Jesus encounters a man with an infirmity at a pool near the sheep gate. Dr. Sproul points out the textual issues with this section and then proceeds to exposit the healing event. Since this was the Sabbath and Jesus had told the man to take his bed and walk, he was confronted by the Jews. However this man's witness was not like the Samaritan woman, but more like Adam's (The woman you gave me...).

Once again, we return to our study of the gospel according to Saint John. Today, we begin at John 5:1–15, where we have the account of the healing of the paralytic by the pool of Bethesda:

After this there was a feast of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. Now there is in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate a pool, which is called in Hebrew, Bethesda, having five porches. In these lay a great multitude of sick people, blind, lame, paralyzed, 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. When Jesus saw him lying there, and knew that he already had been in that condition a long time, He said to him, “Do you want to be made 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.”

Jesus said to him, “Rise, take up your bed and walk.” And immediately the man was made well, took up his bed, and walked.

And that day was the Sabbath. The Jews therefore said to him who was cured, “It is the Sabbath; it is not lawful for you to carry your bed.”

He answered them, “He who made me well said to me, ‘Take up your bed and walk.’”

Then they asked him, “Who is the Man who said to you, ‘Take up your bed and walk’?” But the one who was healed did not know who it was, for Jesus had withdrawn, a multitude being in that place. Afterward Jesus found him in the temple, and said to him, “See, you have been made well. Sin no more, lest a worse thing come upon you.”

The man departed and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had made him well.

He who has ears to hear the Word of God, let him hear. Let us pray.

Father, as we contemplate the significance of this incident recorded in Sacred Writ, we pray that You would condescend to help us through the illumination of the Holy Spirit, that we may understand the text correctly and apply it to our lives in a manner that is pleasing to You. For we ask it in Jesus’ name.

Winds of Hostility

We mentioned at the beginning of our study of John’s gospel that John is different from the other gospel writers. The other gospels—Matthew, Mark, and Luke—are called the Synoptic Gospels because they provide a biographical synopsis of the life and ministry of Jesus.

Even though John gives us other insights into Jesus’ person and work, the goal of his gospel is not to give us a complete synopsis of the life of Jesus. In fact, about two-thirds of the material found in the gospel of John covers the last week of Jesus’ life.

We have seen the development of this gospel thus far, and we have looked at some of Jesus’ encounters with people like Nicodemus and the woman at the well in Sychar. Now we have another miracle story that tells us of an encounter that Jesus had with a man who was presumably paralyzed.

If you note the mood and the editorial structure of the beginning of chapter 5, you will see that John is not focusing on the paralyzed man. Rather, he is introducing the winds of hostility that are starting to blow against Jesus from the Jewish establishment. We are beginning to gain some insight into why so much fury broke out against Christ from the leaders of His day. With that in mind, let us look at the text as it unfolds.

The Healing Pool of Bethesda

Chapter 5 begins with this introductory statement: “After this there was a feast of the Jews.” Something unusual in this text is that every other time John provides the setting for an event that takes place during a Jewish feast, he tells us which feast it was. This time, he does not, so we do not know. There is much speculation, but the bottom line is that no one knows which feast it was that Jesus went up to Jerusalem to observe.

But there Jesus is, and we are told, “Now there is in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate a pool, which is called in Hebrew, Bethesda, having five porches.” The area of the Sheep Gate was in the northern section of Jerusalem. There were two pools, side by side and covered by five columns. These columns had a covering at the top that stretched back onto the roof of the temple, and there was a shelter beside these two pools.

People who had illnesses and maladies would come there and stay under the shelter, waiting for the opportunity to go into the water. We read here something rather unusual and fascinating, for it says, “In these lay a great multitude of sick people, blind, lame, paralyzed, waiting for the moving of the water.”

That is explained for us in verse 4: “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.” This is the only time in sacred Scripture that we find anything indicating that there was a pool in Jerusalem that an angel visited periodically, stirred up the water, and gave miraculous healing to at least the first person who entered the water.

Textual Criticism

Before I tell you what I am about to tell you, let me remind you that at one time I was the president of the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy. I have spent my whole life defending the doctrine of the inerrancy of sacred Scripture. What I am about to tell you may shake you up and make you wonder how someone who believes in inerrancy could bring up the problem that I am about to raise.

Those of you who are seminary students will recognize what I am holding in front of you now. It is that which creates terror in your hearts when your professors call upon you to translate from the Greek. This is the Greek New Testament. It is used well. Mine is dog-eared, and I hope yours will be dog-eared as well in thirty years.

But in any case, on the pages, there are a couple of little footnotes at the bottom. At that point, the text ends, and everything below it is footnotes. What that is technically called in the Greek text is the apparatus. Using literary symbols and a kind of code system for academics, the apparatus does is rehearses for us readings, schools of manuscripts, and copies of the biblical text. This apparatus in the Greek text is part of the science that we have in theology called textual criticism.

Textual criticism is the science by which scholars try to reconstruct what was in the original documents of the Bible. We do not have the original letter to the Romans. We do not have the entire original gospel of John. What the church possesses is hundreds, and in some cases, thousands of copies that were made in the earliest days and then copied carefully again in the next generations.

Inevitably, when copying takes place, every now and then one of the scribes nods, and he turns an “i” into an “e,” or an “l” into a “t,” or skips a word. Or, he might jot something in the margin that we call “marginal gloss.” The next scribe sees and thinks, “Oh, that’s part of the manuscript of the original text,” and he sticks it in there. So, we see certain errors in the copies.

Now, do not get alarmed. One of the best sciences we have is textual criticism, the science of reconstructing the original text. Someone once said that 99.44 percent of the time, there are no discrepancies, no textual variants, no textual problems, or anything to be worried about. But every now and then, you will find manuscripts that differ as to what was in the original text.

I am laboring this point because some of the best copies of the gospel of John do not have verse 4 in them. It is very possible that this statement about an angel who comes and stirs up the water and heals the first person who steps in may be a textual gloss that reflects more of the superstition of the people around the pool of Bethesda than the actual truth of God.

I mention that for your consideration, because we know that those two pools in Jerusalem were fed, not only by a reservoir, but also occasionally by artesian wells. When that water came in, it had special characteristics, something like the hot springs that people go to for therapeutic reasons even today. When those wells kicked in, the water was stirred, and people would rush to take advantage of the curative powers that were thought to be in the water.

That is the background of this text. I do not want to take it any further, only to mention it in passing. There is no reason to abandon your confidence in the inspiration of Scripture, or anything like that based on this text and textual criticism.

Do You Want to Be Made Well?

In this text, we have a man who thinks along the lines of what is described in verse 4 because he believes the angel is stirring up the water. He is convinced that if he can just get in the water first, he will be cured. But for thirty-eight years, this man, in his malady—which was presumably a kind of paralysis—was never able to take advantage of the curative powers of this pool. We read in verse 6 that when Jesus saw him lying there and knew he had been in that condition a long time, He said to him, “Do you want to be made well?”

John leaves us to guess why Jesus said that, because he does not explain why. Psychologists have a field day with this. They say: “Jesus is assuming that this man is in his miserable condition because he doesn’t want to be made well. He has become satisfied in his state of inertia.” We know there are people like that.

On the other hand, Jesus may not be involved in psychologizing, but is simply aware of the fact that if this man is made whole after thirty-eight years of paralysis, this could be a radical threat to the well-being of his existence. This man has learned to depend on others to tend to his matters because he has been helpless for thirty-eight years. If, all of a sudden, Jesus makes him whole, that changes everything. No more handouts. No more assistance. He will have to be productive. He is going to have to function in a society in which he has been unable to be productive for thirty-eight years. On that point, I think we do learn that some folks do not want to get better, because being better represents a threat they cannot handle.

I remember one day, I had finished working at a gym in the East Liberty section of Pittsburgh. It was Vesta’s birthday. I was hurrying home because we were going out for dinner. I was in downtown East Liberty, and it was dark. I started to walk past a jewelry store, and just as I was walking past, a man rushed out the door, ran into me, and almost knocked me to the ground. The store owner was right behind him, hollering, “Stop, thief!” It was a robbery in progress—almost like a gin game at Heathrow, a “robbery in progress.” But that is another story.

Anyway, this man ran right into me. What do you do when a crook who just pulled off a hold-up runs into you? I reacted instinctively, and I grabbed him, and I said, “Hold it!” He looked at me. He did not take a gun and shoot me. He said, “I give up,” just like that. When I got home to my wife, I said: “You’ll never guess what I did on my way home tonight. Wyatt Earp has nothing on me. I nabbed this guy right there.”

The police came and they carted the criminal away and took him to jail. The next day, I saw the police—I knew them—and I said: “What happened to that guy last night? He didn’t even try to get away from me.” They say: “Oh, we know him. We put him in jail for six months; the day he gets out, he’ll go do something like this again.”

He did not have a gun. He did not have anything. He wanted to get caught because he could not survive in the outside world. He was used to living in jail. He got a bed every night and three square meals a day. There are people like that who are satisfied in their paralyzed condition, who are threatened by life to such a degree that they do not want to deal with the vagaries of human existence.

The Paralyzed Man Walks

Jesus asked him, “Do you want to be made well?” Then the sick man answered Him, “Sir”—he calls Him “lord,” but in the polite form—“I have no man to put me in the pool when the water is stirred up; but while I am coming, another steps down before me.” John tells us that Jesus says to the man, “Rise, take up your bed and walk.”

The bed the sick man lay upon was a mat that he could roll up, made of reeds. So, he rolled up his mat, put it on his shoulder, and started to walk away as Jesus instructed him. John says, “And immediately the man was made well, took up his bed, and walked.”

Now comes the ominous signal of what will soon come to pass: “And that day was the Sabbath. The Jews therefore said to him who was cured, ‘It is the Sabbath; it is not lawful for you to carry your bed.’”

Where in the Word of God does it say that it is not lawful for a person who was healed of paralysis to carry his bed? You know the answer to that question: nowhere. But the rabbis, in their historical interpretation of the law, enumerated thirty-nine specific types of work in which it was illegal to engage on the Sabbath day. The thirty-ninth rule of Sabbath observance—the very last one on the list—prohibited carrying something like this from one place to another.

The Jews see this man who was hopelessly paralyzed, the man whom they had seen under the portico for thirty-eight years, and now they see him walking. Instead of responding to the miracle of his healing and saying, “How is it possible that you’re walking?” they say, “Why are you carrying your bed?”

How wicked and deceitful is the human heart. The Jews were so caught up in the laws they had added to the law of God that they were more concerned with this man’s disobedience of rabbinic tradition than they were excited about his astonishing healing and relief from suffering.

Ashamed to Confess Jesus

We are going to see later in John a similar story regarding a man who was born blind, whom Jesus healed. We will look at that story when we get to it. We have already seen the encounter Jesus had with the woman of Sychar. When Jesus revealed Himself to her, she ran into the town and told everyone in Sychar that she had just met the Messiah. She could not wait to bear witness to the greatness of Jesus.

How about this fellow? The Pharisees and leaders come to him and say: “It’s the Sabbath. It’s not lawful for you to carry your bed.” What does he say? “Hey, I’m so happy that I want to throw this bed in the air and catch it and skip and leap all the way home”? No.

The man says, “He who made me well said to me, ‘Take up your bed and walk.’” He is saying, in essence: “It wasn’t my idea. If someone comes along and tells me to walk, and I walk for the first time in thirty-eight years, and then He tells me to pick up my bed and carry it, what do you think I’m going to do? I’m going to pick up the bed and carry it. If you have a problem with that, go talk to Him.”

When is the first time you see that kind of thinking in the Bible? “The woman that you gave to me, she ate and made me do it.” Nothing has changed from the fall, from the garden of Eden. This man, instead of rejoicing and defending the glory of the man who just healed him, says, “This other guy made me do it.” They ask, “What is His name?” The man answers, “I didn’t get His name.”

Can you believe that? What did He do, leave a silver bullet, and you say, “Who was this masked man?” No, he says, “He never gave me his name.” The Jews were probably thinking: “Did you not try to find out His name? You have been here thirty-eight years, sick as a dog. He cures you with one command, with one word. He says ‘Rise,’ and you rise, ‘Walk,’ and you walk, and you do not get His name?”

Jesus said, “He who is embarrassed to confess Me before men, I will be ashamed to confess before My Father.” I have previously mentioned a story of Alexander the Great. His troops were engaged in a very serious battle when one of the soldiers fled the scene. He was a coward. After the battle, the coward was apprehended and brought to Alexander the Great’s tent. He stood there trembling before his general. Alexander looked at him and said, “Son, why did you run?” The boy said, “I was afraid.”

Alexander said: “I see. What’s your name?” The boy mumbled his answer, and Alexander did not hear him. He said: “Speak up. I asked you, ‘What is your name?’” The young soldier said, “My name is Alexander.” Alexander the Great looked at the young soldier and said, “Son, either change your behavior or change your name.” Christian, if you are embarrassed by Jesus, and you are afraid to confess Him before men, then change your behavior or change your name.

How Not to Receive Blessings

“Afterward Jesus found him in the temple, and said to him, ‘See, you have been made well. Sin no more, lest a worse thing come upon you.’” There are many passages in John’s gospel—in chapter 9 and elsewhere—where we are warned against coming to the conclusion that particular calamities befalling us are the direct result of a specific sin.

Even though we are warned in the book of Job and in John 9 never to assume that a calamitous event is directly related to a person’s sin, we should not conclude that calamity is never a result of sin. As Jesus said when the tower fell upon the innocent bystanders, “Unless you repent, you will all likewise perish” (Luke 13:1), so He says to this man, “Stop your sinful lifestyle, lest a worse thing befall you.” What is the next line? The man runs to the authorities and tells them it was Jesus who inclined him to break the law.

What a marked contrast between this man and so many others who encountered the living Christ. Once they received His touch, once they received a blessing from His hand, they would have crawled over glass to bear witness to Him as their Lord. But this man, who received the physical blessing of healing, apparently never went past the physical and never acted out of saving faith. How easy it is for us, beloved, to be faithful to Christ, to be faithful to God, only when we receive some benefit from His hand.

I preach to myself, and I say: “Self, if God never blesses you another moment for the rest of your life, you have no reason under heaven to do anything but glorify Him, adore Him, and be grateful to Him for the blessings you’ve already experienced. If He abandoned me tonight—which I know He won’t—I would have no excuse to do anything but serve Him until I take my last breath.” Let us learn from this man how not to receive the blessings of Christ. Let us pray.

Father, like Augustine, as we struggle with our sin, sometimes we do not really want to be made well. We say, “O Lord, make us clean, but not quite yet.” Rather, Father, help us to desire to get out of the ditch and off the bed where we have been so comfortable. We ask it in Christ’s name and for His sake. Amen.

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.