Day 281 (John 5) - Year 4
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Hey, Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble, and I'm your host for The Bible Recap. There's a quiet corner in the old city of Jerusalem with manicured gardens outside a beautiful church, and off to the side, you can walk down the stairs to the pools of Bethesda. You can even see the remains of the five porticos where one of my favorite stories happened.

In Jesus' day, this pool is where the invalids of Jerusalem gather. One of the reasons they like this spot is because the word on the street is that these waters have healing powers. From time to time, the waters start to swirl, and people say that if you jump in when that happens, you'll get healed.

Your Bible may have a footnote that says some ancient versions of this text include a local rumor that it was angels stirring the waters. Maybe, but there's a bit more evidence that the bubbling and swirling is from a natural spring or a hot spring that would occasionally rear its head. And those can and do sometimes have the effect of helping aches and pains. Regardless, this is a place of hope for invalids.

Jesus rolls up to the pools of Bethesda one day and starts a conversation with a man who has been there for 38 years. Jesus asks if he wants to be healed, and the man doesn't give a yes or no answer. Maybe because he doesn't want to get his hopes up. So instead, he tells Jesus why healing seems impossible for him. After all, he's been there for 13,870 days. And in that time, he's probably had to watch other people get the healing he's longed for.

But Jesus meets him in the midst of his hopelessness and gives him the thing he can't even imagine is possible. And he picks up his mat and walks off. And do you know the very first place he goes after he's been healed? To the temple. He hasn't been allowed to go there in almost four decades because even if he could have gotten there, he wouldn't be allowed to enter because he's considered unclean. But the minute he's healed, he goes to worship God.

Unfortunately, he gets in an argument with the Pharisees because he brought his mat with him. Here's the problem. It's the Sabbath. There are laws about the Sabbath. God set up these laws way back in the beginning of his relationship with Israel because they had just come out of 400 years of Egyptian slavery, and he wants to show them that he's not a slave driver like the Egyptian Pharaoh. Pharaoh commanded them to work, but God commanded them to rest.

Sabbath also serves as a marker of their trust in God, believing he'll provide for them even if they take a day off from work each week to engage in their relationship with him, to focus on worship and peace and nearness. Historically, the Jews were terrible at keeping the Sabbath. So along come the Pharisees, who are very strict, and they decide that apparently God's law is too lenient. What they need are more rules to force them to obey the law. So they beef up God's law by writing their own amendments. For instance...

God says you can't work on the Sabbath, so they said, well, brick masonry is a big job around here and that involves combining water and dirt, so just to be on the safe side will make it illegal to combine water and dirt on the Sabbath. Therefore, we hereby declare it illegal to spit on the dirt on the Sabbath. You can spit on a rock, but you can't spit on the dirt. They call this building a fence around the law, a fence to protect it.

But over time, what happens is that they start treating the fence itself like it's God's law instead of something they built. These Pharisees tell the healed man that not only is he not allowed to carry his mat on the Sabbath, but that he's not allowed to be healed on the Sabbath either and that the man who healed him has broken the law. Wow. Talk about a bummer. Jesus tracks the man down in the temple and encourages him. He says, you're better. Isn't this amazing?

Look, you've had a hard life already and sin has consequences I want you to avoid so that no more harm will come to you. Let today mark a turning point for you. When the Pharisees find out that Jesus was the one who healed the man, they want him dead. Can you imagine? So Jesus pushes back.

Often when we see Jesus interact with the scribes and Pharisees, what he's doing is throwing a leg over the fence intentionally and basically looking them in the eye and saying, I'm not breaking the law. He doesn't do it to be defiant. He does it because they are being defiant. They're defying God's command to not add to his words. They're giving their man-made traditions and rules equal standing with God's laws.

When Jesus does these things, they repeatedly accuse him of breaking the law, but he isn't. He never breaks the law. He breaks man-made traditions and rules.

He goes on to tell them that every single thing he's doing is done through his father's power. And if they're angry about it now, they haven't seen the half of it. He says he can give life to the dead when he speaks to them. And while this is certainly true on a physical level, like the story we'll read about Lazarus in John 11, he's also speaking about the spiritual level here. When he speaks to the spiritually dead and causes them to hear his voice, they come alive. Like that second birth he talked about with Nicodemus in John 3.

Jesus also says God the Father has given the role of judgment to him, but that ultimately all his judgments are the one God the Father has handed down. Because in verse 30, he says, I seek not my own will, but the will of him who sent me. Jesus, God the Son, submits to the plans of God the Father. What remarkable humility he demonstrates in his time on earth. We'll touch on this more in the future, but I just wanted to point it out here as well.

Jesus ends with more harsh words for the Pharisees. He says they may think they know and love God's word, but they don't really know it at all, because all those Old Testament scriptures point to him, and they don't even see him there. And in fact, because of that, the scriptures they cling to are the very ones that will condemn them. If they had actually understood Moses, not just memorized the law, they would have understood who Christ is. But knowing scripture without knowing Christ is pointless.

The Pharisees have built their hope on the law, but all those laws were given to show how impossible they are to keep, to humble mankind into seeing our great need for Him, the law-fulfiller and the life-giver. The law, checked boxes and moral uprightness, will never have the power to save us. The law is the MRI that diagnoses our problem, and Jesus is the surgeon.

Today, my God shot was in the absolute value of Jesus over all other things. As I'm reading about the pools of Bethesda and I see this man get healed, I can't help but wonder how I would have felt if after he gets healed, he just goes home or goes to get a massage or goes to meet a friend for coffee. It absolutely wrecks me that the first place he goes is to the temple. He knows the value of drawing near to God.

He has been denied that opportunity for so long. So God came to him and God kept pursuing him. Jesus found him again in the temple. And Jesus basically gives him a benediction for life in the kingdom. His entire world has changed. But do you know why? Not because he got his legs fixed. If he'd gotten his legs fixed and didn't get God, I would feel sorry for him because

because he was right there, face to face with the king. If he had missed it and just skipped off with his mat, my heart would shatter at this story. But thank God, Jesus spoke to that dead man's heart and called him to life. And now that man knows for sure that he is where the joy is. ♪

Have you heard? Did you get a copy? Last week, I released my first devotional. It's called The God Shot, 100 Snapshots of God's Character in Scripture. In this little devo, we explore powerful sections from each book of the New Testament. And each day's reading points toward a name or attribute of God from that passage. So grab a copy at the link in the show notes or visit our store at thebiblerecap.com.