Dennis Tuuri

and his wonderful gifts to us. Today we have a wondrous story of the salvation of our savior and his effects upon the world found in John 5:1-18.

Please stand for the reading of God’s word. John 5, beginning at verse one. Hear the word of the Lord.

After this there was a feast of the Jews. And Jesus went up to Jerusalem. Now there is at Jerusalem by the sheep gate 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 and troubled the water. Whosoever then first after the troubling of the water stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had.

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? 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 stepeth down before me.

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. The Jews therefore said unto him that was cured, “It is the Sabbath day. It’s not lawful for thee to carry thy bed.”

He answered them, “He that made me whole, the same said unto me, Take up thy bed and walk.” Then asked they him, “What man is that which saith unto thee, Take up thy bed and walk?”

And he that was healed was not who it was. For Jesus had conveyed himself away, a multitude being in that place. 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. The man departed and told the Jews that it was Jesus which had made him whole. 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.” 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.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for your most holy word. We thank you for the Holy Spirit. We admit and confess before you, Father, that we are sick, lame, and halted sheep that need to be carried by you and healed by you. We pray that your spirit, Lord God, would minister to us now in our infirmities, in our troubles, in our trials and tribulations, and help us to see the salvation that the Lord Jesus Christ has affected for us. Transform us, Lord God, here on this Sabbath day in your presence, by your spirit, by means of your word. In Christ’s name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated.

Well, in the providence of God, we’ve met together on this Sunday before Thanksgiving when the tradition of our church has been to have a kind of a special meal instead of our normal meal. Our normal meal is a special meal. Of course, every Lord’s day we come together and rejoice with each other. But the meal gets a little fancier on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, coming together a few days before a national feast day. And we come to consider a feast at Jerusalem that our savior attends.

So we come here with hearts that desire to increase our thankfulness to God our savior, to the Lord Jesus Christ, and to the spirit. And we come to a text that is designed, I think, to do that very thing—to cause us to rejoice, to have festivity in the context of our heart and our meals together as we consider the wondrous salvation affected by our savior. And this text will bring us, I think, if we understand it properly, to a greater thanksgiving this week in spite of all the difficulties that we may have for thirty-eight years or more in the context of our own lives.

Our thanksgiving was increased the last few days—at least mine was—as God answered the prayers of his people that have been going up for a couple of months and particularly a couple of Sundays ago when we celebrated international, or participated in, the international day of prayer for the persecuted church. Remember one of the specific things we prayed for was the release of the eight foreign aid workers in Afghanistan. Two women Christians of that group. And those eight foreign aid workers were, of course, released this past week or rescued by the United States military and by the Northern Alliance.

And there was a press conference on C-SPAN that, in the providence of God, I happened to turn on. About an hour long where these two women talked of their faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and how he had saved them, and broadcast this to media all across the world—their faith in the Savior and their thankfulness to him for deliverance out of their plight. So our thanksgiving is increased, I hope, this week because of that. And I think probably our thanksgiving should also be seen in the light of an understanding, as we’ve talked about already in our service through the scriptures, that God’s deliverance is a deliverance from enemies.

And when the enemies to the Christian church—radical Islamic, you know, people involved in the Islamic religion that hate Christianity and have struck out against it—are in God’s providence judged for that, it should bring thanksgiving to his people. And so those events of the past week also bring thanksgiving to us.

Children, you’ll remember that the IDOP was the International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church. That was when we prayed for these eight foreign aid workers. That’s what IDOP stands for, and that increases our sense of thanksgiving today.

Now, as we get into this text, we want to remember some things about the Gospel of John. We want to remember that it comes right after the Gospel of Luke. We’re going to have this portrayed visibly in the rooms of the educational wing—in the lower, or the upper story rather. We have two stories of our educational wing, and those names have been set now and we’ll be talking about that next week in the afternoon during our Sunday school meeting with everyone.

But you know, suffice it to say that in the downstairs portion we’ve got the six covenantal periods of the Old Testament portrayed through the use of six mountain names. So we begin in Eden, which was a mountain—rivers flowed down from that garden. They then moved to Ararat, reminding us of the Noaic covenant—the ark rests in the mountains of Ararat. And then we move to the Abrahamic covenant and we’ve named a room Moriah. On Mount Moriah, Abraham was told to sacrifice his son.

Then we move to the fourth covenantal period, the Sinaitic covenant—a Mosaic covenant. And so Sinai is the name of that room. Then we move to the Davidic covenant where David established at Zion a worship center, so there was a picture of the coming New Testament worship. So Zion is what we’ve chosen for the Davidic covenant room name.

And then the last room downstairs in that progression of rooms—the sixth room—is Jerusalem, reminding us of the restoration covenant. Nehemiah rebuilds the walls of Jerusalem. And it’s interesting that the one gate that is sanctified in the account in the book of Nehemiah about the rebuilding of the walls—the one gate into the city, which also became a gate into the temple grounds—the one gate that was sanctified is the one we read of today in this text: the sheep gate. So we’ll talk more about that in a couple of minutes.

As we come upstairs in our rooms, then we move into the seventh covenantal period. And there’s a progression to that, too, that we’ve tried to picture in the name of those rooms. We go Matthew, Mark, Luke, and then we do the seven regions or cities that received epistles after that. And then we conclude the rooms upstairs with Saint John. So John is the last gospel that’s written, of course. And John is in this sequence of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

There seems to be a progression here of Christ’s history and an unfolding of it, as well as a progression in terms of history. And I think probably these books were written sequentially in that order.

Now remember, Luke’s gospel ends with two meal scenes. Those of you that have been at the beginning of this study, these sets of sermons, remember this: there were two meal scenes at the end of Luke’s gospel. One is the road to Emmaus, and the other is there on the seashore. And in both cases when Jesus has food with the people, he reveals himself to them. And in both cases, at the end of Luke’s gospel, he talks about the Old Testament.

Remember the disciples on the road to Emmaus—a couple of people walking along rather downcast—and then Jesus comes to them, and they don’t know who he is, but he explains to them how all the Old Testament was fulfilled in the work of Christ. And then the same thing happens later on at the last meal scene in Luke’s gospel. Jesus reveals himself and talks about the Old Testament scriptures and how they spoke of him.

We always say we want to be a little fly in the air there listening to Jesus explain that Old Testament. Wouldn’t that be great? Well, it seems like that’s just what Jesus does in John’s gospel. John’s gospel is filled with references that can only be properly understood by understanding the Old Testament and then showing how all that stuff relates to the coming of Christ, our savior, to himself and to the new creation affected by him.

So you know, we’re set up for all these stories. And then, of course, John’s gospel begins with “In the beginning,” where Genesis 1 begins. And so we have these relationships that we’re supposed to understand. And of course, it’s absolutely critical to understand all portions of John’s gospel with an understanding of the Old Testament.

In this particular story, if you don’t know things like the sheep gate and its dedication, or the thirty-eight years and what that refers to, or the angel of the Lord, or the moving of the waters—if you don’t think of that with Old Testament associations, you sort of miss the point. Jesus is going to execute the Sabbath here. And so we have to understand Old Testament Sabbath to fully appreciate what it is he’s doing. And we understand Old Testament Sabbath in light of his revelation of what it really was about—certainly pictured in the Old Covenant writings, but brought to completion in him.

So we have this movement, and it’s very important to see this text in the light of that movement.

Let’s now talk about the text a little bit. Let’s just go through the story. There’s two pages today. There’s an outline and at the first it says “the text,” and it says “See the next page.” And on that page, I’ve laid out this text in verses in a structure which we now think are fairly familiar with here at RCC—a chiastic structure. This particular structure came from a newsletter. This was developed by both Jim B. Jordan and Jeff Meyers. And I think it’s a pretty good structure for understanding the flow of what happens.

But whether you get the connections in the chiasm or not, it’s good to remember what the story is about before we draw out some application and comments in terms of things I want to stress today at Reformation Covenant Church.

So the first thing we’re told is that there’s this feast of the Jews and Jesus goes up to the feast at Jerusalem. Once again, he’s a law keeper. We talked about this back in chapter 2. Feast, Passover happens. He goes—that’s what men were supposed to do, and he does this. And this now identifies specifically that there’s a feast. Now it doesn’t tell us which feast. We’ll talk about that in a little bit, but there’s a feast, you know, so it puts a festival atmosphere to what’s going to happen. And we see Jesus going to Jerusalem.

And if we’ve been reading the Gospel of John and remembering what’s happening, this is going to be interesting. We know this is going to be interesting because we know that Jesus went to another feast up to Jerusalem and there was trouble. Remember, he cleansed the temple and the people—you know, a lot believed, but they didn’t have real Christian belief. They just believed because of the miracles. He didn’t trust himself to them. And some of the Jews argued with him about that cleansing of the temple and he pointed to himself as the fulfillment of the temple—you know, Old Testament reference fulfilled in Christ.

So it’s going to be interesting what’s going to happen, and what the text tells us happens is going to happen for the next five or six chapters as well. And that is that this initial confrontation between Jesus and the Jews in Jerusalem will accelerate. It happened in chapter 2 in small form, but now it’s really going to happen. And by the end of this text they want to kill him. They’re persecuting him. They’re talking bad about him. They’re trying to figure out what to do about him. They’re persecuting him and they’re going to kill him. They’re planning on killing him.

And of course that will find its completion as the gospel moves into chapters 12 and 13. But you know, as we read the text, what’s going to happen? Jesus is going to Jerusalem again. What’s going to happen? And then it says some information. It’s here for a reason.

Now there is at Jerusalem by the sheep gate a pool which is called in Hebrew Bethesda, having five porches. So okay, what we’re told is going to happen at Jerusalem. What’s going to happen is going to happen first at this sheep gate. Now the sheep gate—the word “gate” is maybe in parentheses or italics in your Bible. It’s implied. It says “by the sheep,” and everybody who reads this, all the Jews who read it, would know that it was the sheep gate or the sheep market.

It was on the edge of the city but also on the edge of where the temple would be, and the sheep—the sacrificial sheep—would come in through that gate and they would be sold there. And so that’s all identification with sacrifice and sheep and the lamb of God. All that stuff is there as we read about this sheep gate entering into the city. You enter in by means of the sheep. And you are a sheep, right? We’ve been—we sang about that—we’re the sheep of the people of his pasture. We’re the sheep of his pasture and his flock.

Well, so we have this sheep gate and there’s a pool there, water. Now we’ve had a lot of water already in the Gospel of John, right? And we had a pool, a well sort of pool, in Samaria back in chapter 4, and we know about all those associations and how that brings to mind when Jesus met with the Samaritan woman—you know, Moses with his wife and Jacob getting his wife and Isaac getting his wife through Abraham’s servant—and all that stuff comes. And here we’ve got another pool, more water, and we’ve got this sheep gate. And then we have this pool’s name: Bethesda.

You know, what Bethlehem means? House of bread. Bethel is house, right? Bethany is house of figs. Bethesda means house of mercies, or mercy. We’ll talk about this more in a little bit. But Dave Hoover in this morning’s benevolence class was talking about Matthew 23:23. Now Jesus said that while they tithed (which was good), they neglected the weightier portions of the law: do justice, love mercy, and show faithfulness.

And Dave had one of the people look up Micah 6:8. What are the three things God requires of us? To do justice, to love mercy, walk humbly with God in faith. You know, we’ve talked about before that it seems like politically the conservatives like to do justice, the liberals like to have mercy. And but neither has humility, faithfulness in Christ, and humility before God. They do it all wrong.

Well, here we have the house of mercy, and merciful acts going to happen. We already know that if we’re kind of thinking, “Why is this name given to us?” Something neat’s going to happen here related to sheep, related to entrance into something, into the city and the temple. And it’s going to have to do with mercy.

Verse three: And there lay a great multitude of sick people—blind, lame, paralyzed—waiting for the moving of the water. So instead of a bunch of sheep, we’ve got a bunch of people. A whole bunch of people. And that’s, you know, kind of fitting because people are the sheep of God’s pasture. And so there’s this relationship that we made in our mind: okay, we’ve got a bunch of sheep, but they’re all sick. They all have various problems that make them unworthy as sacrificial animals.

If a sheep is lame, he couldn’t be used as a sacrifice, okay? In the normal ascension offering or sacrifice, it couldn’t do it. So these people are outside, as it were. They’re not quite able to enter in because they’re in various stages of disease, and they’re there waiting for the moving of the water. That’s an odd deal. And the next verse is even odder.

For an angel went down at a certain time into the pool and stirred it up. Stirred the water up. Moving and stirred are two different words in the Greek. The first is the word for kinesis, or kinetic motion. The other is stirring or troubling. That then whoever stepped in first after the stirring of the water was made well of whatsoever disease he had.

So we’ve got three mentions here of moving of the water, this troubling of the water, the troubling of the water. We’ve got a simple fact stated. It doesn’t say this was a legend of the Jews. It says this is what happened. Angel came down, stirred the waters at a particular season. We don’t know how often. And when the waters were stirred, first guy gets in, healed. Second guy, no healing.

Now that’s just what happened. That’s what the text seems to tell us happened. And you know, some people say it’s not in all the manuscripts and it should be there, not be there. But in order for the whole story to make sense, it seems like we’ve got to understand this is what was going on. This is what was going on. This is related to later as the man speaks to Jesus.

So we’ve got this moving water and an angel. You know, if we’re thinking about angels and water, we remember lots of things from the Old Testament about that, don’t we? Well, we should. Once these kids go through our twelve, thirteen years of our Sunday school program at RCC, they’ll know all this stuff. They’ll make all these associations. Well, they’ll know some of it at least, know a little more than their parents. Lord willing.

Well, angel, water, helping people. Well, we’ve got an angel meeting Hagar, right? Water, assuring her of God’s faithfulness to her. And if we remember the story of Abraham’s servant going to get a wife for Isaac, we remember that Abraham promised the servant that an angel would go with him to fulfill the work—angel well, finding the bride, etc. And if we, well, we’ll talk a little later about some other angelic associations, but we’ve got this angel who comes to stir the waters, okay.

And Jesus then—it says a certain man was there who had an infirmity thirty-eight years. We’re given specifically how long he had the infirmity. And now we all know what thirty-eight years means, right? Well, you think about it. Maybe you know, maybe you don’t know. We’ll talk about it a little bit more. But there’s a particular period of time that’s discussed here that’s supposed to draw some associations for us.

A guy got problems, can’t move into the city really. He’s kind of stuck out there at the sheep gate. He needs to move into something here, and he’s been waiting to move in and to be able to walk into the city on his own legs for thirty-eight years. He’s been trying to move in, right? So this is the guy, and Jesus comes up to him in verse 6.

Jesus saw him. He distinguishes one particular person that he’s going to work with here. How many people did the angel work with? One. One person. How many people does Jesus work with? One. He didn’t come and say, “Okay, everybody’s healed.” No. It seems like we’re drawing a positive association with his angel work by seeing him replaced by Jesus—this moving from angels to Jesus, the messenger of God, the son of God.

So Jesus works with this particular man. He sees him lying there and he knew that he had already been in that condition a long time. He says to him, “Do you want to be made well?” It’s a great question, isn’t it? It’s a question you ought to ask yourselves every Lord’s day when you come here to church to be with the presence of the Savior. He asks each of you individually this morning: Do you want to be healed?

Well, no, I can walk. Okay, bank account’s all right. And marriage—is it okay? It’s okay. In fact, I love my wife. Healed though? I’d like to get some information about the Bible. Well, Jesus doesn’t give information about the Bible apart from healing people. He brings you here today to move you ahead in your Christian life. He brings you here today to heal you.

It’s a wonderful old song by Van Morrison with a chorus that goes, “Have you been healed?” And at the end of the day, that’s what you should ask yourself as a result of the worship that God puts us through: Have you been healed? Have you been ministered to in terms of this glory that God gives us, the knowledge of the word of God and the life that comes from this table? Are you healed today as a result of being in the presence of the great physician?

And see, you don’t get to be healed if you don’t understand how infirm you are. We come together and feel bad because we’re not like everybody else. Everybody’s dressed good, looking good, feeling their lives are working out pretty good, and we’re the only ones that aren’t healed. And we’re thinking, “Boy, I’ve got real trouble in my marriage. I’ve got real trouble with my bank account. I’ve got real trouble with my kids. I’ve got trouble at my job. I’ve got trouble with my health. I’ve got problems.”

And everybody else looks good. We try to hide it up. You don’t want to hide it. See, before God, he sees it. And he wants you to recognize, even if you think things are going good, he wants you to recognize how infirm you are and how you sin this past week and you’ve been persecuted by other sinners. You’ve got problems.

And Jesus says to the man, “Do you want to be healed?” And I ask you today: Do you want to be healed? Do you want to be made well? Do you want to get to wholeness in the work of the Lord Jesus Christ? Do you want to be more effective for him? Do you want to be more thankful this Thursday than you were last Thursday? I do. Every year of my life, I want thanksgiving to pinnacle up more and more and more—thanks to God—to recognizing more and more the healing he’s accomplished for us. Do you want to be healed?

The sick man’s answer is kind of odd. I think it almost seems—I don’t want to be irreverent here or anything—but it almost seems like it’s a little whiny. The sick man answers him saying, “Sir, I have no man to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up. But while I am coming, another steps down before me.”

Now part of that, I think, is to get us to feel sympathy and pity for this man the way our savior does. We’re to pity those people that need healing. But part of it seems like he just should have said, “You bet I do.” But he sort of says, “Well, I can’t really. Yeah, I’d like to, but I just can’t get to it.” You know?

Well, we do see the inability of the man, the complete inability to even take the necessary steps for miraculous healing, and our savior meeting that need. So the guy says, “Well, I’d like to be healed, but I can’t quite do it.” And Jesus then declares to him, “Rise, take up your bed, walk.” He’s healing you. Take up the bed. What is that?

Well, he’s going to move the guy into Sabbath rest. And as he walks ahead into the city, ostensibly, he’s going to be carrying a big placard around his neck. It’s a bed. And a bed is what? A bed is a place of rest. He’s walking around entering into rest with a placard that says, “Rest, sleep. This is neat. Look what Jesus did for me.” You see, he enters in. He—Jesus heals this man. Rise up. You know, rise up, oh man of God. I’m done with lesser things. Quit sitting around here complaining. I’m going to make you whole, and I’m going to make you productive for my purposes, Jesus says.

And immediately the man was made well. Took up his bed and walked. And that day was the Sabbath. Well, here’s our savior telling us what the Sabbath is all about. And if we know the Sabbath stuff, the Old Testament, this doesn’t surprise us either.

Isaiah 58 certainly says not to tread upon the Sabbath and don’t do your own pleasure. I’m going to talk about that the next couple of three weeks, but that’s at the end of a chapter that’s all about what the true Sabbath of God is: helping people to move from disease into wellness, from infirmity to health, from oppression into deliverance and liberation. That’s what the Sabbath is all about. And that’s what Jesus is doing for this poor sheep here.

It’s a wonderful picture, and that’s the picture of what he does for us. He moves us ahead progressively every week. He’s healing us. So when we get to Thursday, praise God for what Jesus has done in healing us. And praise God—that’s at the Sabbath. That’s why he brings us together to make us better, to heal us. Praise God.

Verse 10: The Jews, therefore, so okay, now we have the next group come into the scene in this last half of this section. Now we’ve got the Jews, and we remember these Jews. Remember I said that the covenant name here of Jews isn’t a bad thing. There was a particular period where Jews—the Judahites—that’s what the name was shortened to. Praise is what it really means. And it was a good thing, you know, during a particular covenantal period.

But God has a way of, when he moves the covenantal periods along, to change the names of his people. And when we read Jew, Jew, Jew, Jew, Jew, Jew, Jew in John’s gospel, it doesn’t mean anti-Semitism. It means people that wanted to stay with the past, with those previous six covenants, instead of moving on into the fullness of what they had always pictured and meant.

So when we read Jews here, we read people that are identified with the past and refuse to move ahead into the true promised land in the temple. So these Jews meet with Jesus, and they say to him—they say rather not to Jesus—they meet the man who’s been healed and they say to the man that’s healed, “It’s the Sabbath. It’s not lawful for you to carry your bed.”

You know, here we have the leaders of these people, the shepherds of the sheep, right? And they don’t say, “Praise God, after thirty-eight years.” And then maybe they’ve got some questions about how it was done or what he’s doing, the burden he’s carrying. I don’t know about, but their response is “not lawful.”

Where is the law in the Old Testament that says you can’t carry your bed around? There is no such law. Our savior is not replacing Old Testament law here. He’s fulfilling it and showing the true meaning of it. And these guys are being demonstrated as those who have completely perverted what that law of the Sabbath was all about. They didn’t know Isaiah 58, or if they knew it, they didn’t want to think in terms of it.

So you know, and the way this is structured, we can begin to look a little bit at why this chiastic thing is the way it is. At the center is this healing, being made well on the Sabbath. And just before this, Jesus says something to the man. And just after this, the Jews say something to the man, okay? So we have Jesus talking to the guy, and now we’ve got the Jews talking to the guy.

What does Jesus say? “Rise, take up your bed, walk, be healed. Be transformed, have life.” What did they say to the guy? “Not lawful. Stay in death. Stay unhealed. Stay bad. Lay down. Lay down. Don’t get up. Lay down.” That’s what they tell him. Say, “Don’t enter into Sabbath rest. Don’t enter into what it really means to be made productive by Christ.”

So there’s this correlation—and Meyers and Jordan’s outline does that really nicely—shows us that before and after, we’ve got these statements to the man from Jesus and the Jews. And it contrasts those things.

He answers them. Now he had answered Jesus just before this in the section that correlates up to it in this outline. He had talked to Jesus, and now he’s going to talk to them. He who made me well said to me, “Take up your bed and walk.” You know, I don’t like this answer either a whole lot from this guy. Maybe I should. Maybe—I’m to—me the whole pattern of his speech here is interesting, and I think it’s significant for the last point of the outline when we get to the application.

You know, he doesn’t seem—you know, he seems to want to blame shift in terms of why he can’t get healed. And now he seems to be saying, “Well, it’s the guy that told me who healed me. He told me to do this, right?” I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong there. But in any event, he tells him that.

And then in verse 12, they ask him, “Who is the man who said to you, Take up your bed and walk?” Okay, so that seems to correlate with Jesus talking to the man before that: “Do you want to be made healed?” And then they ask the guy, “Who is him that told you, ‘Take up your bed and walk’?” Two questions, right?

Jesus asked him a question, and now the Jews ask him a question. And the questions are completely different. One offers healing and help, and the other question is accusatory. And now they’re not just mad at the guy. Now they’re going to go after whoever told him. Whoever healed him and caused him to take up his bed and walk as well.

So two questions. But the one who was healed did not know who it was, for Jesus had withdrawn, a multitude being in the place. So Jesus saw him, but he can’t see Jesus now. Jesus has disappeared into the crowd, as it were.

Afterward, Jesus found him in the temple. We can’t find him, but Jesus finds him in the temple. After this little discussion between the man and the Jews, he finds him. And he finds him where? He finds him in the temple. So again, where was he able to enter once he got raised up and carrying his bed? He was able to enter the temple. You see? So the whole picture is being kind of at the gate, in liminal space out there, not quite able to enter in on the threshold, but can’t get in because he can’t walk. And Jesus raises him up, and he goes into the temple.

The apostles, I think, do this in Acts too. They give life to a guy who walks in and worships them. I think that’s the whole point. So, but here very clearly Jesus finds him in a specific place the text wants us to identify as the temple. So this movement of the man toward Sabbath day convocation in the temple is given to us.

Jesus found him in the temple and said to him, “See, you have been made well. Understand what’s happened. You’ve been healed. And then he tells him something very important: Sin no more, or a worse thing will come upon you.” So he warns him here. You know, later on we’ll see Jesus healing a blind man, and the blind man’s response to him is completely different from this guy. Everything is different, and we’ll see the contrast when we get there.

But Jesus actually kind of rebukes him now and tells him, you know, “Hey, your life should be better. I didn’t heal you just so you can walk around and do what you want to do. Make sure that you attend to your life now and the transformation I’ve given you and use the power of God for the purposes of his kingdom. A worse thing can happen to you.”

And then it’s interesting: what does he do? Verse 15: The man departs, told the Jews it was Jesus who had made him well. I don’t know. Maybe, again, I’m not sure of this, but again, it seems like his response is odd. “Go, sin no more, or something really bad will happen to you.” He immediately gets up and goes and tells the Jews who it was who made him well. Jesus didn’t tell him to do that here. I guess I’m kind of reading into it, but it just doesn’t seem quite good that he then goes and immediately tells him who it was who made him well.

And then verse 16: For this reason, then, the Jews persecuted Jesus. They sought to kill him because he had done these things on the Sabbath. Okay, so they go to him and then start bugging him about the Sabbath. And he answers them, “My father has been working until now, and I have been working. Therefore, the Jews sought all the more to kill him because he not only broke the Sabbath but also said that God was his father, making himself equal with God.”

So we began at this feast scene. We don’t find out it’s the Sabbath until the middle, but at the end we’re reminded again that it’s the Sabbath. The Sabbath is a feast day in Leviticus 23—beginning and end. These references to feast and Sabbath. And Jesus helps us to understand what the nature of feast days and Sabbaths are by saying, “My father works, and I’m working.”

Okay, so he tells us, he brings a correction to what it is that the Sabbath is all about by executing it here for us and drawing these correlations at the beginning and end between what he’s doing and then what they’re doing in terms of persecuting him. He’s showing grace, and their reaction to him. He’s at Bethesda. He is that pool of life-giving water. He is the house of mercies, and all that stuff. And they’re the house of death. They’re going to kill him. They’re going to persecute him, and they’re actually, you know, seek him out for his death through the rest of the gospel account of what the Jews do in through chapter 12.

Well, okay, so that’s the flow of the story. That’s what goes on. And let me make seven comments about this. Now, seven comments. I’ve got these comments kind of structured, or little quotes from the account provide us with what I want to draw out for this in terms of importance.

Number one: “Father has been working.” And I’ve made this point, but let me make it clearly here. Jesus executed the father’s Sabbath. Jesus does not say, “Well, the Sabbath was just sort of back then, and now it’s different, and the Sabbath was not all that great a deal.” No, Jesus comes to reveal the father. And he comes here to tell us what the Sabbath is—not to contrast it, not to contradict it, not to get rid of it—yes, to bring it to completion, to show at the central core of what Sabbath-keeping is before God.

But he doesn’t put himself in opposition to the Sabbath. It’s the father’s Sabbath. We—the reason I say this is because we read the New Testament. Now we’ve got Jesus and grace, and he used to be the father’s law. He used to be tough stuff, and we couldn’t do things, and the Sabbath is bad, and now we can do whatever we want to do as long as we go to worship. And that’s just not the picture.

Jesus identifies himself with the father. Remember in chapter one, that’s what he’s doing. He’s always moving in terms of the father. And he, because he has such an intimate relationship with the father and that personal structural bond of the Trinity, can then reveal the father to us. It’s why he comes—remember in chapter one—to exegete, literally that’s what the Greek word means, to declare the father. And the father, you know, is what’s described here in terms of his Sabbath activities. That he’s working.

Now I’m going to take, you know, you know, I’m going to take the next two or three Sundays and take a little diversion before we get to the discourse of Jesus immediately following this event. You know what we’re going to see now in these events? It says something will happen, and then Jesus will talk a lot about it, right? So something happens here—this healing of this guy and the Sabbath day healing—and then we’re going to have a long discourse of twenty or thirty verses here, thirty verses where Jesus talks to them. Big long uninterrupted thing. It’s not a dialogue. It’s a monologue. And I’m going to cover that.

But I want, before we get to that, I want us to understand, to remind ourselves again, of what the Sabbath is according to the Old Testament, how it worked its way out from creation through the Old Testament revelation. And next week we’ll talk about the Lord of the Sabbath. Jesus says in the synoptic gospels that he is Lord of the Sabbath, and it’s important for us to do that.

And in the providence of God, next Sunday, in some churches, the liturgical year—the particular Sunday—is Christ the King. This is the Sunday right after Thanksgiving and just before Advent: Christ the King. And so we’ll talk about Jesus being king or lord of the Sabbath, and we’ll talk about Old Testament Sabbath.

But he sets us up for it here by not contrasting—you know, not saying the Old Testament was bad. And in fact, in the discourse, what Jesus is going to say at the end of this chapter is, he’s going to say this: “Don’t think that I will accuse you to the father. There is one that accuses you, even Moses, in whom you trust. For had you believed Moses, you would have believed me, for he wrote of me. But if you believe not his writings, how shall you believe my words?”

See, he’s not drawing a contrast between him and Moses. He’s drawing a comparison. “Hey,” he’s saying, “I’m doing just what Moses said. Moses, when he gave you Sabbatical laws, wrote about me. I am the Sabbath. What are you talking about? I’m not keeping the Sabbath. Of course Jesus keeps the Sabbath. He is the Sabbath. And he helps us to see here what it is.”

But he draws no contrast back to Moses. He draws a correlation. Let me just mention this at this particular point of the outline. You know, we talked about this feast. We don’t know what feast it is here. But we—I’ll save that for later. So for now, Jesus shows, exegetes, what the proper view of the father’s Sabbath is. And we’ll talk a lot the next three weeks.

Did Jesus keep the Sabbath? Yes. Children’s outline: What does the word Sabbath mean? It means to rest. Rest. Literally that’s what it means. Rest. To stop—stop doing stuff, you know, to stop. To rest. And so that’s what the word means.

And Jesus is taking a man in a state of unrest and through his ministry and work is bringing him to a position of rest. And so there is a working aspect that has always gone on in the Sabbath. The priests always ministered on the Sabbath in the context of the temple, the sacrificial system. Every Sabbath, Leviticus 23 tells us, was a day of holy convocation. People had to walk to where they would meet, and they’d be taught from the word of God. Three times a year they had to walk up there for those festivals in God’s presence.

So there’s no, you know, distinction here. The Sabbath rest is what’s being spoken of, but work always goes on. The father is working. The son is working on the Sabbath. I’m working today. You had to do some work to get here. It doesn’t mean a complete cessation from all work, but what it does mean for the Christian is rest in the father and son working to transform us.

And we’ll talk more about that in the next three weeks as we talk from the Old Testament laws about the Sabbath and Jesus being the Lord of them.

Who gave us the Sabbath, kids? Moses or God? And you’ll notice that the little blanks I leave for you on the outline, neither word will work. What will work are two words. The phrase: trick question. The trick question I’m giving you kids. Who gave us the Sabbath? Moses or God? Well, both did, didn’t they?

Moses didn’t give us the original Sabbath. That was the seventh day of creation, the seventh day of rest. But Moses gives us the Sabbath in terms of the law structure that these guys are talking about. He gave it to us, but it was God through Moses testifying to Jesus. So Moses and God. It’s a trick question, pastor. Don’t do that to us again. But I’ll quickly explain to you—it was a trick question, okay.

Two: What is the Sabbath about then? If he’s executing the Sabbath, what is it about? Well, it’s about Bethesda. Bethesda. The Sabbath is about redemption, forgiveness, mercy, and grace. And mercy here is the particular word that’s found in this word Bethesda: house of mercies.

Jesus shows us that what the Sabbath is about is the extension of mercy to suffering people. It’s the demonstration of grace. I mentioned before that in Nehemiah chapter 3, the sheep gate is the only one that’s sanctified. And in Nehemiah chapter 3, yes, Nehemiah chapter 3—I’m sorry, Nehemiah chapter 3. The sheep gate is the one that’s sanctified. You know, as I said, the sheep gate’s a picture that they have this great multitude—us, the unwashed, so to speak, in our sins and our difficulties and our infirmities.

Ultimately, there’s only one lamb of God that can enter through that gate for us and bring us with him—mercifully to us—and that’s the Lord Jesus Christ. John has identified him as the lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world. And so the work of the Lord Jesus Christ, his death on the cross and his resurrection for us, is what’s behind this extension of mercy and grace to this sick sheep. And it’s what’s behind the house of mercies that God has called you here today to receive mercy from him. He pities you. Cast all your care on him, knowing that he cares for you. He thinks about you pitifully—I mean compassionately—wanting to assist you and moving you ahead for his good purposes. And that’s what he does.

So the Sabbath is all about the extension of grace and mercy to us. And secondly, I think we should say that—so Nehemiah, by the way, kids, is where this sheep gate is sanctified. Nehemiah, the book of Nehemiah. But secondly, so God extends mercy to us. But secondly, he does it so that we might extend mercy to other people, right? I mean, we’re Christians. We’re to operate in the context of what Jesus does. And on the Sabbath, he does a work of mercy and grace.

And in the providence of God, we have the great high privilege of entering, corporately or at least many of us, into an extension of mercy and grace and kindness on December 23rd, right? We’re going to meet down here at the McLaughlin Nursing Home. Many of us, we’re going to put out a Christmas program, causing these people that maybe don’t have families or they don’t see them that often. We’re going to bring joy, mercy, kindness, healing to them. What do they need to be healed of? Loneliness, a lack of joy. We’re going to minister that grace to them. We’re going to be Bethesda down there at the McLaughlin nursing center or senior center up here in Oregon City on the 23rd.

You know, there was a group of people—young people and some adults—who went down and extended mercy at the rescue mission, right, couple of weeks ago. And that’s going to happen again in January. It’s one of the ongoing benevolent works that’s now getting going in this church: the extension of mercy to men that are hungry and homeless.

We had a wonderful presentation put on by the Pregnancy Resource Centers. There was a woman who actually is employed at the Milwaukee PRC. That’s the old crisis pregnancy centers for us old-timers. They renamed them Pregnancy Resource Centers to get a little better perception of women coming to them and that people would be more willing to come.

So this is a ministry that assists women, men, who are thinking about abortion or maybe have committed abortion and are repentant over that sin. They have ministries set up to minister to women such as that. And they have ministries so that they have free baby clothes. So if people can’t afford babies and are tempted to abort them, they’re going to give them free baby clothes. They’re going to talk to them about from the scriptures. They’re going to show them—they’ve got a little machine down there in Milwaukee. Well, they can see the baby inside them, you know, on that—whatever that thing’s called, you know, on a screen, you know—because really it’s a statement of faith not to kill what’s inside because you can’t see that thing, right? Can’t see that baby.

So you see it on the screen, and the statistics show that if you see that baby moving on the screen, you’re much less likely to kill that child. So they’ll show them the baby if they’re thinking about, you know, aborting their baby. They’ll talk to them about that. You know, these women, these young girls who get pregnant—their parents, the civil state, their teachers, and all too often their pastors and their people at church are all saying, “It’s okay. It’s an option you have.”

So it’s very important, you know, that these ministries such as the Pregnancy Resource Center are there. And if we’re going to be Christians, you know, in word and also in deed, then we have to—we, it’s not an option for our church corporately to be supporting the work of the PRC. Our church covenant—to be a member of this church, you have to pledge to oppose the sin of abortion, to try to stomp it out. And that doesn’t mean just political action—it means that I’m glad we do that—but much more importantly in terms of practical action, right now, what you can do in this country is you can minister to individual women who are making real life decisions day by day in this country and in Milwaukee, whether they’re going to kill their unborn children or not.

It’s not an option for this church. If we’re going to be Bethesda Christians where this house is identified with the house of God, that’s a house of mercy, we have to be ministering to women who are considering aborting their babies. We have an obligation as Dave, in his class, Sunday school class this morning, pointed out to the fatherless. Well, those children are the most fatherless, motherless kids around if their moms and dads give them over to the abortionist methods of eliminating them and killing them.

So it’s an obligation for Christians to extend mercy to those that are suffering, and that includes women who are really suffering in terms of these horrible decisions they’re being encouraged to by their support teams and their false shepherds, you know, their authority figures in their home, church, and state and school. We have to—we want to deliver them from that stuff, right? But we have to engage in ministries.

Last Lord’s day, I preached down at our mission church in Salem, and afterwards went to the Oregon State Penitentiary. Ongoing Bible study there every other Sunday. There’s no Protestant worship service in that dark place known as prison at all. On Sundays, there’s a Catholic service and a Buddhist get-together. No Christian Protestant service, let alone a reformed service. I felt bad leaving that place after spending an hour and a half with these prisoners, most of whom are very committed Christians and know their Bibles well.

Most of them come to faith in the context of prison. The head of the Lifers Club at the Oregon State Penitentiary—life sentence—head of the Lifer Club is taking seminary courses from Reformed Theological Seminary by extension. These are not bad guys who don’t know their Bibles. These are guys who need to be worshiping God. A couple of them said they—one of them said he got so desperate to take communion, he actually went to the Catholic service just so he could have communion because they’ve never had communion there in years.

We have a need as a congregation—as a minister, I feel a need to minister God’s mercy to those prisoners. We’ve got to do something about it. It’s going to take work. It’s going to take organization. It’s going to take all of us being committed to doing what this text is all about.

At the center of our thanksgiving is the mercy God has given us and the mercy we want to extend to other people. The grace we’ve been given, the grace we give. We’re going to start doing something in terms of communion in the next week or two. The alms offering will be primarily taken on either side of these stairs as you come forward to receive communion.

In the reformed tradition, and we used to do this, communion—the deacon’s offering is commonly taken in the context of communion Sunday. And so communion is the great picture of the grace and mercy shown to us by our savior. And it ought to be a place where we are committing ourselves to be, you know, people that take that and transmit grace and mercy to others.

And so your alms offerings go to these places—like the PRC, the Pregnancy Resource Center, the deacons fund that works individually with people as well as corporately in particular groups, the rescue mission, the senior center thing. All these things are funded in part by these alms offerings as well as special offerings we take, like the stuff we took and sent to Messiah’s ministry after the September 11th tragedy.

So you see, we need to understand that the Sabbath day is all about works of mercy. The Westminster Confession of Faith says that there are three legitimate things you can do on Sunday: physical rest, worship of God, and works of mercy, right? And that is at the heart of the Christian Sabbath that our savior tells us about here.

Okay, now, the Sabbath is a day of great joy. I want to just mention that as we go through this as well, and we see that in this man having the joy of healing. Children, so before we move ahead, I should mention, then: what are some of the mercy ministries we do at RCC? You could put PRC—Pregnancy Resource Centers. That’s one thing we do to assist the fatherless and the mothers who are being tempted to kill their children.

OSP—Oregon State Penitentiary. Marty and Steve do that ministry, but we kind of oversee it. The elders do and what they’re doing. And now we’re getting more actively involved. We’ll be trying to think through how we can structure a worship service, how we can administer communion to those men in the context of Lord’s day worship at the state penitentiary.

The deacons fund, DF if you want to put it. The deacons fund. We accumulate money all the time. So special needs come up. Individual men need help in a short-term situation. Deacons fund can minister that to them physically as they bring them into discipleship, help them find work, etc. The deacons fund—giving money to widows and orphans. The deacons fund money is used for those sorts of things.

The rescue mission, RM is another thing you can put there, kids. The rescue mission is another mercy ministry that we’re now involved with. As well as this senior home stuff that we want to do more of as we move ahead, having started now on December 23rd.

Well, if you’re called together today to rejoice in this aspect of the Sabbath—that it is Bethesda—you should ask yourself: What are you doing to extend mercy and grace? You know, are you giving money to help people? Are you giving of your time? Are you willing to start bringing baby clothes? Are you willing to wash baby clothes for the Pregnancy Resource Center? They get all this stuff in. They’ve got to wash it before they hang it up and give it to women. There’s all kinds of stuff.

Are you willing to call people on behalf of the Pregnancy Resource Center? Are you willing to go down and serve meals at the rescue mission? Are you willing to go up to the senior home? We’re going to have a tree here with ornaments on it with the women and men at that nursing home, the senior’s home at McLaughlin Center with their names. Are you willing to take a name and extend a little healing touch to somebody who may be pretty lonely at this time of year and minister the joy of this season, the work of the Lord Jesus Christ?

You should ask yourself: What Sabbatical Bethesda sort of ministries are you involved with? Okay.

Three: The moving of the water. The moving of the water. The Sabbath is the day of new creation.

You know, so it’s so interesting, isn’t it? An angel comes, troubles the water, moves the water. Moving, moving the water, over and over in this text. This movement of the water is pictured, right? Well, the water is going from death to life, you know. If you’ve got, if you’ve got a little dog and it’s been hit by lightning, it’s laying there still, it’s dead, and maybe you can resuscitate it and it moves, then, and it’s living. You can tell when you look at things, you know: Is it moving or not moving? Is it dead or alive?

Now, yeah, is it moving a little bit? It might be breathing. Still movement. But if it’s not moving, something’s dead. And so if water is moving, it’s alive. Now, Jesus comes in John 7 on the feast of booths, the great day of the feast, and he says, “I am the water of life. Drink from me, and from you rivers of living water will flow out.” Life water. So we know there’s living water and dead water. And it seems to me that the angel is moving the water from death to life. He’s making it move, making living water out of it, right?

God’s ministry of life through the water is what’s being pictured here, just like Jesus talked about in the last chapter when he met with the Samaritan woman at the well. And I think that we could probably think here in terms of Genesis 1, where the spirit of God is hovering over the water and begins to move that water around and make different differentiation and forming things up.

So I think that what we have here with the angel and then Jesus being the great angel, and the angel troubling the waters, is a picture of new creation. What Jesus is doing is he’s forming a man’s legs. Remember the problem with creation that Jim talked us about during the creation conference—not the problem, but the state of the original creation is that it’s formless. It’s not formed up. It’s void. It’s empty. It must be filled. And it’s dark, right? Three things are going on there.

And Jesus in here, in this middle of the Gospel of John, he takes this guy’s legs, which are lifeless, and sort of forms them up so they can walk and be differentiated and be useful. He forms them. Now what he’s going to do in John chapter 6 is he’s going to fill people. He’s going to feed them with, you know, fishes and loaves. He’s going to feed them. And then he’s going to—the next thing he’s going to do in John chapter 7, he’s going to heal a blind guy, or John chapter 8, I remember which one of those two chapters. He heals a blind man. He brings light to his eyes.

You see? So we’ve got these pictures of the new creation: forming, filling, and lighting. And so what this is intended to do is to cause us to rejoice and be thankful that what we enter into on the Sabbath at Bethesda is new creation life. The life of God. Remember, we talked about this with him healing the nobleman’s son. Jesus gives himself to us. He is life, and so he gives that to us, and we move into this new creation.

And here, this particular miracle is, as I said, I think a forming, organizing sort of miracle of the guy’s legs. And so we have, in the context of what we do, there’s an organizational structure there. There’s a forming of these mercy ministries that has to go on, and then there’s a filling that has to go on. They’ve got to do things to bring things to these people, and in doing so, we bring the light of Christ.

Organization is part of the centrality of being men and women walking about in the new creation, okay? Organization—forming things up, forming up your family, forming up your vocation to understand what you’re supposed to do. Form things up. And Jesus is doing that here.

You know, it’s been wonderful for me these last four months to have Doug working as an administrative assistant. And this is what he’s really good at. He’s good at forming sort of stuff. I don’t know what I’m good at. Maybe light. I don’t know. But he has this forming, organizational sort of stuff that he does. And so things start to form up, and we have an elder training manual and now a deacon training manual. We’re getting policies and all this stuff is forming up in the context of our church. And we can say, well, this is what we do. This is how it’s structured. And then we fill this stuff with activity.

So, you know, we’re to think of this new creation in terms of forming, I think. And part of what is going on here that increases our thanksgiving is understanding that Jesus is bringing about a new creation forth.

An angel—there’s this angel there. I mentioned that before. Jesus is the one who has ushered in this definitive new creation. The angel in the Old Testament ministered by angels. New Testament, now Jesus, the son of God, son of man, comes, and he’s the one that brings these great blessings to pass. And as I mentioned earlier, if we think of angels—the angel is the one who led people into the promised land. The angel is the one who found the wife for Abraham’s servant. The angel is the one who ministers to Hagar, an angel of the Lord. All that stuff is fulfilled in the work of the Lord Jesus Christ as he comes to affect this definitive new creation.

Five: Thirty-eight years. I mentioned this, right? Why is it thirty-eight years? Now we know that we can think of the wilderness wanderings as forty years. We sang about that earlier in Psalm 95. But in Deuteronomy 2:14, we read this: “And the space in which we came from Kadesh Barnea until we were come over the brook Zared was thirty and eight years, until all the generation of the men of war were wasted out from among the host, as the Lord swore unto them.”

So how long did they wander in the wilderness? They were forty years from deliverance to entrance. But here in Deuteronomy 2, we’re told that their actual wandering in terms of God’s judgments upon them particularly was thirty-eight years. Thirty-eight years they wandered, and then they were brought into the promised land. This guy has been sick thirty-eight years, unable to enter in. And after Jesus ministers to him, he is now found in the temple by our savior. He’s moved into the promised land.

God wants us to think of the future. Remember I said those Jews—it’s the past. It’s the old covenants they want to cling on to. But God says, “Move ahead into the promised land.” That’s why we’re doing benevolent works. That’s why we’re setting up a Sunday school program. That’s why we’re trying to learn these songs in a more glorious way. That’s why we want to beautify this church and make it reflect the glory of the worship of God. That’s why we want to have outreach ministries into this community. That’s why we look at these neighborhoods around this church, and we want to tell them, “We’re your church. God has planted us here.”

We want to think long term about moving into the promised land that God says all the earth is now, because that’s what Jesus says the Sabbath is all about, too. It’s movement ahead into the promised land. We have a forward-thinking view of things. At least we should.

I asked the team leaders as we’re working on budget: What do you want? You know, what would you like for your team, your budget, this next year? Dave H. says, “Well, I don’t want next year. But I’ll tell you what I want long term. I want a van. I want a building to house seniors and widows in. And I want a building I can have a Christian school in.” What? Any? I can’t even do a partial of any of that stuff right now. But see, I like that. I like that. That’s what we’re supposed to be doing at these teams. Thinking: What does that promised land look like to us? Talking to Doug H. about this. He said, “Well, I want this to be the biggest, best reformed church in the greater Portland area.”

That’s right. We want to have ministries going on. We want to work in assistance with other reformed churches. We want them to be successful in their ministries, too. But we want to have an impact on Oregon City, right? We want to inform the civil magistrate of what the scriptures speak on things so he doesn’t keep walking in fire and getting his hands slapped by God. We want to have an effect upon the civil polity. We want to have an effect upon our neighbors. We want to minister to people. We want to see the promised land manifested around this Bethesda, this house of mercy, that God has planted here in terms of what we do on the Lord’s day.

The Sabbath is movement into a place of blessing. You know, I think the feast might have been the feast of booths, because it’s at the feast of booths where Jesus says he’s that living water, right? And at the feast of booths, people would be like trees around God once a week—one week out of the year. That’s what the feast of booths is. And these guys are in colonnades, five colonnades that are like big giant palm tree kind of things. And they’re sitting there for protection, and they’re around the pool of water.

Well, who’s the pool? Who’s the life-giving water? Jesus. So you’ve got a mass of people gathered together on a feast day in the context of trees and the life-giving work of the Lord Jesus Christ being found at the center of them in this pool of Bethesda—mercy, grace, and moving forward into the promised land. I think that’s what it’s about.

Now, folks, if we understand that’s what the Lord’s day worship is—praise God. As we move from here into Thursday, we better have high thanksgiving on our hearts and minds. I’m sure we do. We understand the beauty of this story given to us from John chapter 5.

Thirty-eight years pictures this move into the promised land. You know, it was the angel of God that led them for thirty-eight years and then moved them into the promised land. God told Moses, “I’m going to send my angel before you guys, and you’re going to go into that promised land, and he’ll help you to drive out the Canaanites, the Perizzites, and the Hivites, because there’s enemies there.”

And that’s the next point. We understand that we’ve moved into the promised land. We should understand that the Sabbath moving into promised land leads us in interaction with people to say, “It’s not lawful. It’s not lawful to do this.” That’s what they said, right? What did—what did Joshua meet? Jesus, you know, is Joshua. The names are identical except one is Hebrew, one is Greek.

What does Joshua meet when he goes into the promised land? He’s got to deal with Canaanites. Who does Jesus meet as he brings this guy into the end of the thirty-eight years of wandering in the wilderness? And as the angel of the Lord leads him forward, he finds bad guys—enemies of the church. There in the church, but they’re not of the church, right?

So enemies have to be dealt with. We’re going to have opposition. I mentioned Moses, right? Moses goes and finds his wife at a well. And who’s there with his wife? You remember that story? Seven daughters, Jethro’s daughters. He’s going to marry one of them. But they’re having trouble getting water. Why? Because of some bad shepherds, the text tells us, right? In Exodus, bad shepherds. Moses has to deal with the bad shepherds.

These guys, the leaders of the Jews, are terrible shepherds. They want their sheep sick. They want them lame because they can’t heal them. They’re filled with envy. If they can’t do it, nobody can. And the Lord Jesus Christ, like the greater Moses that he is, has to deal with the enemies of the church. When we move forward, there will be opposition. Don’t be surprised by it. Don’t, you know, let it confuse you.

Maybe opposition in the church. As this church, for the last twenty years, has had the vision of walking forward into the promised land, we have regularly, fairly periodically, had problems and enemies who try to get in our way, either from outside or some from inside. And what we want to do is what Jesus tells these Jews: “Hey, we’re going forward. We’re going to go into the promised land. I hope you come with us. I hope you Jews understand what the nature of the Sabbath is and want to go along. But you know, that’s where we’re going. One way or the other, we’re going ahead. We’re going where God wants us to be. We’re making manifest the Bethesda—house of mercy—that God has called his church to be. We’ve got enemies, but it’s okay.”

And then lastly: Sin no more. You know, there’s always these warnings in the text. Or not, I thought of that movie—that clip from that movie, Shaft, where the guy, you know, he’s been fired as a policeman, and he’s talking to these bad guys. He says, “Do you think that makes me more dangerous or less dangerous?” Because they’re kind of laughing. He’s not a cop anymore. His point is the law is no longer restraining him, and he can deal with him whenever he wants to deal with him.

Well, I thought of that when we get into the promised land where God lives, when we come back into corporate worship, when we go up to this table gratefully acknowledging what he’s done for us: Is he more dangerous to us or less dangerous? We seem to think he’s become a buttercup or something frequently in the context of the church. Otto Scott said, “God is no buttercup.” When you get closer to the presence of God, it’s more dangerous for you.

You see, in the Old Testament in Leviticus, if you got too close—now he wanted certain guys to get close—but if you acted like a priest, he’d kill you because you’re too close. There were degrees of separation to remind us about that. That getting too close to God will kill you. Well, you see, we’re now moving into the promised land. We’re doing these ministries. We’re interacting with the living God. But God wants us today to be healed. And on the basis of that healing, he wants to tell us as we go out the doors: “Don’t sin anymore, or a worse thing will happen to you.”

I kind of think this guy did continue to sin right away, and a terrible thing happened to him. Much worse things than suffering for thirty-eight years lame, apparently, right? A worse thing? What are you talking about, Jesus? A guy was lame thirty-eight years. That’s pretty bad. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Much worse things can happen to a man than being lame thirty-eight years.

And you know, you—we all have the problems. We’ve got our trials. We’ve got our afflictions. We’ve got our lamenesses. We sort of like to pity ourselves in them. And you know, and God tells us today, “Sin no more. You’ve been healed today. The gospel of Christ has brought you into Sabbath rest and the extension of mercy to you and empowering you to be life-giving forces to others. He’s brought you forward to minister to you. He’s forgiven you. He’s healed you. Don’t