the stirring of the water, was made well of whatever disease he had. Now a certain man was there who had an infirmity thirty-eight years.”
This would appear to be a rather important detail which is left out of many modern translations, so why the difference? Most commentators agree that what we know as verse 4 was added later on by a scribe as a word of explanation, but it was not included in the original Greek text, which is why most reliable translations today also exclude verse 4. John MacArthur’s commentary on verse 3 helps us to understand why verse 4 was included later. “It was a custom at that time for people with infirmities to gather at this pool. Intermittent springs may have fed the pool and caused the disturbance of the water. Some ancient witnesses indicate that the waters of the pool were red with minerals, and thus thought to have medicinal value.”
So there is no indication that an actual angel stirred up the water. The disturbance of the water was more than likely caused by underground springs, but superstitions are very hard to break.
The previous two signs of Jesus that John records - turning water into wine and healing the nobleman’s son - were relatively private miracles, but in chapter 5 Jesus performs a miracle which was witnessed by many. Verse 3 tells us there was a multitude at the pool, so this sign was very public. This man had been disabled for nearly four decades, so when Jesus cured him no-one could dismiss what He had done.
But why this specific man, and why only Him? Why did Jesus not heal them all? The simple answer is the sovereign will of God. Jesus picked just this one man out of many sick people. Why did Jesus choose him from among all the other disabled people gathered around the pool? The only possible answer is God’s sovereign grace. In the Father’s timing, this was the time, the place, and the way He would heal this man. The sovereign initiative was His and His alone, and no reason is given as to His choice.
In verse 6 Jesus asked him something which at first glance, seems a rather silly question: “Do you want to be healed?” This question though, was a lot more loaded than we might think. Of course the man wanted to be healed. That was why he was there, and Jesus certainly knew that this was the one thing he wanted more than anything else, but Jesus also wanted to draw out from the man an admission of his own helplessness and of his desperate need for healing.
And it is exactly the same with our salvation. God knows that we desperately need to be saved, but He waits to hear the confession from our own lips that we are lost, and that we need Him as we accept Christ as our Saviour. We are not saved by our own will, however, we need to recognise our need before God will save us.
And so the man responds to Jesus by raising the obvious problem he had. Their misguided belief was that the first into the water once it was disturbed would be healed, but because of his disability he couldn’t reach the water on his own, and there was no-one who was willing to help him, but this presented no challenge to Jesus. “Jesus said to him, ‘Get up, take up your bed, and walk.’ And at once the man was healed, and he took up his bed and walked.” (John 5:8-9)
The question Jesus asked in verse 6 focused on the man’s superstition and belief in magical powers. Had the pool really been God’s healing agent, Jesus could have just helped the man into the water first, but the words, “Get up. Take up your bed and walk,” proves that Jesus was the source of divine healing, not some kind of magic.
Jesus told him to get up and walk, and the application for us here is that when we are saved, we are not only told to get up, but also to walk. Jesus gives us complete and instantaneous healing from the plague of sin, but the responsibility we now have as Christians is to walk in a manner worthy of Him.
What is really interesting about this miracle in John 5 is the absence of faith. This man did not ask for help, and there is no indication in the text that he had any faith at all, unlike the royal official we looked at last week.
He didn’t even know who Jesus was, but Jesus, according to His sovereign will, chose this man to heal. John records this particular miracle because it was a powerful witness to Jesus’ deity. Jesus Himself told John the Baptist that the proof of His messiahship was that the lame would walk. “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them.” (Matthew 11:4-5)
“The poor have good news preached to them.”
Now that is an important statement, because this is a pattern we see throughout the gospel of John when Jesus performed signs and wonders. In this particular case, Jesus declares Himself as Lord of the Sabbath, and He then goes into a detailed sermon on His power and authority in the rest of chapter 5, which we will cover in the next couple of weeks.
In chapter 6 Jesus feeds the five thousand, and He then preaches the good news that He is the bread of life. He heals the blind man in chapter 9, which results in Him teaching about spiritual blindness, and the raising of Lazarus in chapter 11 forms the basis of a sermon in which He proclaims Himself as the resurrection and the life.
As the Gospel is proclaimed, God draws the lost to Himself.
Jesus choosing this one man out of many was not a random act of kindness. Everything Jesus did and said had an eternal purpose. In this particular case He didn’t even need a request or faith of the man He healed. He healed because that was His will.
Sometimes God wants us to ask as the royal official did in chapter 4, and sometimes He asks for faith before He acts. But God does not need our help, our permission, or even our faith when He chooses to work in our lives or in the lives of our loved ones. Jesus did not require faith from this man before giving him the gift of healing, because the focus in this miracle is on Jesus’ power, but not just power over physical ailments, but the Sabbath.
There is an important detail in the second half of verse 9 which shapes so much of the rest of Jesus’ earthly life and the many run-ins He had with the religious authorities: “Now that day was the Sabbath.”
Jesus performed this miracle on the Sabbath and that became a huge issue for the religious elite, but why the fuss over a day? Surely the miracle of healing is more important than the day of the week it occurred? Not according to the Pharisees, because they want rules, not grace. They wanted to boast about what they did to earn merit from God. This whole attitude directly opposes the Gospel, but the Pharisees were just not having it. They could not get over this hurdle which shaped their relationship with Jesus until they finally had Him put to death. As Vernon McGee said, “These men never let up until they folded their arms beneath His cross.”
Verse 12: “Who is the man who said to you, ‘Take up your bed and walk’?” They were determined to find out who dared tell this man to break their Sabbath tradition, and so they asked him to identify the culprit. The Law of Moses decreed that anyone who broke the Sabbath should be stoned to death, and that was what they wanted. They couldn’t care less that a paralysed man had been healed. Even their question reveals the callousness of their hearts. You’d think they would ask, “Who healed you?” That would have shown at least some small measure of compassion, but no. All they wanted to know was, “Who is the man who said to you, ‘Take up your bed and walk’?”
Over the years, the Jewish authorities had added a multitude of rules and regulations to the Law of Moses, and by Jesus’ day, when it came to defining what was and was not permitted on the Sabbath, they had 39 different classifications of work. One of these categories of work had to do with carrying burdens. The whole thing had degenerated to farcical proportions, so much so that it never crossed their minds to rejoice with a man who’d been crippled for nearly 40 years and was now able to walk. Here we see their shallow and dreadful understanding of theology. They focused on the carried bed, not the new legs. All they wanted to know from him was just who this was who dared to break their precious man-made religious rules. But Jesus had not broken the Old Testament law. He had broken their warped understanding of just what the Sabbath was really all about.
For the remainder of chapter 5 Jesus debates the religious authorities about His relation to the Sabbath and to God. His argument is not about whether they understand the Sabbath law properly, but whether they understand who He is. Remember, our faith is not based on signs and wonders. Our faith is based on Jesus and who He is.
Jesus did not break God’s law for the simple reason that there was no prohibition of doing good on the Sabbath. In Mark 2 Jesus and His disciples were walking through a field of wheat on the Sabbath, and His disciples began picking a few heads of wheat. Incredibly, some Pharisees who were no doubt stalking Jesus hoping that they would do exactly that, began complaining and accused the disciples of breaking the Sabbath laws. Jesus’ reply was, “Have you never read what David did, when he was in need and was hungry, he and those who were with him: how he entered the house of God, in the time of Abiathar the high priest, and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and also gave it to those who were with him? The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath.” (Mark 2:25-27)
Immediately after this, Jesus went into the synagogue where He healed a man with a withered hand. We pick up the narrative in Mark 3:3-6. “He said to the man with the withered hand, ‘Come here.’ And He said to them, ‘Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to kill?’ But they were silent. And He looked around at them with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart, and said to the man, ‘Stretch out your hand.’ He stretched it out, and his hand was restored. The Pharisees went out and immediately held counsel with the Herodians against Him, how to destroy Him.”
Jesus dismissed and disregarded the way the authorities had corrupted His own, perfect law, and He probably chose to heal on the Sabbath at the Pool of Bethesda on the Sabbath for the specific purpose of provoking a confrontation with the religious leaders.
The timing of this particular miracle was no accident or coincidence. Jesus didn’t just forget that it was Saturday. He knew all about their Sabbath laws, so He knew that healing on the Sabbath would upset the religious leaders, and He was fully aware that by commanding the man to carry his bed out of a public place He would annoy them even more. So why did He do it? As we’ll see in the coming weeks, this argument continued over the next several chapters in the gospel of John, but the central idea has to do with the authority of Jesus as the Son of God.
Verses 11–13 show us how little the man actually knew. “The man who healed me, that man said to me, ‘Take up your bed, and walk.’” They asked him, “Who is the man who said to you, ‘Take up your bed and walk’?” 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.”
This stranger had walked into his life, healed his legs, and then disappeared. But that was not the end of it as we see in verse 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.’”
The first thing to note here is that Jesus found him. Just as Jesus appeared the first time when He healed the man, so He takes the initiative again as they meet a second time.
The important point here is that Jesus found the man, rather than the other way around. In our day we hear a lot about “looking for God” or “finding Jesus.”
There is even a worldwide movement of Churches that call themselves “seeker sensitive,” but the leaders of those Churches have clearly never read Paul’s words in Romans 3:10-11. “None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God.”
It is God who seeks us and draws us to Himself. The whole Gospel message is built on the good news that Jesus came to seek and to save the lost. In our sinful state we would never seek Him out, and so God took the initiative in putting into place His glorious plan of salvation.
And then Jesus said, “See, you are well! Sin no more, that nothing worse may happen to you.” The implication here is that the man’s paralysis was the direct result of some sin in his life.
Now we need to tread very carefully. Sometimes we find ourselves in a situation or a condition which is the result of our own sin. Rob a bank, and you’ll go to jail. However, not all sickness or suffering is the direct result of our personal sin.
One of the worst things you hear from some confessing Christians is, “You are in this situation because there is unconfessed sin in your life.” Not only does such a statement have no Biblical basis whatsoever because it completely undermines the Gospel of Jesus Christ, but it is also one of the most thoughtless and damaging things we could ever say to a person who is suffering or hurting.
Only God knows why “bad things happen to good people” as the old saying goes. Again, this brings us back to the sovereignty of God.
We need to compare Jesus’ warning to this man in John 5:14 to what He says to His disciples in chapter 9. “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him.” (John 9:2-3)
In the first case, it is clear that the lameness was caused by sin, and in the second, the blindness was not, so we need to be very careful about placing the blame for people’s suffering on them. There are many times when sickness or suffering has no direct connection with any sin a person has committed.
That being said though, we mustn’t ignore or dismiss the warning Jesus gives to the man. When He said, “Sin no more,” Jesus was expressing God’s standard of holiness, and as Christians, we are to be obedient to the Word of God. We are to get up and walk in a life of holiness, not sin. Salvation does not give us the right to live as we please. This is nothing more than abusing the grace we have been so freely given at such a high cost to God. As Paul wrote in Romans 6:1-2, “What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it?”
And then we come to the last part of our study for today. “The man went away and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had healed him. And this was why the Jews were persecuting Jesus, because He was doing these things on the Sabbath.” (John 5:15-16)
Here we have a vivid picture of the wicked heart of man. Jesus came and performed a great act of healing and compassion, and the Pharisees were furious because the miracle took place on the Sabbath. They were cold-blooded religionists, more interested in ceremonial ritual than they were in the blessing and welfare of the people they were meant to be caring for. They had no idea that Jesus was the one who set apart the Sabbath in the first place who now performed an act of mercy on this day. He did not break the Sabbath. The law was given to stop menial work on that day, but it did not prohibit acts of necessity or mercy.
Jesus said something profound in verse 17. “My Father is working until now, and I am working.” In order to understand the wonder of what He meant here, and why He deliberately chose to heal on the Sabbath, we need to go right back to the beginning. Having finished the work of creation in six days, God rested on the seventh day. This was the Sabbath. However, when sin entered the world, God’s rest was disturbed, and He would now work ceaselessly to bring lost sinners back into fellowship with Himself.
And He would do so by providing the means of redemption, and He would send out the Gospel message to every generation. So right from the moment of Adam and Eve’s sin up to the present time, God has been working ceaselessly, and He is still working today to reconcile the world to Himself through Jesus Christ. When Jesus healed on the Sabbath all those years ago, He was engaged in His Father’s business, and His love and grace would not be confined to only six days of the week.
John MacArthur writes, “Jesus’ point is that whether He broke the Sabbath or not, God was working continuously and, since Jesus Himself worked continuously, He also must be God. Furthermore, God does not need a day of rest for He never wearies. For Jesus’ self-defense to be valid, the same factors that apply to God must also apply to Him. Jesus is Lord of the Sabbath.”
This incident in John 5 marks one of the great turning points in the public ministry of Jesus. Because He performed this miracle on the Sabbath, He stirred up the anger and hatred of the Jewish leaders as they began to pursue Him. He and the Pharisees were now on a collision course for Calvary.