John chapter 5, and we'll be looking at the first 29 verses. Before we read those together, let's pray. Heavenly Father, we pray that You would come down and speak to us now. Speak to us through the reading of Your Word, speak to us through the preaching of Your Word. Speak with a voice that raises the dead. Lord God, we are the dead. And we need Your power to raise us to life. Lord, many of us have tasted that power and we know and we live in the reality of it, but Lord, even we desire to be filled with life afresh and anew. Revive us, oh God. Help us, we pray. In Christ's name, Amen. John chapter 5, and we'll read the verse, the first 29 verses. “After this there was a feast of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. Now there is in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate a pool, in Aramaic called Bethesda, which has five roofed colonnades. In these lay a multitude of invalids—blind, lame, and paralyzed. One man was there who had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had already been there a long time, He said to him, ‘Do you want to be healed?’ The sick man answered Him, ‘Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, and while I am going, another steps down before me.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Get up, take up your bed, and walk.’ And at once the man was healed, and he took up his bed and walked. Now that day was the Sabbath. So the Jews said to the man who had been healed, ‘It is the Sabbath, and it is not lawful for you to take up your bed.’ But he answered them, ‘The man who healed me, that man said to me, “Take up your bed, and walk.”’ They asked him, ‘Who is the man who said to you, “Take up your bed and walk”?’ Now the man who had been healed did not know who it was, for Jesus had withdrawn, as there was a crowd in the place. Afterward Jesus found him in the temple and said to him, ‘See, you are well. Sin no more, that nothing worse may happen to you.’ The man went away and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had healed him. And this was why the Jews were persecuting Jesus, because He was doing these things on the Sabbath. But Jesus answered them, ‘My Father is working until now, and I am working.’ This was why the Jews were seeking all the more to kill Him, because not only was He breaking the Sabbath, but He was even calling God His own Father, making Himself equal with God. So Jesus said to them, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of His own accord, but only what He sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise. For the Father loves the Son and shows Him all that He Himself is doing. And greater works than these will He show Him, so that you may marvel. For as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, so also the Son gives life to whom He will. For the Father judges no one, but has given all judgment to the Son, that all may honor the Son, just as they honor the Father. Whoever does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent Him. Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes Him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life. Truly, truly, I say to you, an hour is coming, and is now here, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live. For as the Father has life in Himself, so He has granted the Son also to have life in Himself. And He has given Him authority to execute judgment, because He is the Son of Man. Do not marvel at this, for an hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear His voice and come out, those who have done good to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil to the resurrection of judgment.’” This is the Word of the Lord. Now, we're going to take a couple of hits at this particular passage. We'll look at it again next week. But this week, what I want to do is I just want to show you one thing from the first section of that passage where Jesus heals an invalid, and how it relates to one aspect of what Jesus says in His discussions with the Jews after that event. But before we get to looking at this invalid in particular, I want to remind you of what John is all about in his gospel. We've been slowly working through the book of John, so you may have forgotten some of this, but John has written his gospel to tell you about Jesus so that you may believe in Him. And he actually uses that word belief and talks about the idea of belief more times than any other book in the Bible. 84 times, if you count them all up, he uses the term belief. And you'll find 18 of those in the first four chapters. We saw, for instance, back in chapter 1, when Jesus meets Nathanael and tells him that He knew him when he was under the fig tree, we see that Nathanael believes in Jesus. He declares that He is the Son of God, the King of Israel. In verse 50 there, you'll see that Jesus talks about how he believed. And then the next miracle comes when Jesus turns water into wine at the wedding in Cana. And we see that as He does that, His disciples see this miraculous event and they believe in Him. And then, you might remember when we talked about how Jesus cleansed the temple, and we saw even then John is at pains to say that His disciples, after He was raised from the dead, remembered that He'd done these things and said these things, and they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken. And then we have Nicodemus. He's the next event. And Jesus spends a lot of time speaking to Nicodemus. We don't really know if Nicodemus responded with belief, but we can see the emphasis in what Jesus says to Nicodemus about how you must believe. A great, that great verse that everyone knows, you know, the John 3:16, for God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life, is in the context of Him speaking to Nicodemus. After Nicodemus, we moved on to the Samaritan woman. And there we see Jesus engaging with this woman, encouraging her to come to Him and receive living water. And we see her respond in belief. She asks Him for the living water, and then she goes off and tells her neighbors about the Christ, and they come, and John emphasizes at the end of that passage about how many from her town believed in Him. And so, when we come to the next miracle, oh sorry, we missed one. Then there's the official who comes from Galilee. And Jesus says to him, "Go, your son will be made well." And you remember, he had to believe Jesus' words without receiving the promise. And that's exactly what he did. John tells us twice he believed Jesus' words, and then he goes home and sees the result, the promise received, and he believes with renewed vigor as well. Can you feel the emphasis? Jesus acts, Jesus reveals Himself, and people respond with belief. And so as we come to this next account of a great miracle where Jesus heals this invalid who's been lying by the pool of Bethesda for 38 years, there's something I want you to notice that's particularly striking. Let's have a look at it together. The scene opens on a pool in Jerusalem, near the sheep gate, a pool called Bethesda. And by this pool, we find a multitude of sick people: invalids, blind, lame, and paralyzed. And if you have the ESV, you might notice that verse 4 is missing. That's because in the earliest manuscripts, what you have in front of you in the ESV is what's in the earliest manuscripts, but later manuscripts have side margin notes that explain why there were all these sick people lying next to this pool in Bethesda. And the reason they're that they were all lying there is that they believe there was an angel who would come down and stir the waters, and the first person to get in the water would be healed from their sickness. And that explains why the sick man later on in verse 7 says that he has no one to put him in the water when the water is stirred up. But Jesus sees this man, a sick man, he's called, and it seems he's lame because he struggles to get up and get into the water. And Jesus sees that he's been lying there for 38 years. And He asks this man an interesting question. He says, "Do you wish to be healed?" It seems like a strange question. He's been sick for 38 years. He's lying next to a pool where you get healed if you jump in the water. I think he might want to be made well. But it's a very similar question to what we saw Jesus doing with the Samaritan woman. The Samaritan woman comes to the well because she's thirsty, and Jesus says to her, "If you knew the gift of God and who it is that's saying to you, 'Give me a drink,' you would have asked Him and He would have given you living water." In that situation, back with the Samaritan woman, we saw a complete misunderstanding. The Samaritan woman says, "Sir, you don't have a bucket. How are you going to get this living water?" She interprets His invitation to receive some spiritual gift, some great miracle, as a physical thing. She interprets it as a physical thing that He's offering. And this man in John chapter 5 is thinking on the same level. Jesus says, "Do you want to be healed?" and he's thinking, "Well, the way you get healed is you get in the water. And Jesus, I can't get in the water." But then in contrast to John chapter 4 where Jesus engages with the Samaritan woman and gets her to the point of realizing that she needs the living water from Him, to the point where she actually says to Him, "Give me this living water," Jesus in John 5 doesn't wait for the man's response. The man says, "I can't do it," and Jesus just says, "Be healed. Get up, take up your bed, and walk." In every other miracle we've seen so far in John, we would expect to hear about how this man responds with some sort of belief. We'd expect to see how this man understands the identity of Jesus. We'd expect to see something from this man, but there's nothing. Jesus disappears from his presence, as you see in verse 13. The man doesn't even know who it was that healed him. And when this this man has an interaction with the Jews in verse 10 to 12 when they take issue with the fact that he's walking around with his bed on the Sabbath, he says, "I don't know who it was. I've got no idea." This is cutting against everything we've seen in John's gospel so far. John's gospel is all about people seeing who Jesus is, the identity of Jesus, knowing Him, and responding with faith. This man has not believed, he's not responded with faith, he doesn't even know who Jesus is. But then we might think, okay, well the story's not finished yet. Perhaps there's more. Maybe Jesus is going to get back to him and and reignite his faith or something, or or reveal Himself to him in some way. And He does, in verse 14. Jesus goes and finds the man in the temple, but He does—He says to him just one thing. He clearly reveals His identity, because the man knows who He is afterwards, but he says to him, "See, you are well. Sin no more that nothing worse may happen to you." And once again, you might expect some sort of response from the man. You know, the man, the man heard the word of Jesus and and he went off and he sins no more. But there's nothing. There's nothing in the text. This man hears Jesus, he now knows who Jesus is. He goes back to the Jews and he tells them, "Hey guys, I worked out who it was. It was Jesus." But there's no mention of belief. There's no action of faith. There's no understanding of his identity as the Christ, as the one whom this man must seek and obey. This man is strange in terms of John's gospel. We're left empty. We're just left hanging. We don't even know if the man obeyed Jesus. This man seems to do nothing and have no response. And so the question for us is, what, why does John include this story? If John's wanting to show us example upon example of people who encounter Jesus, who understand who Jesus is, who see Jesus' power and his identity, and who respond in faith, why is this example here where Jesus heals this man with really no understanding of who he is and no engagement in terms of faith? Now in in the narrative, we see that the Jews pick up on this idea of Jesus and the man working on the Sabbath, and that causes problems and is really the the driving force for the rest of the book of John where the Jews seek to kill Jesus, and there's a a repeated engagement around the Sabbath. We'll leave that for a moment. We might come back to it another time. But Jesus also uses this time to speak to the Jews about something that I believe has relevance to try and answer this question as to why this account is here. And so that's where I want to show you another one thing from verse 19 to 29, this discussion that Jesus has. And I just want to point out one, one aspect. I want you to notice Christ's claim of authority. Look at verse 21. "For as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, so also the Son gives life to whom He will." You see, Jesus is saying that it's Him who decides who gets life and who doesn't. And we saw this at work with with this account of the lame man at the pool of Bethesda, because Jesus asks the lame man what his will is, "Do you want to be made well?" and then promptly kind of ignores his will and says, "Well, I want you to be well." Can you see that? He doesn't wait for the man to recognize that Jesus is the life-giver and ask for life. He just gives life. He just heals the man. And so in a a book, the book of John, that is so full of Jesus interacting with people who believe Him, we're where we could be tempted to conclude that Jesus only has power where He is wanted, only has power to engage and deal with people who respond to Him in faith, we see Jesus in this account of the lame man being healed exercising His authority to heal to whomever He wishes, whenever He wishes. And it's not only the power to give life that rests in Jesus's hands, it's the authority of judgment, because that's what he goes on to talk about next in verse 22. "For the Father judges no one but has given all judgment to the Son." This is courtroom language. This is Jesus claiming to have authority to be the one before whom people will stand who will make a declaration of judgment over their life. He is saying that He will be the one deciding on the eternal fate of all human beings. And so He's claiming this incredible authority, this incredible power, not only to have the power of life and death over whomever He wishes, but also the power to judge guilty or not guilty. And so our next question should be, well, if Jesus has this level of authority, then how, who is He going to judge and how, and who is He going to give life to and how? Because we've just seen that it's not dependent upon their belief so much. He's able to do this to whomever He wishes. Who is He going to do it to? Well in verse 24, Jesus lays out for us exactly who it is that He wills to give life to, and who He wishes to judge as not guilty. In verse 24, he says, "Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes Him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment but has passed from death to life." This is what Jesus has decided. Jesus, who has the power of life and death in His hands, who has the authority to judge the living and the dead, has decided that whoever hears His word and believes Him who sent me has eternal life, that whoever believes on Him will not come into judgment, but will be judged as not guilty when he stands before the judge. Which is an incredible thing. Our God and savior, the creator of the universe, is willing to save all those who simply hear his word and believe. That is a a stark contrast to every other religion in this world. Every other religion says God will judge those who are worthy. God will judge those who do the right acts of penance. God will judge those who do the right acts of sacrifice. In every other religion, it's based on you and what you are able to do. But Christianity says, Jesus says, your eternal destiny is based on your hearing and believing. That's it. Think of what what power and authority Jesus must have in order to give life and the verdict of not guilty to those who just believe in Him. But then in contrast to John chapter 4, where the Jesus engages with the Samaritan woman and gets her to the point of realizing that she needs the living water from Him, to the point where she actually says to Him, "Give me this living water," Jesus in John 5 doesn't wait for the man's response. The man says, "I can't do it," and Jesus just says, "Be healed. Get up, take up your bed, and walk." You know, by placing the miracle of the of the healing of the unresponsive invalid in this context, I think Jesus is vividly demonstrating His authority over all people, believer or not. And I think we're invited by John to wonder, what happened to this man? Where will he be on this day when Jesus raises the dead? Will he be among those who heard the voice of Jesus but were apathetic, ignoring Christ's call to come away from his sin, to repent and believe, and live in the service of his King? Will he be among one of the many who heard about Jesus, even encountered Jesus, who had every opportunity to know that Jesus is the Lord, Judge, and Savior of the world, but who will be scrambling at that time, when he's called from his grave to appear before the judgment throne, knowing that it's too late? Will he be one of those who despair, knowing that his eyes had seen the Judge? His ears had heard the call of mercy, but he had ignored the summons, and now he will face the just condemnation that will be handed down? Will that be his fate? Or did he go from meeting with Jesus and consider, who was this man whose words had power to raise me to new life? Who was this man who commanded me to sin no more that nothing worse may come upon me? Did he hear the words of Christ to go and sin no more? And was he gripped with the enormity of his sinful state? Did he seek the mercy that is found in Christ? Did he follow Jesus so that he might hear more of the words that He would speak, to hear more of this man who has such authority and power? Did he believe in Christ? Because if he did, as as John Newton wrote in the in the next verse of his hymn, then the appearing of the Lord Jesus would feel very different to him. But to those who have confessed, loved, and served the Lord below, He will say, "Come near, ye blessed, see the kingdom I bestow. You forever shall My love and glory know." But the ambiguity of this man's response to Christ should draw us into this story and to consider a more important question than what's his fate, but to consider what is your fate going to be. For you and I are in the same position as this man. You have met Jesus and seen His power in this account in John's gospel. It's been read in your hearing today, and you've heard it. You've seen Jesus speak the word and bring new life to a lame man's legs, and you've heard Jesus's promise and Jesus's warning. You have received the letter from the Judge, telling you of the coming court case where your life will be judged. And you've been told of the way to find safety in the face of this justice. I know I'm laboring this point, but it's because we don't think about it. We don't stop. And I get it, I'm busy too. And it's not, I don't wake up every day and think, "Ah, one day I'm going to stand before my maker and he will judge my life." I don't stop every day and think, "One day my neighbor's going to stand before his maker and he will judge his life." My children are going to stand before their maker and He will judge their life. I want you to stop and let the reality of this coming judgment sink in this morning. See it as a hymn writer John Cennick wrote of this day in 1750, he said, "Every island, sea, and mountain, earth and heaven, flee away. All his enemies confounded, hear the trump proclaim his day. Come to judgment, come to judgment, stand before the Son of man." That day will come. You will be called. Are you ready? When you awake from your grave to the voice of Jesus and you see Him seated on His throne, high and lifted up, and the multitudes of every eternal soul that's ever been made standing before Him, what will your heart do? Will you despair? As you consider how you ignored Christ's call? Will you shrink before his justice as you think on how you scorned his offers of forgiveness and mercy? Of how you heard him call to you and say, "Repent and believe and I'll give you eternal life," and you went home and you said, "I don't care. I want to live my life." "I'm going to ignore what that preacher said." Will you call on the mountains to fall on you so that you can avoid his piercing gaze? In the 1200s, some some Christians wrote of this, "Full of tears," they said, "and full of dread, is that day that wakes the dead, calling all with solemn blast to be judged for all their past." Your life laid out before the creator God. All those times when you knew in your heart what it was to obey the creator and you disobeyed because you thought, "I want to do it my way." Laid out like a scroll. Not just your actions, not just your words, but the thoughts and intents and motives of your heart, all laid out before his gaze. You know, those who are hardened in sin can have an attitude towards God where they think, "You know what? I'll deal with that when it comes." You know, when God stand, when God calls me before Him, I'm going to fight. I'm going to say, "How how can you command me, God, when you've done all this and that, and you've run the world in a way that I don't think you should have?" And do you know what God says to those who lift up their fists against him in defiance because of the judgment that He's going to pour out on them? We read about it in Joel. He says, "Bring it on." Did you hear that in Joel 3? He says to the wicked nations, "Go, make your swords, make your spears, come and wage war against me." "Come, because I'm seated in my judgment seat, and my voice will shake the earth. And I will judge the living and the dead." The Lord roars from Zion and utters His voice from Jerusalem, and the heavens and the earth quake. There is no fighting the Lord of glory. So will you hear His call today? Will you hear Him ask you if you would be made well from your sin and cleansed from your guilt? Because if you do, you will have your lawyer. You will have your case sorted out and done because the very next line in Joel 3 says, "The Lord is a refuge to his people, a stronghold to the people of Israel." And those who have heard and received and believed in the call of Jesus Christ will see Him seated on the throne with wounds in His hands that paid the penalty that they deserve. And they will not fear on that day. They will know that their life is to be rolled out before him and they will say, "Go for it because I know my savior lives and in the end I will stand with him." And the dear tokens of his passion on his dazzling body will be there, the cause of endless exaltation to his ransomed worshipers. Because the Lord is a refuge to his people and to those who hear His call. Jesus is the judge of the earth. Life and death are in His hands and He will call you to appear before His throne. Are you ready? Let's pray.