The Healing at the Pool

Part 1

John 5v1-9a

John 5v1-9a
Some time later, Jesus went up to Jerusalem for a feast of the Jews. Now there is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a pool, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda and which is surrounded by five covered colonnades. Here a great number of disabled people used to lie - the blind, the lame, the paralysed.
One who was there had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, he asked him, "Do you want to get well?"
"Sir," the invalid replied, "I have no-one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me."
Then Jesus said to him, "Get up! Pick up your mat and walk."
At once the man was cured; he picked up his mat and walked.

This scene seems totally bizarre to us. There were people lying around a pool for years, hoping for a miraculous healing. Sometimes the pool of water was stirred up, and the first person into the pool was healed. How strange. It's completely outside our experience. But John was no fool. He would never have included this story if it hadn't been true. His first readers must have been able to find out if people really were healed in this way. We don't see such things today, and we don't need them, because we have a risen Saviour, with healing in His wings (Malachi 4v2).

Verse 4, which is in the Authorised Version but not in the NIV (and not in many translations) says that an angel stirred up the waters. That makes sense. People would not have waited around the pool if nothing happened and no-one was healed. And how could the waters of the pool heal just one person, and then only when the water was stirred up, without some divine or angelic involvement?

But this man couldn't get to the water in time.

Jesus asked him, "Do you want to get well?" and He asks us the same question. Have our infirmities of body, mind and spirit become so much a part of our identity that we really don't want freedom from them? Do we enjoy our sin so much that we don't really want to repent? Do we enjoy the sympathy we get because of our illness so much that we don't really want to be healthy? Do we enjoy our own way so much that we're happier being lonely?

The man explained that he was helpless; no-one would come to his aid. Then Jesus said "Get up! Pick up your mat and walk". The man had a choice: stay sick helpless, or trust the words of Jesus. He chose to trust Jesus. And we will stay in our problems, sicknesses and sins, unless we choose to trust Jesus. There is no other way.

And the man had to respond to Jesus. He had to act according to this faith he had put in Jesus. He had to rise up ("rise" is a better translation than "stand"). That was, of course, impossible. But he did it - in the power of God.

If you hear the voice of Jesus, asking you if you want to be healed, say "yes". And when Jesus tells you how to respond - what to do - in order to receive that healing, then do it - even if it's impossible! God will not tell you to do anything that He will not empower you to do.

Jesus really does have the answers, and the power, and the love, that you need. Will you respond, and do the impossible, and be free?

This is a Bible story about physical healing but it applies all the way across life. Wherever we need to rise up and be healed of anything, Jesus comes and He speaks to us, and we can trust Him and obey Him, and do the impossible, and be free.