For thirty-eight years a paralyzed man has been lying beside a pool everyone believes has healing power, and for thirty-eight years he has never once been first into the water. Jesus does not ask him to get there faster. He tells him to get up and walk. And when the religious leaders confront Jesus for healing on the Sabbath, His defense makes the whole controversy immediately worse: He says God is His own Father, and He has been working alongside Him since the beginning.
A study in John 5 · Arthur Baldwin · StandUp4Jesus.Org · 26 min read
Wilt Thou Be Made Whole
“Now 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.”
John 5:2-3
“Hundreds of sufferers visited the place; but so great was the crowd when the water was troubled that they rushed forward, trampling underfoot men, women, and children, weaker than themselves. Many could not get near the pool. Many who had succeeded in reaching it died upon its brink.”
Ellen G. White · The Desire of Ages, p. 201
The very place people came to for healing was, for the weakest among them, its own kind of cruelty — a competition the sick were the least equipped in the whole crowd to win.
“And a certain man was there, which had an infirmity thirty and eight years. When Jesus saw him lie, and knew that he had been now a long time in that case, he saith unto him, Wilt thou be made whole?”
John 5:5-6
“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 steppeth down before me.”
John 5:7
“He had seen the rippling of the water, but had never been able to get farther than the edge of the pool. Others stronger than he would plunge in before him. He could not contend successfully with the selfish, scrambling crowd.”
Ellen G. White · The Desire of Ages, p. 202
He does not even directly answer Jesus’s question. His whole reply is an explanation of why the answer does not matter — thirty-eight years of failure have taught him not to hope for the thing he was just asked about.
“Jesus saith unto him, Rise, take up thy bed, and walk. And immediately the man was made whole, and took up his bed, and walked: and on the same day was the sabbath.”
John 5:8-9
“Jesus does not ask this sufferer to exercise faith in Him. He simply says, ‘Rise, take up thy bed, and walk.’ But the man’s faith takes hold upon that word. … Without question he sets his will to obey the command of Christ, and all his muscles respond to his will.”
Ellen G. White · The Desire of Ages, p. 202
He never gets into the water at all. The pool that had defeated him for thirty-eight years turns out to have been entirely beside the point — the healing comes from a word, obeyed before it is understood, not from being fast enough to win a race he had already lost every single time he tried it.
“Afterward Jesus findeth him in the temple, and said unto him, Behold, thou art made whole: sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee.”
John 5:14
Jesus seeks him out a second time, privately, once the crowds and the controversy have died down — the same pattern of following up on an unfinished conversation this Gospel has already shown once with the woman at the well.
My Father Worketh Hitherto, And I Work
“And therefore did the Jews persecute Jesus, and sought to slay him, because he had done these things on the sabbath day. But Jesus answered them, My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.”
John 5:16-17
“All days are God’s, in which to carry out His plans for the human race. … Should God forbid the sun to perform its office upon the Sabbath, cut off its genial rays from warming the earth and nourishing vegetation? … Must the trees and flowers put forth no bud nor blossom on the Sabbath?”
Ellen G. White · The Desire of Ages, p. 206
Jesus’s defense is not a technical loophole in the Sabbath law. It is an appeal to the same created order this Gospel’s own opening chapter has already identified Him as the Author of — the sun, the seasons, the growing wheat, none of which pause their work on the seventh day, because sustaining life is never itself a violation of rest.
“Therefore the Jews sought the more to kill him, because he not only had broken the sabbath, but said also that God was his Father, making himself equal with God.”
John 5:18
“The whole nation of the Jews called God their Father, therefore they would not have been so enraged if Christ had represented Himself as standing in the same relation to God. But they accused Him of blasphemy, showing that they understood Him as making this claim in the highest sense.”
Ellen G. White · The Desire of Ages, p. 207
The Jewish leaders understood exactly what Jesus meant, even if many readers since have tried to soften it. They did not react this violently to a common religious figure of speech — they reacted to a claim of full, personal equality with God, made plainly enough that no one in the room could mistake it for anything less.
“My authority, He said, for doing the work of which you accuse Me, is that I am the Son of God, one with Him in nature, in will, and in purpose. In all His works of creation and providence, I co-operate with God. ‘The Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He seeth the Father do.’”
Ellen G. White · The Desire of Ages, p. 208
“In all His works of creation and providence, I co-operate with God” is as direct a statement of what this site’s own study of this Gospel’s first chapter has already established as Ellen White ever offers — not a created being doing God’s bidding from a distance, but the co-Worker present at creation itself, still at work.
The Dead Shall Hear The Voice Of The Son Of God
“For as the Father raiseth up the dead, and quickeneth them; even so the Son quickeneth whom he will. … He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life.”
John 5:21, 24
“Marvel not at this: for the hour is coming, in the which all that are in the graves shall hear his voice, And shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation.”
John 5:28-29
“This assurance of the future life was that for which Israel had so long waited, and which they had hoped to receive at the Messiah’s advent. The only light that can lighten the gloom of the grave was shining upon them. But self-will is blind.”
Ellen G. White · The Desire of Ages, p. 211
The same voice that told one paralyzed man to rise and walk is here said to be, one day, the voice every grave in human history will hear at once — the small Bethesda miracle offered as a preview, on a single body, of what this same authority will eventually do to all of them.
Search The Scriptures
“Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me.”
John 5:39
“In every page, whether history, or precept, or prophecy, the Old Testament Scriptures are irradiated with the glory of the Son of God. … From the promise given to Adam, down through the patriarchal line and the legal economy, heaven’s glorious light made plain the footsteps of the Redeemer.”
Ellen G. White · The Desire of Ages, p. 211
This is a claim about the whole Old Testament, not merely its explicit messianic prophecies — every sacrifice, every feast, every law, the entire sanctuary system, all of it built to point forward to exactly the person now standing in front of these accusers, being accused by the very book they claimed to revere.
“For had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed me: for he wrote of me. But if ye believe not his writings, how shall ye believe my words?”
John 5:46-47
The chapter closes on a sharp irony that has run through it from the start. Men who pride themselves on knowing the Scriptures better than anyone are shown, by the very Author those Scriptures were written to reveal, that they have never really understood a word of what they were reading.
