God's Question for You: Will you be made whole?

But this morning we're going to allow God to ask us a question in John chapter 5 and verse number 1.

John 5 · chapter mention

I don't I don't know what I said, okay?

I thought I might have said the wrong thing, but I'll come around to it.

I'm not very good at math.

I say five out of four people are bad at math, and so I I messed up.

Okay.

John chapter 5.

John 5 · chapter mention

Do you have your Bible there?

Did I say 6, 8, or 10?

I don't even know.

Well, can I defend myself for a second?

Okay.

We study Mark on Wednesday night.

We would love to have you visit with us on Wednesday night at 6.30.

So we are in Mark.

We're in chapter 9.

In our under the under our in the heritage hour, we're studying the parables.

And I've been in Matthew 13.

So I don't know where I am.

I'm just glad to be here.

John 5, verse 1.

John 5:1

I was preaching one day on Moses Ark.

And I was preaching.

I was I was waxing an elephant.

I mean, I was really preaching on Moses art.

And people weren't tracking with me.

And finally I just had to stop.

And I looked at my wife.

You wonder why she sits right here in the front.

Well, number one, I need something pretty to look at.

Not no offense, but I just needed something.

And and two, she can get me back on track if I say something wrong.

And she said, You told them that Moses built the ark.

I was preaching one time on Jonah.

And I said, Jonah swallowed a whale.

And someone said, You said Jonah swallowed the well.

And I said, I believe the Bible so much if God said that Jonah swallowed the well, I would believe that too.

Whatever.

Okay.

John, John chapter 5.

John 5 · chapter mention

Lady said to me one day, I love when you mess up.

It humanizes you.

Who needs proof of that, right?

John 5.

After this, there was a feast of the Jews.

And Jesus went up to Jerusalem.

There is at Jerusalem by the sheep market a pool, which is called in the Hebrew tongue Bethesda, having five porches.

In these lay a great multitude of impotent folk, of blind, halt, withered, waiting for the moving of the water.

For an angel went down at a certain season into the pool, troubled the water, whosoever then, first after the troubling of the water, stepped in, was made whole of whatsoever disease he had.

A certain man was there, which had an infirmity thirty and eight years.

Saith unto him, Wilt thou be made whole?

The impotent man answered, Him, Sir, I have no man.

When the water is troubled to put me into the pool, while I am coming, another steppeth down before me.

Jesus saith unto him, Rise, take up thy bed and walk.

And immediately the man was made whole, took up his bed and walked, and on the same day was the Sabbath.

Notice in your Bible in verse number six, Jesus saw him lie and knew that he had been now a long time in that case, saith unto him, Wilt thou be made whole?

Do you want to be clean?

Do you want to be healed?

I speak on this subject this morning, the question, the question behind the miracle.

Our Father, we thank you for the Lord Jesus and thank you for the hope we have in Christ.

Lord, we're grateful today to be called a Christian.

For those of us who have come to Christ by faith.

And Lord, we are needy people as we offer imperfect worship and imperfect hearts and imperfect attention to a perfect God.

In our strength, in our weakness be strong.

In our own strength, help us to become weak so that we may fully depend upon you.

And in this hour of preaching, I pray that you'll help us to magnify Christ, to point men to Jesus.

And we thank you for it in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Thank you for standing.

Please be seated together.

There are some miracles in Scripture that tend to raise as many questions as they answer.

John 5 is one of those stories.

Jesus comes to a place called Bethesda, the house of mercy.

Pool of Bethesda, I've been to this pool right inside the gates of Jerusalem, near to the temple.

St.

Anne's Church, if we ever get to go there, if they'd stop fighting, we'll go to Israel.

St.

Anne's Church has the most beautiful acoustics anywhere in the world.

You could harmonize with yourself in that great church.

Pool of Bethesda has been found.

Had five porches where, according to Scripture, a multitude of hurting people would lie waiting for their healing.

A place called the House of Mercy is filled with people who desperately need mercy.

Yet for 40 or for 38 years, this impotent man has remained broken.

Bethesda, a place of healing, has become a place of four decades of illness in his life.

It's a place associated with healing in a world where sacred pools and cults, like the cult of Asclepius, we'll talk about, were familiar realities.

For 38 years, this man had come to this pool seeking to find in its waters the healing that he so desperately craved.

He had a lot of questions.

When will this water ever move?

Who will ever help me in?

Why does someone always get there before me?

When will my moment of healing come?

When Jesus walked to that pool that day, everything changed.

One day Jesus passed by my way.

He made me whole that day.

Just so you know how I feel.

I love the Lord Jesus with all of my heart.

He's touched my life.

He was wounded for my transgressions, bruised for my iniquities.

The chastisement of my peace was upon him.

With his stripes I have been healed.

The question behind this miracle is not merely, can Jesus heal him?

No.

The question is, will this man look away from everything he's been trusting in?

And look to Christ.

I want us to notice in our scriptures this morning the pool of Bethesda and its meaning.

Its meaning.

Bethesda means the house of mercy.

A place of outpouring.

In the Dead Sea Scrolls of 1948, a famous scroll called the Copper Scroll confirmed that this place was a place of two pools, referred to the place of two outpourings.

As much as I could discover in archaeological proof, there were two pools, one higher, one lower.

Rain water would fill the higher pool.

It was fed to the lower pool through some type of underground system, and the water, as it emptied from the upper pool, it would fill the lower pool, and as the water bubbled, it was believed that these waters had healing properties.

It's a place where the sick and infirm, as the Bible describes here, would come, they would rest under these five porches and seek to be healed by these waters.

Where was it?

Well, John answers that too.

Verse number two, there is a at Jerusalem by the sheep market a pool.

Now we discover here in Scripture that this pool is by the sheep gate and enters into Jerusalem.

I've had the privilege to walk into the city of Jerusalem.

One of the most amazing days when you go to Israel, the bus will drop you off on the top of the Mount of Olives.

You overview the whole city of Jerusalem.

You walk down from the Mount of Olives, down into the Kidron Valley, and you go into the Garden of Gethsemane and pray under millennia old olive trees where Jesus would have prayed before he was crucified.

And then you walk the ascent up the eastern slope into the city of Jerusalem.

What a day that is.

We go and sing at St.

Anne's, we view the pool, and then we walk the Via Dolorosa to the top of Galgotha where Jesus bled and died, and take communion at the garden tomb where Jesus defeated death.

The sheep gate.

The Bible describes in the Old Testament in Nehemiah chapter 3 that the sheep gate was reconstructed during the days of Elisha Pro Eliashe the scribe, the priest.

Nehemiah 3 · chapter mention

The gate opened onto a marketplace where sheep were sold.

Now, this is interesting.

The idea that the sheep gate was connected closely to the pool, which was connected closely to the temple, is significant.

It reinforces the idea that sheep represented both the people of Israel and the sacrificial system through which they maintained the covenant relationship with God.

If you were from the Galilee, you would not necessarily bring a sheep from your home.

You would come to Jerusalem, you'd enter into the gate near Bethesda, you would purchase a sheep at this market, and you would take that as your sacrifice to the temple where you would be in right standing with God.

Because, as it was in the days of Jesus, beginning in the Garden of Eden, it is through the shed blood of the innocent that the sins of the guilty are atoned.

Without the shedding of blood, there is no remission.

And the word means to cover.

God had so designed that man's sin was covered by the blood of the innocent, covering the sin of the guilty.

And that typology goes all the way through the Old Testament.

Every lamb was a picture of an innocent one who died for the guilty one to cover his sin.

And it was Jesus who enters the baptism waters of the Jordan River, and it was announced by John the Baptist, behold the Lamb of God, and he has come to take away the sins of the world.

It's interesting that this sheepgate is a picture of the sacrificial system that had existed for thousands of years.

And it's also significant that the Holy Spirit is working into this text the notion that the gate through which sacrificial animals entered the temple became the setting where Jesus, the Lamb of God, demonstrated his power to heal and to restore.

That this story serves as an object lesson or a living embodiment of the redemptive work those sacrifices prefigured.

Because watch this, guys.

This story is not just about Old Testament lambs that would be offered as sacrifices at the temple.

It's not just about healing waters that would bring temporary healing to a person's life.

This story is about the Lamb of God who wanted to come and with his stripes, this man can be healed, not from physical malady, but from the illness of sin that has so infected the bloodstream of mankind.

And not just living, not just waters that would bring some type of temporal healing, but water, living water that would bring an everlasting quenching of this man's spiritual thirst.

And Jesus comes to speak to this man in this place.

Think thoroughly of its miracle.

Now there's a lot of confusion about this passage.

In later Bibles, the end of verse 3 and verse 4 are not included.

Different subject for a different day.

Some Bibles say there was an angel of the Lord, verse 4, that came down to the waters.

Some Bibles say there was an angel.

Now we know that these two pools in Jerusalem were fed not only by a reservoir, but also occasionally by artesian wells.

When that water had come into the upper pool, it had special characteristics, something like hot springs that people would go to for therapeutic reasons even today.

When those wells kicked in, the waters were stirred, and the people would rush to take advantage of what they believed was curative power thought to be in the water.

I've often said this jokingly.

If you've been baptized here at Calvary lately, you will agree with what I'm about to say.

We have an old Baptist tree.

It is delaminating.

There's some rust on the bottom.

It's clean as a whistle, but it looks like the Jordan River.

And I tell everyone who goes to the baptismal waters this water cannot save you.

In fact, you will be dirtier when you come out of this water than you will be going into that water.

But they believe that this water, this physical water, had healing power.

Now notice verse 4 an angel went down at a certain season into the pool and troubled the water.

Now we have another enigma in our story.

What is the nature of this angel?

Is it an angel sent by God or a supernatural entity, a supernatural demonic entity from Satan?

Is this passage speaking of a divine manifestation of God at a place called the house of mercy?

In other words, is this significant of an outpouring of heavenly grace at which one day a year an angel sent by God stirs the water and the first invalid person in the water finds their healing?

Or is this something different?

Is John referring to a cultic site, one built for the Greek god Asclepius?

This healing cult that perpetuated itself with enough truth to propagate the lie.

That one day a year a demonic presence of some kind came and stirred the waters, toying with the many that were sick and infirm there, that this was a supernatural game of cat and mouse in which the fastest invalid discovered healing.

As I read this chapter, the previous interpretation seems invalid.

How could the Holy Spirit of God, he that moved upon the face of the waters, moved only once a year onto the healing waters of Bethesda?

How could Jehovah Rapha, that's Exodus 15, 26, I am the Lord that healeth thee?

How could Jehovah Rapha, the Lord our healer, choose but one lucky sinner a year to bless for his speed in accessing the pool when the waters were troubled?

Does it seem plausible?

Does it even seem likely that the God who so loved the world would love but one man on one day a year when the waters were stirred by an angel?

And pray tell me why Jesus would visit a site that he was already visiting once a year for the benefit of one man to the neglect of all the other invalid and sick who lay on those porches that day, and they too would not receive their healing.

Now I was talking about the cult of Asclepius.

Here he is in the picture.

Asclepius is a serpent wrapped around a pole.

The pool of Bethesda existed within a world where pools and sacred waters were commonly associated with healing.

We've already talked a little bit about that.

One of the most prominent examples was the cult of Asclepius, the Greek god of healing.

Asclepius was worshipped as the divine healer.

His sanctuaries became places where people who were sick came seeking supernatural healing.

The healing process often involved water and purification or even sleeping in sacred areas in hopes of receiving healing or divine instruction.

Now hang with me just a few more minutes.

I know you know this symbol.

Can we bring up the next slide?

Because you've seen it all over medical vehicles and hospitals, even to this day.

We've used this for centuries.

The cult of Asclepius, this divine healing, this pool, may in some way be significant with a cult, a demonic presence of some kind.

And by the way, Satan is not omnipotent and he's not omnipresent.

But every fallacious lie that comes out of the charred vocal cords of Satan has enough truth in it to perpetuate the lie.

And I would just encourage all of us while I'm on the subject today that we ought not to have fellowship with demons.

And we ought to be very careful what we turn to and what we look to.

And I would speak not just to teenagers.

I remember years ago there there was a lady in a church I pastored, and there were so many odd things going on in her life.

Her daughter was saved and was baptized.

She had a baptism party at her house.

At the baptism party, it was revealed to me that she was delving into the spirit world.

Through tarot cards and through a Ouija board and other means of summoning presences in her life, and I strongly discouraged her from doing that.

We ought to be very careful with that because we are not of the darkness, we are of the light.

Now let me give you the tagline here.

Whether the stirring of the water was an actual miraculous work of God or a popular explanation surrounding the pool.

John wants us to see something greater in John chapter 5.

John 5 · chapter mention

He wants us to note that the man had been waiting for the water to move while the woman who could truly make him humble was already standing beside him.

What John wants us to know is that there's a man by the sheepgate by the pool in which he's looking to for healing for 38 years.

He's rested in his den for 38 years.

He's been lying there waiting on someone to lift him in the water when the fact of the matter is, all healing and even eternal life had come knocking on the door of his heart that day.

And what Jesus is saying in John chapter 5 is I want you to turn away from every earthly thing in which you've been seeking to find deliverance and healing and happiness and purpose.

John 5 · chapter mention

And I want you to look away from the pool, and I want you to look to Jesus Christ because in him is our salvation.

Let me give you that was a long introduction, short sermon, long introduction.

Good thing for you, I'm hungry.

Number one.

He was looking for healing in all the wrong places.

For 38 years, he went to the same place.

He turned to the same place.

Broken cisterns for thirty-eight years.

Jeremiah says, My people have committed two evils.

They have forsaken me the fountain of living water and have hewed out cisterns, broken cisterns that can hold no water.

He was looking for healing in all the wrong places.

May I say to you today, and be so pointed in my emphasis here.

People in our world today are looking for healing and hope in all the wrong places.

And if you've tried all those empty places, you keep trying, if you will, and discover they will never satisfy.

Alcohol satisfied, they'd only need to put one can in the carton.

The problem with the pools that we go to is that we need a further intensification of that very thing.

We live in a world of perversion.

Perversion.

We live in a world, if I can just be so plain to say this, we live in a world of leaders and politicians, media personalities, entertainers that turn to the most ungodly releases of anxiety and stress in their lives.

It happens on a weekly basis.

May begin with sexual temptation that becomes a turning on God's natural order for the expression of sexuality.

And may I just go on the record and say every sexual expression outside of God's covenant relationship called marriage is against God's design.

And there might have been a day in time, there might have been a day in time in places like this and many others that certain lifestyles were excoriated and other sins were ignored.

But I want to tell you something.

Whether it's heterosexual sin, fornication or adultery or homosexuality or even deviant roads that lead from that, every sexual expression outside of marriage is against God's plan for your life.

But man, we live in a perverse society.

Ever learning, ever exploring, never able to come to the knowledge of the truth, never able to come to the knowledge of acceptance.

If I said to you, by statistic, by statistic, they say half of all men in our world today are addicted to pornography.

Listen to me.

We're not careful.

We will look for what we need in all the wrong places.

You say, Pastor, why are you mad today?

I'm I'm frustrated with what sin causes in the lives of God's people.

He looked in all the wrong places.

Not only so, he was looking for healing in all the wrong people.

Notice what he said.

Jesus said, Do you want to be whole today?

Well, I have no man, verse 7.

I have no man to let me in the pool when the water's troubled.

While I'm coming, another steppeth down before me.

Number two, he was looking for healing in all the wrong people.

If this man was made whole after 38 years of paralysis, this healing would be a radical threat to the well-being of his existence.

This man has learned to depend on others because he has been helpless for 38 years.

And if all of a sudden, someone said, if all of a sudden Jesus made him whole, that would change everything in his life.

No more handouts, no more assistance.

He'll have to be productive.

He's going to have to function in a society in which he has been unable to be productive for 38 years.

In other words, he's not only sick, if he's not careful, he'll wear this illness as an identity.

He says, My name is so-and-so, and I am an invalid.

He's wearing it as an identity.

Looking for help in all the wrong people.

I have no man to let me in the pool.

And when the water's troubled, I always miss my moment.

Matter of fact, I've never been in the pool.

Somebody always gets their moment before me.

I have no man to let me in the pool.

Maybe so, but the I am is here.

I always miss my moment.

Well, your moment is right now.

I've never been in the pool.

Yeah, Jesus is not interested in putting you in the pool.

He's interested in putting the pool in you.

Well, look in chapter 4.

Just occurs just a few verses before here.

Look in chapter 4.

Jesus comes to a woman, a Samaritan woman, and he has a conversation about all things about water.

She's come to the well to draw water to quench a physical thirst.

And Jesus has come to the well to quench a spiritual thirst.

And look what he says to her in verse 14.

But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst, but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.

Listen carefully.

Jesus is not interested in throwing this man into the pool.

He's interested in putting water in his soul that will permanently satisfy him.

Someone always gets their moment before me.

Many have come, 38 winners he's seen in this relay race to the water.

Someone always gets in before me, but right here, right now, at this moment, it's just you and the Lord Jesus Christ.

He was looking for healing in all the wrong people.

Your spouse can't save you, this church can't save you, this pastor can't save you, that counselor can't save you, that doctor can't save you.

Only Jesus.

Number three, he was looking for healing at all the wrong points of time for 38 years.

He had watched other people have their moment while he remained on his mat made of reeds.

But on this particular day, as many had come, and many were lying around the pool on the porches, right here, right now, it's Jesus.

The pool wasn't his answer, the crowd wasn't his answer, his friends weren't his answer, his timing wasn't his answer.

Jesus was his answer.

And that's why I love how Jesus handles him here.

Watch carefully.

I don't want you to look at that pool anymore.

That's not going to help you.

And I don't want you to look at that water anymore.

That's not going to help you.

And I don't want you to look at all these people that you've been blaming for your sickness who haven't been able to get you.

I don't want you to look at your friends right now.

Look at me.

Look at me.

Are you looking at me?

And beloved, that's what faith is.

Faith is looking away and looking unto Jesus.

Will you look away?

He's been sick so long.

Maybe he thinks healing is so far away from him, but it's staring him right in the face.

I just want to speak the name of Jesus.

Oh, over every dark addiction.

Look to Jesus.

Look away to Jesus.

Will you be whole?

Every time I've read this passage, it just it humors me.

Really, it does.

Will I be whole?

I almost fell.

That was amazing.

One day that's going to happen.

Promise me you won't put it on YouTube the day it happens.

Faith can't promise that.

Well, you be whole.

That's all I've ever wanted.

Jesus goes to Jericho.

There's a blind man who's sitting on the wayside crying out, Jesus, thou son of David, have mercy on me.

And Jesus says to him, What wilt thou that I do for you?

Doesn't that seem like a crazy question?

Well, I don't know, but a five-bedroom house down on the bank of the Dead Sea would be a pretty nice place.

What do you want me to do for you?

Well, it's kind of like a new job and a new wardrobe.

I want my sight.

Wilt thou be made whole?

It is that we must confess our great need to God.

Lord, I am sick, I am lonely, I'm desperate, and the only thing I want in this moment is you.

Look away to Jesus.

If you have this little handout, I wrote some questions for you.

It will become our invitation this morning.

Number one, in what ways have you been needing healing in your life?

I want you to think about it.

In what areas of your life lately have you needed healing?

It could be addiction, it could be sin, it could be severed relationships, it could be physical healing, financial healing, emotional well-being.

How have you been sick lately?

Think about it, write it down.

Number two, from what pools is God calling you to look away so that you might look to Jesus?

What are you looking to today?

What are you looking to?

Because guess what?

If you're not looking to Jesus, you're looking to something else.

And I hope you've come today to realize those pools aren't satisfying the deepest longings in your heart.

Number three, do you want to be whole?

Are you sick of being sick?

Are you sick of being addicted?

Are you sick of being angry?

Are you sick of being hopeless?

Look to Jesus.