Following the Law of Moses, the law under which He was born (Galatians 4:4), Jesus went to Jerusalem to observe what appears to have been the Passover Feast (John 5:1). While there He visited an apparently well-known place containing a pool enclosed within five porches that was near the sheep-market and by the Sheep Gate. In the Hebrew Aramaic it was called, “Bethesda” (John 5:2). On those five porches, or “roofed colonnades,” there lay “a multitude of invalids – blind, lame, and paralyzed” in anxious hope of some kind of cure (John 5:3). The popular superstition was that when the water of the pool was stirred, some kind of healing would take place for the first to enter it (John 5:7). John does not ascribe this stirring of the water to angelic power nor does he, or Jesus, endorse the belief that only the first to enter the water could be healed supernaturally. The last part of John 5:3 and all of verse 4 in the King James Version are from much later manuscripts. The older copies do not have the explanation of what appears to have been a superstition. However, this does seem to have been the belief of the impotent man as well as that of the waiting, invalid multitude.
Why would Jesus visit such a place while in Jerusalem? I’m not sure, but it was an escape from the stifling atmosphere of the worldly pomp and self-righteousness of the Jewish religious leaders. In the atmosphere of Bethesda, the Lord could demonstrate His real work. Rather than preach controversial or reformatory doctrines, Jesus set out to do, and in so doing, He was speaking. Thus, Peter preached to Cornelius that Jesus “went about doing good” (Acts 10:38), and even in that, he infuriated the Jewish religious authorities.
On the day of His visit, and without the water of the pool, Jesus healed a man who had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. It seems that the Lord searched among the multitude of invalids for the most wretched of all. The one He found had no attendant or friend (John 5:7). His terrible ailment was the result of his sin, or, at least, the Jews thought it was. Jesus alluded to that thinking when he said to the healed man, “See, you are well! Sin no more, that nothing worse may happen to you” (John 5:14). Later, the Lord made it clear to His disciples that it was not the sin of another man nor that of his parents that resulted in his being born blind (John 9:1-3). But in the case of the man at Bethesda, he had been a sinner who had brought pain upon himself, and, if he continued in that sin, something worse than thirty-eight years of paralysis would occur. Indeed, to die in sin and be lost forever would be much worse than physical suffering.
Friends, there is something worse than being frightfully ill or even dying from a terrible disease. Jesus teaches us that it is far worse to die in sin, especially when we don’t have to. Jesus can heal us spiritually when we approach Him in confidence, humility, and submission to His will.
–Andy