John chapter 5 recounts an exciting story of hope and healing for the paralytic man who waited there 38 years. Yeshua (Jesus) comes on the scene and everything changes, “Rise, take up your bed and walk.” Healing. Deliverance. A new life. He meets the man later in the Temple and tells him, “Go and sin no more.”
Only confirmed in its identity in the last century, the Pool of Bethesda site revealed Crusader and Byzantine churches, two huge rectangular Hellenistic (Greek) water reservoirs, surrounded by five colonnades or porticos, even as the Gospel writer records. By opening the pipes from one pool, the water would mysteriously begin to stir on the other….
You will see the commentary about an angel stirring the waters in parentheses in some Bibles. This was not an angel of the Lord. Jesus never told the man to get into the pool. God doesn’t dole out first-come, first-served miracles! He heals all who come in faith (Luke 4:40).
At the time of Jesus’ visit, the pool served the pagan healing cult of Asclepius, begun in the 4th century BC. Asclepius served as the god of medicine in Greek mythology and was associated with the serpent-entwined rod. This pool likely dates from the 1st century BC with artifacts attesting to its identity.
And here Jesus appears! Friend of sinners, he reaches out to those with no help and no hope. He tells the man not to wash in the pagan pool, but to rise to God’s word! One powerful word from the Lord changes the paralytic’s entire existence. The fact that he was a Jewish man is confirmed by his later entrance into the Jewish Temple. He left the pagan promises behind and began to testify of Jesus to the Jewish priests! Today, kick literal or emotional paralysis to the curb and rise up at his word, which is all-powerful and always produces what he sends it forth to do!
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