Clough John Lesson 25

Doctrine of Legalism and Suffering – John 5:1-16

One of my great criticisms of traditional fundamental Bible teaching is that it is not conceiving of a tactical real situation and this is why as much as possible, sometimes I know I bore some of you because you don’t understand why I’m doing it, this is why we bring in the human viewpoint opposites to the doctrines that we are teaching. In the basic series we’ve gone to considerable expense of getting some tape recordings of men who are the most vehement opponents of the Christian faith I could find, so that you will hear what the other side is saying, because some of you to this day I still don’t believe think that people think this way. I mentioned something about evolution—well, I never heard anybody say that. I don’t know what world you’ve been living in for the last ten or fifteen years but it’s not the same one the rest of us are; you’d better check things out because when things look like that you’re in bad shape. The world is the world under Satan’s dominion. And he’s not playing games, he’s out to destroy or immobilize the body of Christ and to a large degree he is successful. We have Christians in high places that ought to be doing things and they are doing nothing.

We have many Christians who are teachers in the public schools that are doing absolutely nothing except teaching anti-Christianity and they are so stupid about it that they don’t even know that’s what they’re teaching. It’s amazing to listen to some of our people who have discernment go through some of the school textbooks. The political science in the high school starts out saying the political process is the solution to all basic human problems. And then it goes on to say shortly thereafter that the political process is a very imprecise process. And with that he course begins. And it’s this kind of garbage that is pedaled in the classroom by innocent believers that are to stupid to even see what it is that they are teaching.

And we’re loaded, the woods are filled with idiots and this is why we are trying to teach the Word and be a little hard about it at times, simply to either get rid of the idiots physically or change them into smart people. But we have no patience with people who willfully are idiots. Now all of us are idiots to a degree because we’re fallen beings. It’s one thing about being an idiot by just gradually wallowing in it and growing out of it by sanctification, it’s another thing about being an idiot because you like it. And we have a lot of Christians that are “like it” type idiots. They just love it, the stupider they are the better off they feel, don’t get involved I this problem, don’t get involved in that problem, that’s work, don’t teach, don’t study that portion of the Word of God, it’s too detailed, we don’t bother with stuff like that, we prefer to sit around and be stupid the rest of my life. So this is an attitude and you will find it in many Bible-believing, so-called, Christians.

Now in John 5 we come to a new part of this Gospel. It is Jesus second Jerusalem trip; it is a trip that is put into this Gospel and not put in any of the other Gospels; it is to the Gospel of John. And when we come on a passage that is this unique, that is not recorded in any of the other Synoptic Gospels, then we have to hold back and ask wait a minute, why? Why does the Apostle John relate this incident in the life of Jesus Christ when none of the other men do.

One of the themes that John has pounded away and will pound away again for chapter after chapter after chapter is that the Lord Jesus Christ was rejected nationally because of their negative volition toward God’s Word. It was not because of the evidence, not because Jesus didn’t make an insufficient testimony to Himself, it was because Jesus made a fully sufficient testimony and because He did men rejected. So John 5 is put in this Gospel in order to show us when the official Jewish persecution against Jesus began and how that persecution began. It began outside the north wall beyond the temple, approximately 100 to 200 yards. That was the location where an incident happened on one of the Jerusalem trips that led to systematic persecution against Jesus Christ. John 5, therefore, is an exposition of the origin of the official attack against the person of Christ.

John 5:1, “After this there was a feast of the Jews; and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.” Now from the time of the Gospel writing to the time that John the Apostle died everyone has wondered about what the feast was. Nobody to this day knows what that feast is, we can guess based on the Jewish calendar, we can guess it is either the spring series, the Feast of Passover and Unleavened Bread, it could be Pentecost, or it could be in the fall, the Feast of Tabernacles. It could have been some other feasts like Purim and some extra-Biblical feasts, like Rosh Hashanah and so on but we know probably it isn’t Passover because all the times that Jesus goes down to Jerusalem for Passover it’s explicitly mentioned in the text. Well, if it’s not mentioned in the text here and we’re talking about a feast that pretty well eliminates Passover. So what then is the feast? The best guess is that this is the Feast of Tabernacles in the fall. So therefore, “after this” means after the entire summer. John 4, the wedding north of Jerusalem, happened after the Passover which would have been in spring, Jesus ministered in the north, in the Galilean region and now in the fall, “after this,” after a considerable period of time He comes south again.

John puts this in to show Jesus contact and His relationship breaking down with the authorities in Jerusalem. “Jesus,” it says, “went up to Jerusalem.” And this refers to the terrain, Jerusalem is at about 2000 feet and it would have been a long trek upward as we will see in some of the slides. Jerusalem is on a hill, and it’s tall, it’s on several hills, it’s elevated, it’s in a high section of area. Jerusalem is situated in the Judean highlands and so any way you approach it you’ve got to go up. Today when you drive from Tel Aviv airport up to Jerusalem you’ve got to go up, and you’ve got to go up a considerable grade to get there. It always has been that way.

So Jesus goes up to Jerusalem and it is this trip in which Jesus Christ will reveal officially His Messianic claims. He will say things about His own character that previously He had only said to isolated people, like the woman at the well. And now he’s going to make it very clear to the authorities what He’s saying. But prior to the great discourse, called the Son of God Discourse at the end of verse 17, we have this incident with the healing of the impotent man. This entire healing incident, by the way, it’s not a mass healing, it is only a healing of one individual, this healing of one individual among a mass is the trigger event to the next discourse that’s going to happen. So we must, if we’re to appreciate what Jesus says and why He says what He says in this discourse we must study carefully the event that led to that discourse.

The background is given in John 5:2, “ Now there is at Jerusalem by the sheep market a pool, which is called in the Hebrew tongue Bethesda, having five porches.” This is one of the evidences of the genuineness of this Gospel. Only the Gospel of John reports the existence of this particular pool. Therefore, as usual you’d expect the critics over the centuries said no, John is a late writer, John doesn’t now what he’s talking about, there never was a pool like this, we haven’t found it, we can’t locate it. And so the Gospel of John was doubted. And then along came the science of archeology and this pool was uncovered and found you’ll see it. This is Dr. Avi Yonah’s model of Jerusalem, we have studied this slide several times, it shows the city of Jerusalem in the time of Herod. This slide is looking southwest across the city; the real city of Jerusalem is over here, but this is just a model, it takes up about half an acre. This four towered structure is the Fortress of Antonia, that’s where the Roman garrison was kept; there were the Romans who were watching on the top of that tower the day the Apostle Paul was almost mobbed and killed down inside this court and the commander authorized an intrusion and the soldiers went in to extract Paul from the Mob. This is the temple area in Jesus’ day. Just north of this area is a building that you can see with various columns on it and that is the pool of Bethesda. That’s its location, it’s just beyond this gate that comes out the north wall, the sheep’s gate and the sheep market area.

And it’s significant that the healing occurs here because what is the animal, the sheep a symbol of? The sacrifice. And so we have the cleansing in the area where the sheep were being sold for slaughter. There Jesus Christ, as the Lamb of God, performs the healing. So we want to look a little bit closer, this is from another angle and you can see better what that pool looks; this model is reconstructed from archeological digs in the area. But obviously now no one doubts the existence of the pools of Bethesda. We don’t know where the healing occurred and we don’t know exactly whether this particular pool with the five porches was a subdivision that had not yet been picked up by the archeologists but enough has been picked up to know that in this area, north of the city, was this area. Notice it’s quite big; notice in John 5 John says there was a multitude of people in this place, that’s how big it was. Now the remains of the bottom of this are visible if you go to a certain place just on the north wall. This is shot from a height looking down into the ruins of this pool. There are some of the columns down at the bottom. Here’s one little portico, there’s another one, there’s another one; these aren’t necessarily the five mentioned in John because these are remnants of a post-gospel era. So these probably were not there in the time of John 5. There’s a wall there, the remains of a wall, plastered wall. That plastered wall was put on centuries after the Lord Jesus Christ died and was one of the proofs that this is indeed the pool; it’s an old, old wall and on this wall there’s a painting of an angel troubling the waters. This is how this identification was made. But I show this to you to show you once again that if people would just trust the Word at face value they would be right geographically.

Let’s look at the text, John 5:3, “In these lay a great multitude of impotent folk,” the word for “impotent” is the word for physically sick, they’re weak, and this emphasizes a certain kind of sickness, a sickness that is debilitating to the physical frame and therefore three sub categories are given, “those who are blind, halt, withered,” those who are blind is self-explanatory, those who are “halt” are those who are paralyzed and do not have use of their limbs, and those who are “withered” where they had some accident, some injury or some congenital defect, something that has caused a shrinking of the limbs. And they were “waiting for the [moving] bubbling,” literally, “of the water.” It’s a very pathetic sight, there’s no help for them in terms of the human medicine of the day. All they do is just sit here, day after day, as one man thirty-eight years sitting here, every single day, waiting for the waters to bubble.

Now physically what’s happened is that these waters are activated by hot steam underneath, the pressure builds and there’s a bubbling and then it stops for a while, and then the pressure builds and there’s more bubbling, and it was the thought of the ancient people that there was an angel here. The Bible does not condone this superstition; now the Bible doesn’t say it couldn’t happen, but at this point this was a well-known superstition in the city of Jerusalem and from the end of the word “waiting for the moving of the water,” that phrase plus all of verse 4 does not appear in the earliest Greek manuscripts. It was inserted later on to explain why these people were sitting around this great pool that you saw in the slides. It’s an explanatory note inserted into the later texts and it just got in and has been transmitted from century to century.

Now notice the theme so far in the Gospel of John. In John 2 we had a wedding feast and we had Jesus working with water. And what point did we make about John 2 with the water there? It was the water of cleansing, the water that the Jew kept looking to to cleanse, to cleanse, to cleanse, to cleanse and he’d keep washing, washing, washing, because he needed more and more cleansing. And then Jesus comes along and cleanses. So the water there was a picture of cleansing. In John 3 we find “born of water and of Spirit” and there we studied it was a metaphor from Ezekiel that refers to cleansing from moral sin. In John 4 we met water again, this time at the well of Jacob and the water there was refreshment… refreshment to the creature, showing his dependency upon his Creator. And now in John 5 we meet water once again and here it’s picturing healing.

So the water of pool becomes the issue. Verse 4 is an explanation, [“For an angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water: whosoever then first after the troubling of the water stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had.”] They thought that in that day they had to wait and the first one in would be healed. Probably it got started, as so often happens around great shrines, think of Lourdes, for example, in France, the great shrines where there are documented healings. These healings can be of several categories; they can be satanic, they can be psychosomatic, or they can be genuine. God can heal in spite of one’s theology, simply because He loves men. But the usual pitch that all you have to do is kiss a few rocks or put your coins in the basket and you’re going to be healed, that is not at all in line with the Word of God. But apparently there had been some healings at this place and not the least to substantiate this superstition.

John 5:5, “And a certain man was there, [which had an infirmity thirty and eight years].” and one of the things you want to observe as we go through this text is to notice that Jesus picks who will be healed. The man himself doesn’t come to Jesus, Jesus goes to the man; in fact, it happens twice for emphasis in this story. Why? Because again it is showing that grace is on God’s side, it is an initiative from God to man, not from man to God. If someone trusts in Jesus Christ it is because the Holy Spirit has initiated toward you and has called you to Himself, and has made clear the gospel in your soul, and because He has you respond to it. God has taken an initiative and that’s one of the attributes and one of the characteristics of love in the Scriptures. So the man had the infirmity, it’s not said exactly what it is but we can guess from later on that he was one of those who were halt, that is, he was one who was paralyzed. He was there and he had this infirmity thirty-eight years; it doesn’t say he had it from birth, and that’s going to be interesting, he was not congenitally born this way. This was something picked up later in life.

John 5:6, “When Jesus saw him lie, and knew that he had been now a long time in that case, he saith unto him, Are you willing to be made whole?” In verse 6 Jesus surveys the situation and He is going to pick out this one man whom He knows, obviously Jesus is exercising omniscience. Nowhere does it say Jesus asked, took a survey, walked into that great pool and just said eenie, meenie, miney, moe, or did He pass around a survey, Sir, how long have you been here, carefully tabulating the results of his survey He deliberately picked the oldest one. Not at all. Jesus walked onto that porch and here in His divine nature He understood the most pathetic, the most helpless, the most sad face of all the pools that’s the one Jesus Christ picked out, because He wants to demonstrate His Messianic claim. And here is a point, a fine point in the text, but don’t take these feelings that you see in the Gospel narratives as normative. If Jesus had come to heal people He would have healed everyone in the pools of Bethesda, but He did not come to heal everybody in the First Advent. He came to call men to Himself, and He healed in those areas where He could validate His Messianic claims.

Turn to Isaiah 35:6; one of the signs of the Messianic coming kingdom is spelled out by the prophet Isaiah and this prophecy was going to be fulfilled in those pools of Bethesda. This is a prophecy of the millennium and the coming of Messiah. And it says, “Then shall the lame man leap as an heart, and the tongue of the dumb sing; for in the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the desert. [7] The parched ground shall become a pool, and the thirsty land springs of water;” and so on. It’s talking about millennial conditions and one of those millennial conditions will be that those who are paralyzed will be healed. The Bible specifies certain kinds of physical healing as authentic; not every one but certain ones are used over and over again and one of them is recovering sight from blindness, that’s in John 9, and the other one is people who are crippled, people whose limbs have no use, the muscle has atrophied. Those are the situations that are demonstrated again and again in Scripture to show what a real healing miracle looks like.

Now back to John 5, we’ve seen the Isaiah picture of what Messiah is associated in the common mind at this point, so Jesus is going to declare His Messiahship. Shortly He will declare it verbally to people who reject Him; now He declares it by a definite act in public that people will see. He saw him and He walks over to him and He says are you willing to be made whole. And I want you to notice Jesus initiates He respects the man’s volition. Jesus does not force this healing upon him, he recognized that the person is going to reject or accept, but he asks him, are you really willing. Obviously the man says he is. The pathetic thing is, there’s developing a contrast here between, if you noticed on that slide, the temple wall went down like this; here was the temple, there was the four towers of the fortress of Antonia and here was that pool. Now within this temple are whom? The Pharisees; they are in the temple, they’re debating the fine points of the Law and pathetically just within ear shot of the north wall and the temple lies this mess of humanity, suffering, the results of sin. No one is comforting them, no one is teaching them the Word of God, they’re too busy on the other side of the temple wall discussing the fine points of the Law. And this is a tension that Jesus is going to point out when He comes back and tells these people the [can’t understand word] of God discourse. You people, where are you, there are people just on the north side of the wall that need some spiritual help, if not physical, at least spiritual help and what are you people doing, you’re here discussing the fine points of Moses. Fine points which I will read you because they’re still available today because you can buy it, it’s called the Mishnah. We’ll read some of the parts and you’ll see what they were doing on the south side of that well

Well, the contrast develops and heightens. John 5:7, “The impotent man answered him, Sir, I have no man, when the water is troubled, to put me into the pool: but while I am coming, another steps down before me.” So what do we have in verse 7? The same thing we had in John 4, Jesus meets a creature and in the way He meets that creature the limitedness of the creature is expressed. Remember the woman at the well; “give me a drink,” and then He said to her if you knew who I was you’d ask Me to give you a drink and I would have given you the gift of God, so He stressed her need for water. And here He’s got the man acknowledging his total limitedness; there is no asset within himself that can solve his problem and that’s precisely the first step in the motion of the Lord Jesus Christ. It is precisely only until we get into that position where we find out, realize, swallow the pride and admit that we don’t have the inner resources to cope with the situation. Then we are open to God’s help.

So He gets the man in the situation of acknowledging his utter hopelessness and then in an astounding way…think of what must have gone on. If you were a dramatist imagine how you’d shoot this one, the actor that’s playing the role of the man who has been crippled for thirty-eight years and as you pan in on the camera, as it zooms in on his expression, as Jesus says well just get up then, you can imagine the look of …what? Huh? coming over this guys face. Thirty eight years he has been crippled and along comes this Jewish rabbi who this man doesn’t even know and Jesus well then, if you want to get up, just get up. John 5:8, “Jesus saith unto him, Rise, take up thy bed, and walk.” “Thy bed” is a small rug, padded rug, more or less a cushion we would translate it, “take up your cushion and just walk.”

Now John 5:9 gives a clue in the original language of the potency of this miracle. If you haven’t been around a person or you’re not aware of what happens when you have a paralytic person over a long time period you know the muscles atrophy. And there actually a whole series of miracles that just happen at this point, because it says in verse 9, “And immediately the man was made whole,” now if he was paralyzed for thirty-eight years and he couldn’t move his muscles you know that at least he had a nerve problem. Actually there was an interference on the nerve tissue so the nerves were not transmitting the signal down into his legs to move, so you had instant regeneration of nerve tissue, something the medical profession says is impossible; nerve tissue doesn’t regenerate they say. But obviously…the word “immediately” is used and this is only the third place in the entire Gospel the word “immediately” is used so we know from the way this word “immediately” is used that John deliberately puts it in the text to show that this was instant… instantly this man got up to his feet. So it shows an instantaneous regeneration of nerve tissue.

But what else also show? Doesn’t it also show an instantaneous regeneration of muscle tissue? Weren’t the muscles in the man’s legs completely atrophied for thirty-eight years of disuse. You bet. And so instantly the muscles are made whole. Now this is a real miracle, not this fakery stuff that you read about or see about, some divine healer trots in town with his tent, and there’s ten different offerings between the healings and you have that kind of a process. This is not I think I’m healed, or I feel like I’m wheeled, or I come down in my wheel chair and because I’m embarrassed someone to think I’m a queer or I want to help out this person or something else. Jesus Christ executes it very simply, there’s no emotion associated, no mass hysteria but there’s an instant regeneration. So the man was made whole “and took up his bed, and walked: . and on the same day was the Sabbath;” the only bad thing and the kind of minor note that’s struck in all this is unfortunately it happened to be the Sabbath day. Now begins the persecution.

John 5:10, “The Jews therefore said unto him that was cured, It is the Sabbath day: it is not lawful for thee to carry thy bed.” This is a brilliant response, here’s a guy that for thirty-eight years has been sitting, rotting by the pool, he’s walking around town, the first thing somebody says to him, it’s wrong to carry your cushion. Now there’s humor in this but its serious because what God’s Word is doing is showing us the ridiculousness of legalism.

What is legalism? We talk about it a lot but what is it? What is legalism? Legalism is the addition of man’s words to God’s words, the word of man added to the canonical Scripture. You have Bible doctrine here and then encase the Bible doctrine in all sorts of human things so you can’t see the Word any more because it’s all buried up under legalism. And in America the fundamentalists have done their share of adding legalism to the text of Scripture. I’ve had a chance in the ministry to watch legalism in action. In watching it you get this exact impression you get from the Gospels; it renders people, first of all, very, very imperceptive. This miracle could happen right in front of their face and they’d be worried about the miracle. It would be like today if the Lord Jesus Christ is walking around and He healed somebody like this and this person happened to be sitting there, as we saw many people in Israel puffing on a cigarette, and he got up and was walking around still puffing on his cigarette. Do you know what the fundamentalist would say? It’s not lawful for you to be puffing, not recognizing the obvious miracle that had just happened, that’s beside the point, you’re violating one of our taboos and that’s more important; in practice that is more important than what the Word of God says. And this is always typical of legalism.

Not only is it an addition of the word of man but in practice it always works out that what is added is more important than the Word of God. It is more important that the Christian witness so many times a week and if he doesn’t, watch out for everyone in the spiritual group. If you want to get spiritual B.O. fast in some groups just let them know that you haven’t done your quota for the week and watch what happens. Now isn’t that evidence, isn’t that real evidence that in practice this exact same thing goes on, that additions to the Word of God are more important than the Word of God. Now the Word of God is for evangelism; we’re not knocking witnessing and evangelism, but when men restrict the Holy Spirit as saying you will now talk to ten people today and fifteen tomorrow and twenty the next day and you’ll report back, and if you don’t do that the implication is… now some of the more sophisticated ones don’t say this but the implication is always left, and if you don’t …. (dot, dot, dot, dot). See, never stated but you know what it is.

And there are other subtle forms of legalism; all have a good start, they all start out with something that is legitimate, a hundred percent abstention from alcohol is another one. The idea that a Christian can’t pass a drop across his lips. I don’t know where these people have been but the wine that Jesus made in John 2 was not Kool-Aid. It was good wine and it was vintage wine and it was enjoyed by the people that were there. We did say in John 2 that the wine was a lot less in alcoholic content than [can’t understand word] wine. But be careful, the Bible doesn’t say don’t drink; it says don’t get drunk. Now that may mean for some people don’t drink but it doesn’t mean that for everyone because if it did then the Bible would say that and the Bible doesn’t say that, so don’t say the Bible says something when the Bible doesn’t say it, because you’re a legalist when you do that; you have added something to the text. Now granted, it’s easier to say this and it’s easier to measure a group and it’s easier to handle situations if you have this standard up here, and that’s why, frankly from a practical point of view legalism got started; it’s just a lot easier to handle a situation and have no doubts and just make a rule and say that’s what Scripture teaches.

But I find every time that happens the next thing that develops is that rule takes precedence over Scripture. Those of you who were here when we went through the Samuel series, you know what happened, and there was a perfect case. I had just got through teaching about Saul, the perfect self-righteousness legalist and what happened. All the Saul’s started vibrating, coming loose at the seams, getting mad at me, calling me up, sending little nasty notes on the feedback cards and all the rest of it. Now what’s going on. I had just got through teaching… well, obviously someone wasn’t listening. The only time they listened was when I happened to utter a four-lettered word once in a while, because I knew that would vibrate a few, and that was what they heard. And you can teach these people and teach these people and teach these people hour after hour after hour on the content of Scripture and they don’t even listen. But boy, the moment you transgress one of their little sacred legalistic taboos, whooo, watch out, you’re in trouble.

Now this is the same thing that’s happened here; the most obvious grace oriented miracle of the Son of God walking into the pools that you saw there, filled with hundreds and hundreds of people, walks over to the most pathetic case and heals him instantly. That’s something to talk about and what’s the talk of the town? Don’t do that on the Sabbath. Now often times people say well, you know, this is just Christian bias, all this talk in the Gospels about what they believed. Well, I just happened to have a copy and you can get it yourself, called the Mishnah. Now this is a codification of Jewish law that was developed, some of it before Christ, some of it after Christ but it represents pretty much what people believed in that day.

Now there’s a section of this book called the Shabbat, which deals with what you ought to do on the Sabbath. Let me read some sections of this to show you what they had gotten themselves into. What did the Ten Commandments say you ought to do on the Sabbath. It just says you ought to respect the Sabbath and rest, and then the Old Testament Law developed some things that you ought not to do, you ought not to work on the Sabbath. That’s all the Scriptures ever said about the Sabbath, but now listen to this.

Shabbat 2:5, here’s one reference: “If a man put out the lamp on the night of the Sabbath from fear of the Gentiles or of thieves or of an evil spirit, or to suffer one who is sick to sleep, he is not blamable, but if he put out the lamp to spare the lamp or spare the oil he is blamable,” because it’s work then, it’s work to blow that lamp out if he did it just to save the oil in the lamp that’s an act of work; must not be done on the Sabbath.

Here is Shabbat 14:4, I’ve just picked out a few that are a little bit easier to understand from our cultural point of view, “If his teeth pain him he may not suck vinegar through them but he may take vinegar after his usual fashion, and if he is healed, he is healed; if his loins pain him he may not rub thereon wine or vinegar, yet he may anoint them oil but not with rose oil.” So it’s an attempt to get the healing across, use that but not this, because if you use that’s violating the Sabbath.

In Shabbat 23:1, it just goes on and on, “On the Sabbath a man may borrow of his fellow jars of wine or jars of oil provided he doesn’t say ‘lend them to me.’ So too, a woman may borrow of her neighbor loaves of bread and if one does not trust the other, the other may leave his cloak with the lender and make a reckoning with him after the Sabbath. So too in Jerusalem on the eve of Passover, when it falls on the Sabbath a man may leave his cloak and take his Passover lamb and make his reckoning with the seller after the close of the festival day.” In other words, the legalistic attempt to define… now is this work or is this work. And this is the mentality.

Now enclosed in all this Mishnah in the light of John 5 in this section on the Shabbat there is an interesting one in 10:5 because this deals with exactly our text and shows you that in deed, yes, there was a code that said exactly what John 5 says. I’ll just read the fore part of this, this has nothing to do with the passage, it gets onto the problem of carrying the cushion around at the end of this text but I’ll just read the first of it just again so you get more flavor for what Jesus was fighting in His day. “If a man took out a loaf into the public domain, he’s blamable, but if two men took it out they’re not blamable. If one could not take it out and two men took it out they’re blamable. But Rabbi Simeon declares them not blamable. If a man took a vessel of food stuff less than the forbidden quantity he’s not blamable by reason of the vessel since the vessel is secondary.”

Now at this point we get into the cushion. “If he took out a living man on a cushion he is not blamable by reason of the cushion, since the cushion is secondary.” Now let me read what the reasoning is. “If a man takes a living man,” that is he’s carrying an injured person on a liter, which is what we’re talking about, a cushion or a couch, if you carry a living man on a cushion you can do that on the Sabbath day. Technically it’s wrong to carry a cushion, but if you’re carrying someone on the cushion who’s injured, that’s all right. And that’s what it says, if you take a living man on the cushion, that’s okay, because in that case the cushion is secondary to your act, it’s not primary. “But if the man took out a dead man on a cushion he’s blamable.” Now don’t ask me how they got that point, but the point is that if you carry a dead person… you’d better be sure he’s alive if you carry him somewhere; that’s the point. Now obviously the implication behind both of these two sets of laws in the Mishnah is that you’d better not carry a cushion around with nothing on it and that’s exactly what this man is doing… exactly what this man’s doing. And so this is why in verse 10 you see it is damn the Sabbath and it is not lawful for him to carry his bed. Why? Because in all the eccentricity and legalism that had developed on top of legalism on top of legalism on top of legalism on top of legalism, all of that was an amplification of just rest on the Sabbath day.

So the man says in John 5:11, “He answered them, He that made me whole, the same said unto me, Take up thy bed, and walk.” [tape turns] …mutual conviction than it is to, I wonder what this brethren says, I wonder what that brethren says; he’s not doing it by faith, he’s developed a very bad habit pattern because he’s doing it out of fear, not of trust. And when we go back in our divine viewpoint Framework what do we find was the original lesson that God taught the people in the sequence of history, at the call of Abraham? What was emphasized first? Trust. Did God clobber Abraham because he violated fine points of the Mosaic Law? Not at all, because God was interested that basically trust be established first and if you can get that you can get all the rest of it, but if you’re going to put the cart before the horse and force people into conformity with a moral standard when they can’t do it in trust, you have set into motion very dangerous habit patterns in their soul; you’ve set in fear as the motive for living the Christian life and not trust and you’ve just reversed everything. And it will take months if not years to undo that kind of damage.

So this man fears, who me, what, yeah, I’m walking, yeah, I’m violating the Sabbath but the guy who made me be whole, He said unto me. And so they said well who is the man that said unto you, “Take up thy bed and walk.” [12, “Then asked they him, What man is that which said unto thee, Take up thy bed, and walk?”] Now notice the difference between verse 11 and verse 12. Do you notice something drop out of the text? What had the man said in verse 11 that the Pharisees don’t repeat in verse 12? The healing, the guy has just said something, you know, thirty-eight years and I’ve just been healed, the guy who healed me told me to do it. Who was it that told you to do it? They should have at least recognized there was a miracle that just happened; you’d think they’d be interested in a miracle. One thinks at this point of Saul and Abner, as David goes out to slay Goliath. And you remember what happened, Saul is there wondering who David’s father is because he’s got to marry his daughter off to this kid and he wants to find out the family. And here it is, one of the most astounding military feats in the history of Israel, happening in front of his face and he’s worried about whether he has the right parental background for his lovely little daughter. And the classic reply is: Abner, I don’t know sir, damned if I know, because Abner has his eyes on the issue. So here, these people don’t see the issue and the proof of it is their blindness showed by the way they repeat it.

In John 5:13, “And he that was healed did not who it was: for Jesus had conveyed himself away, a multitude being in that place.” Notice how Jesus tactically withdraws. He does not heal everyone and the reason He doesn’t is because He did not come to heal everybody, He came to bear witness to His character and incidentally heal, toward that goal. So verse 14, “Afterward Jesus finds him in the temple,” now notice the second point in verse 14 as in verse 6. Who does the initiation, Jesus or the man in need? Who did the initiation work with the woman at the well. The woman came down, all she was looking for was physical water, she wasn’t looking to be saved. So what did Jesus do? He initiated. And what does He do here, he initiates once again. The man can’t find Jesus but Jesus finds him. And notice something else about verse 14, Jesus Christ times His follow up in stages… in stages. He doesn’t, after He healed that man, He doesn’t go into a big long follow up spiel. Why? Because at that time that man was not in a learning position; now he would be in a learning position. And so therefore Jesus says this, and when He says this He gives you part of the doctrine of suffering, “and said unto him, Behold, have been made whole:” it says in the King James, “sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee,” but in the Greek it’s stronger than that, it says “stop that which you are sinning.”

So now we know how this man became infirmed; that infirmity was due to discipline. Now not all physical sickness is due to discipline in the life, so let me just hasten to add the six reasons why Christians suffer, so someone doesn’t walk out of here, as frequently is done from divine healing services thinking that you have some malady, some illness because of your personal sin. That isn’t necessarily true.

One reason why we suffer, because we are all identified with Adam in the fall and we are all under the curse. Because we are under the curse all of us suffer to degrees. We suffer because of sin, yes, because of our participation with our father and mother in Eden. We don’t understand it all but we were there too, and we sinned with them. So because of that sin we are fallen beings. We also sin because of rebellion, that’s personal rebellion in this life and that’s the reason this man was in trouble, category two type suffering. And then there is the problem of being in association inside the divine institutions of marriage, family and so on, with other people who are getting it. If God is going to discipline your life, if God is going to discipline your husband, if God is going to discipline someone with whom you have a close association, He is going to discipline you, you suffer with it so to speak; you just get in the way of the paddle. Then God’s discipline is often times in suffering because He is interested in teaching us certain lessons. He’s interested in… Satan is also in attacking us and also it’s the problem of testimony.

There are at least, then, six reasons for sickness, and only one of them is due to discipline. Now in this case it happened to be due to discipline. And what Jesus warned him about was that he had been instantly healed from this, sometime after childhood, the man is obviously over thirty-eight, it’s not a congenital thing, he picked it up later. So Jesus healed him and then he warned him, don’t persist in your sin, which apparently had become a –R learned behavior pattern with him. So Jesus is giving him the first rule in sanctification, break that pattern that led to your problem and make that number one.

Here’s the growth curve of some Christians. It starts out, sanctification, and reaches some plateau where God imposes an obligation and we go negative volition toward that obligation, we don’t like it, we aren’t thankful for what God has given and so we rebel and so therefore our sanctification is stopped and from that point on in our life until we get straightened out this is our Christian life, until finally things get real bad and then we’ll make a breakthrough, but there’ll be a long time of suffering until we get squared away what that issue was. Now this man had a long platform of thirty-eight years; it took him thirty-eight years to learn this lesson. Now Jesus says I’ve given you a break, we’ve ended the discipline, now you’d better not get back involved in this pattern or something worse is going to happen to you.

John 5:15, “The man departed, and told the Jews that it was Jesus, which had made him whole.” So again it shows his incomplete trust, he should have, by this point, understood that Jesus Christ was who He claimed to be and that there was a tremendous antagonism developing. But he goes ahead and tells them, points Him out. Verse 16, “And therefore did the Jews persecute Jesus, and sought to slay him, because he had done these things on the Sabbath day.”

Let’s review? What does this passage show us? It shows us the horribleness of legalism. Because of legalism people are rotting only hundreds of feet from the north wall. They’re not being helped in any way, they’re not being helped with their suffering by teaching the Word of God because people are more interested in whether they’re carrying cushions around on the Sabbath than they are whether they’re getting healed. Their priorities are all fouled up.

Again this passage shows the activity of the Lord Jesus Christ in sovereign grace. Jesus Christ walks is one day and He picks what He’s going to do and who He’s going to do it with. And it shows His grace because this man is healed even though he doesn’t perfectly trust in the Lord. This man is healed even though he’s still afraid, he still fears; the last picture we have of this man he still fears, he still imperfectly trusts. And that’s a graphic reminder that our salvation and the blessings that you inherit in your Christian life are not in any way connected to the quantity of your faith; they are sheerly by God’s grace, and incidentally by faith. If God had to wait until you and I develop perfect faith, He’d be waiting a long time. God is gracious, He doesn’t expect perfection in any of us.

With our heads bowed…..