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| Pool of Bethesda |
If there is
one thing that characterizes the ministry of Jesus more than any other, it’s
his healing ministry. This is what gave
his ministry an international reputation.
A short time
later, when Jesus was in Cana again, a government official came all the way up from
Capernaum to ask Jesus to heal his son, who was about to die (John 4:46). This government official is called in Greek a
basilikos, which comes from the Greek
word basilica, a market
building. He was in charge of weights
and measures in the market place at Capernaum, to make sure no one was cheating
on the weight of the produce they were selling.
When he asked Jesus to come and heal his son, Jesus said to him, “Go, your son lives” (John 4:50), and
the man believed what Jesus said.
As the
official returned home, his servants met him on the road and told him that his
son had recovered. When he asked them
when the boy had started to get better, it turned out it was at the same time
that Jesus had spoken the word (John 4:52).
This was the second miracle of Jesus' ministry according to John (John
4:54).
The third
miracle was in Jerusalem, at the Pool of Bethesda, just a short distance north
of the Temple (“Now there is in Jerusalem
by the place of the sheep a pool, which is called in Hebrew Bethesda, having
five porticoes,” John 5:2). For
centuries no one could figure out what it meant when it says that the pool had
five porticoes, that is, five covered walkways around the pool. But when the archeologists found it, it was
obvious: it was actually two pools with
a portico in the middle, dividing the pools.
Tradition claims that the sick man was lying in this central portico.
These were
huge, deep pools. It’s actually a little
unnerving when you come up to the edge of the pool and look down. They’re 43 feet deep (13 m)! Only a very small section of the southern
pool has been dug out. It continues much
further to the south. But the width of
the pool in this excavated section is the full width: 150 feet (45 m).
Why were
these pools so large? Remember, this is
a desert land. Water is essential to
life, and they needed to store as much of it as they could.
John
5:3,4: “In these [in the porticoes] lay a multitude of those who were sick,
blind, lame, and withered, {waiting for the moving of the waters; for an angel
of the Lord went down at certain seasons into the pool, and stirred up the water;
whoever then first, after the stirring up of the water, stepped in was made
well from whatever disease with which he was afflicted.}”
The last
part of this verse between the brackets doesn’t appear in all the manuscripts,
so we’re not quite sure where it came from.
But that this place was associated with healing is clear from its name. Bethesda in Hebrew is Beth Khasda, which means “House (or Place) of Lovingkindness.” Khesed
in Hebrew is the word for lovingkindness.
This refers to the lovingkindness of God in healing people here.
We don’t
know when the belief started, but by the time of Jesus, people believed that
when the water was stirred up, the first one to enter the water would be
healed. We have no idea how often this
happened. Many years after this,
Christians visiting the place said the north pool sometimes turned mysteriously
red. We don’t know if this is what the
belief referred to or not. But what we
do know is that there were lots and lots of sick people here. And they came because they were hoping for a
miracle from God, a miracle of healing.
John
5:5: “Now
a certain man was there, who had been thirty-eight years in his sickness.” The man that Jesus came up to had been sick
for thirty-eight years! That’s a long
time to be sick!
John
5:6-7: “When Jesus saw this one lying there, and knew that he had already been
a long time that way, he said to him, ‘Do you want to become well?’ The sick man answered him, ‘Sir, I have no
man to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, but while I am
coming, another steps down before me.’”
Why did he
need someone to help him? These were
deep pools. There was no shallow end. If the water level was low, you might have to
go down many steep steps to reach the water.
But did you
notice what Jesus asked him? “Do you want to become well?” Now that seems like a pretty strange thing to
ask a sick person. But it focused the
man’s attention on being healed.
How did the
man answer? He didn’t have a way to
reach the water quickly enough. He had
tried to do it, he had tried to get to the water, but every time someone else got
there first. He realized that in his own
strength, he just couldn’t make it. And
he didn’t have anyone to help him. So it
probably looked like he would never get healed.
John 5:8: “Jesus said to him, ‘Arise, take up your
pallet, and walk.’” Up until now,
this man had all his attention focused on getting into that pool to be healed. But now Jesus gives him a completely
different way to be healed. Would he
take it?
John
5:9: “And
immediately the man became well, and he took up his pallet and was walking.” The verse doesn't give the details, but I imagine the man felt something happening in his body, or perhaps simply felt the intensity of Jesus' presence —something that gave him hope and a reason to believe. Then he responded in faith to
what Jesus told him to do, and he was well! This was an incredible miracle! Just imagine how happy he was to be healed
after 38 years!
Before long,
huge crowds of people were gathering, bringing sick people to him, and Jesus
healed them, every disease and every sickness (“And the news about him went out into all Syria; and they brought to
him all who were ill, taken with various diseases and pains, demoniacs,
epileptics, paralytics; and he healed them,” Matt. 4:24).
Many
passages specifically say that he healed them all (Matt. 9:35; also Matt. 8:16,
12:15; Acts 10:38). This is an
absolutely amazing record that put Jesus in a completely different class of
miracle worker from all that had gone before him. Others in Israel had done miracles here and
there, but from Jesus, there was a continual outpouring of miracles.
Soon he
commanded his disciples to go out and heal the sick, just as he did: first the twelve (“And he called the twelve together, and gave them power and authority
over all the demons, and to heal diseases. And he sent them out to preach the
kingdom of God and to perform healing,” Luke 9:1,2). Then he sent out the seventy (“Now after this the Lord appointed seventy
others, and sent them two and two ahead of him to every city and place where he
himself was going to come,” Luke 10:1).
He told them to go into different cities, “and heal those in it who are sick, and say to them, ‘The kingdom of
God has come near to you’” (Luke 10:9).
After his
resurrection, he gave the same instructions again, which apply to all of us
until today (“And he said to them, ‘Go
into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature... And these signs
will accompany those who have believed: in my name they will cast out demons...
they will lay hands on the sick, and they will recover,’” Mark 16:15,17,18). So how do we do that? How do we heal the sick, how do we cast out
demons?
During his
earthly ministry, Jesus connected healing with preaching the Kingdom of God,
first with the twelve (“to preach the
kingdom of God and to perform healing,” Luke 9:2), and then also with the
seventy (“heal those in it who are sick,
and say to them, ‘The kingdom of God has come near to you,’” Luke
10:9).
After his
resurrection, too, he said that we should preach the gospel, and that these
signs would follow (Mark 16:15,17,18). Do
you see the pattern here? The message is
confirmed by the signs that follow.
They’re a package deal: both go
together.
Yes, it’s
true that healing became more and more rare in the Christian church after the
time of Jesus. But that’s because the
church drifted further and further from the truth of the gospel. The message soon became to serve the Church
and obey the Church rather than serving and obeying Jesus. How could God honor that? —although he did sometimes continue to heal out of his
mercy and his grace.
But wherever
the true gospel is preached, healing is still today an important part of the
gospel message. In areas where people are
familiar with the spiritual world, it shows God’s power over the evil spirits
and the false gods of pagan religions. But
in many other areas, belief in materialism is strong. This is the belief that there is no God and
there are no miracles. Many who hold
this belief identify themselves with “science,” as if science had anything
definitive to say about miracles. In
fact, true science only disclaims the ability to investigate miracles because they
cannot be reproduced in the lab. But
many have misunderstood this to mean that science has somehow disproven
miracles, and refuse to believe in them or anything supernatural. People with this belief are often extremely
proud of it, as if by denying the experiences of so many others throughout
history, and sometimes even their own experiences, they have discovered
something amazing. But this makes as
much sense as denying that your eyes can see, ignoring what they see, and then claiming
that no one else has ever been able to see: that sight is just an illusion. But even these, many times when they experience
a miracle, begin to question their materialistic worldview, and open up to the gospel
of Messiah Jesus.
After all, if
you think about it, any worldview that excludes God is Satanic. It’s a spiritual prison that keeps people
bound. But Jesus came to set the
captives free: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he anointed me to preach
the gospel to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, and
recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are downtrodden” (Luke
4:18). His healing sets us free not just
from sickness, but from false ideas about the world, spiritual strongholds that
take captive the minds of men. And the
more time we spend with Jesus, the more he shows us not only what is false in the world, but also what is false within ourselves. His desire is
always to draw us closer and closer to himself.
This is what
Paul was talking about in 2 Cor. 3: that
we are changing into the image of the likeness of the glory of God. “But
we all, seeing with unveiled face the glory of the Lord as in a mirror, are
being transformed into the same image, from glory to a glory just as that of
the Spirit, by the Lord,” (2 Cor. 3:18).
This is a constant process of healing and restoration in our lives.
So how does
this healing process work? One good
example is the healing of the paralytic in Capernaum. So many people had gathered together to hear
Jesus speak that the house where they were meeting was completely full. There were teachers and scribes from all over
the place. Luke says that “there were some Pharisees and teachers of the
Law sitting there who had come from every village of Galilee and Judea and
Jerusalem” (Luke 5:17). This means
there were hundreds of people listening to Jesus teach. Luke also says that “the power of the Lord was there for him to heal” (Luke 5:17). This seems to indicate that Jesus’ message
had ended, and he had begun to heal people.
This is when
the friends of the paralytic wanted to bring him to Jesus for healing, but
there was no way to bring him in because of the crowd (Luke 5:18). So they carried him on a bed of some kind,
probably a small one or a pallet of some kind, up onto the roof, and then made
a hole in the roof (Luke 5:19). Mark says
that they “dug” a hole in the roof (“and not being able to get to him because of
the crowd, they removed the roof where he was, and having dug it out, they let
down the pallet where the paralytic was lying,” Mark 2:4). Why does he use this word? Because people in that area had roofs made
with branches, reeds, and dirt. They had
to dig through the dirt to make an opening.
And then they let the man down before Jesus.
This was, of
course, not the normal thing to happen in a religious meeting. It certainly got everyone’s attention—you
couldn’t miss it. Everyone would have
been watching them do it. But Jesus
noticed something in particular: “And having seen their faith” (Matt.
9:2). What did Jesus see? He saw their actions, of
going to all that work to get their friend near him. They wouldn’t have done that if they didn’t
believe Jesus could do something to help him.
And I’m sure he saw the hopeful looks on their faces, the
urgency in their spirits to get in there while the healing power of God was
flowing.
The first thing
Jesus did was to encourage the sick man, saying “take heart” (Matt. 9:2; a word of encouragement like “chin up” or “don’t
worry”). And then he forgave his sins (“your sins are forgiven,” Matt. 9:2). But wait a minute: On what basis did he forgive his sins? The man didn’t say anything, he didn’t repent
of anything. So why did Jesus forgive
his sins? It was simply on the basis of
the man’s faith. Faith in Jesus is the
basis on which our sins are forgiven. So
Jesus saw his faith, and forgave him.
But why,
when the man obviously came there for healing, did Jesus talk to him first
about forgiveness? This was not an
accident, but a pattern. As it says in
the book of James 5:16: “Therefore confess your sins to each other
and pray for each other that you may be healed.’” Healing and forgiveness of sins are
connected.
When Jesus
forgave the man’s sins, this made the Pharisees upset. According to their teaching, you can only
forgive sins committed personally against you.
But Jesus was forgiving the man’s sins in general. Then he healed him with a word, not with any
special action or long period of prayer:
“Rise, take up your bed, and go
home” (Matt. 9:6)
But aside
from this general connection between healing and forgiveness, Jesus’ method of healing
cannot be standardized or systematized.
Many teach that to be healed, the person who is sick must have faith for
healing. And that does often seem to be
the case. But with the paralytic, Jesus responded
not only to the faith of the sick man but to the faith of men that were
bringing him there, too (“their faith,” Matt.
9:2). In James it talks about the faith
of the one doing the praying (“the prayer
offered in faith,” James 5:15), rather than the one receiving the prayer. So faith is another key component, but this
is not only the faith of the one being healed.
When Jesus healed the son of the basilikos
(the official), it was his father who believed Jesus’ word. The son wasn’t even there at the time.
Another issue
was that people didn’t always get healed immediately. Even Jesus had to pray twice for the blind
man at Bethsaida (“Then again he laid his
hands upon his eyes; and he looked intently and was restored, and began to see
everything clearly,” Mark 8:22-25). One
time, Jesus’ disciples weren’t able to cast the demon out of a boy. When they asked why they couldn’t cast it
out, Jesus said it was because of the “littleness,”
which probably means their lack, of faith (“But
he said to them, ‘Because of the littleness of your faith. Amen I say to you, if you have faith as a
mustard seed, you will speak to this mountain,
move from here to there, and it will move; and nothing will be
impossible for you,’” Matt. 17:20). But
Jesus’ solution to the problem wasn’t that they should develop great faith. He said they only needed faith the size of a
mustard seed, the smallest of the agricultural seeds in Israel. In other words, you don’t need a lot. You only need a little, but that little can
accomplish much.
Some people
feel that when we pray for healing, we have to work ourselves up into a frenzy
to increase our faith. They have a lot
of shouting and a lot of loud music. But
Jesus’ meetings were quite calm compared to this—although I’m sure they were
also quite exciting. But faith cannot be
measured in decibels. It may be that
sometimes we need to rebuke Satan, as Jesus himself did. But volume alone is not the key to
success. Faith is a direction of the
soul, combined with hope, which brings you into the presence of God. The rest is God’s part. We don’t do miracles. We just draw close to God, and watch him do
his thing.
Remember
what it says in Zech. 4:6: “not by strength, and not by power, but rather
by my Spirit says the Lord.” Faith
is not any power or strength that we have in ourselves. Faith is an acknowledgement of our dependence
on God, that we are inadequate, that we lack power on our own.
That’s why the
Bible recommends prayer and fasting for difficult cases (“But this kind does not go out except by prayer and fasting,’” Matt.
17:21). What happens in prayer and
fasting? We weaken ourselves and our
reliance on our own abilities, and we increase our reliance on God. In other words, for God to move, we need to
get ourselves out of the way, and let him have his way. This has been a common theme in true Christian
spirituality from the beginning. We need
to war against the flesh so that the Spirit can prevail (“For if you live according to the flesh, you are about to die; but if
by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the flesh, you will live,’” Rom.
8:13).
What this
means, of course, is that we are all in need of God’s healing power to be at
work inside us. We all have areas of our
lives that need healing. For some of us,
it’s physical healing, for others it’s emotional healing, for others it’s
healing in our relationships, for others it’s healing in our work relationships
and our work situation, for others it’s healing in our relationship with God. There are many different kinds of healing
that we need.
But to
receive this healing, we don’t have to work ourselves up into a frenzy. We just need to make contact with Jesus, like
the woman that touched the tassel of his garment. Do you remember her story? She had been sick for a long time, 12
years. She tried everything to get
healed. She had reached the place where
most people would give up. But then she
heard about Jesus. And she snuck up and
reached out and touched his garment when he wasn’t looking. And she received her healing (Luke 8:44). Jesus hadn’t even prayed for her or said
anything at all. But she had made
contact with him. When he felt power go out
of him, he called out, “Who touched me?”
(Luke 8:45). When she finally came and
identified herself, he said to her, “Your
faith has saved you, go in peace” (Luke 8:48). Most translations say, “Your faith has healed
you.” But the word used here is the word
for salvation (sodzo), not the word for
healing. What does this mean? It’s that connection between faith and
forgiveness again. Like the paralytic,
she was looking for physical healing.
But Jesus talks to her about salvation, about forgiveness. He’s shifting her attention from the physical
realm to the realm of the spirit. Why? Because Jesus is the source of healing in
every area of our lives.
Do you
remember that Jesus said we need to become like little children to enter the
kingdom of heaven (“And he said, ‘Amen I
say to you, unless you change your ways and become like children, you will
certainly not enter into the kingdom of the heavens,” Matt. 18:3)?
What did he mean by that? We have
to have faith and hope and trust like children do.
We don’t
have to do radical things to get God’s attention. We already have his attention. He already cares. He knows the number of hairs on our heads
(Matt. 10:30). All we need is to come
close to him, to seek less of us and more of Jesus.
We can’t
make a healing or any other miracle happen by our own willpower. We can’t earn it. We can’t manufacture it. We can only trust and not give up.
Sometimes we
don’t get the answer to our prayers right away, like that woman with the judge
that Jesus talked about. Do you remember
that parable? She came back to him over
and over trying to get his help against her opponent. But finally she got his attention because she
didn’t give up (Luke 18:2-5). What is
the meaning of this parable? “That it is necessary for them always to
pray and not be discouraged” (Luke 18:1).
We should keep on praying and not give up.
Sometimes we
do get answers to prayer right away. In
my life, I’ve found this usually happens when it’s something really important
or time sensitive. When the plane is
about to leave, at the last minute God comes through, time and time again. God is so faithful.
But we don’t
always get answers to prayer right when we want them: sometimes the answer itself needs time. When I was praying for a wife for so many
years, God was using that time to prepare me.
I wasn’t ready yet for the answer.
It’s all part of a process of laying down our lives and trusting Jesus,
drawing closer to Jesus, making contact with Jesus. That’s when things happen with God. The answer won’t always be exactly what we
expected, but it will be what he wanted, and that's what’s best for us.
Sometimes
we’re looking in one direction, while God’s moving in another. As the Bible says, “all things work together for good for those who trust God and are called
according to his purposes” (Rom. 8:28).
Sometimes we just have to trust God, without knowing what’s going on. But that trust itself, a giving up on
ourselves and trusting him, releases the power of God. When I am weak, then I am strong (2 Cor.
12:10). When we stop trying to make
something happen our own way and let God do what he wants to do, he will do it: because he is always doing something, and
it’s for our good. We’ve just got to get
out of the way so he can work.
Sometimes
when we see all the terrible things happening in our world, it steals our hope
and our trust. Even sometimes the things
happening in our own lives can be very discouraging. What’s going to happen to us? We get worried, we get fearful. That’s the flesh, rising up.
But we need
to put down the flesh, and let the Spirit come in and heal our thinking, heal our
emotions, cleansing us. Then as we are
cleansed and healed, we are better able to help others. Remember, we don’t need such great
faith. We don’t have to be
super-Christians. All we need is faith
like a mustard seed, and God can do great things with us. Amen?
Let’s
pray: Lord God, we need more of your
healing power in our lives. We pray that
you would draw near to us right now, so that we can draw near to you, so we can
touch you and receive your healing power.
Restore our child-like wonder and awe of you, we pray Lord. We want our faith to be restored and our hope
to rise up, even in areas of difficulty we’ve had for years and years. Do miracles in us we pray. And not just once or twice, but immerse us in
your presence every day. Fill us with
your Spirit and change us completely, Lord.
We lift up to you right now the concerns that have come to our minds as
we’ve been looking into your word today, areas where we need your healing touch,
areas where we need change in our lives.
Lord, we reach out to you right now, to make contact with you about
those concerns. And we pray that you
would move to solve these problems in our lives. May we decrease and you increase in us. In Jesus’ name we pray. And everybody said? Amen.
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