Do You Want to Be Healed?

John chapter five, verse one through seven.

You'll see it on the screen.

"After this there was a feast of the Jews." What that means is there was t- a ton of people in Jerusalem.

Like, think like, I don't know, New Orleans at Mardi Gras.

Like everybody's going.

The city is packed.

"And Jesus went up to Jerusalem.

Now there is in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate," the Sheep Gate is where they would bring in all the sheep for the temple sacrifice.

And so here you have the Sheep Gate.

You have Jesus, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, walking through the Sheep Gate to the lost sheep of Israel.

This is like, like full of symbolic meaning.

"By the Sheep Gate, a pool in Aramaic called Bethesda." This is Bet, which is house in Hebrew, from the root word kesed.

It means house of loving kindness.

This place, Bethesda.

Which has five roofed colonnades.

So here, Jesus, the sacrificial Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, walks into the house of loving kindness, and in these lay a multitude of invalids, blind, lame, and paralyzed.

A multitude of invalids, blind, lame, and paralyzed.

Now, in this day and age, in John, chapter nine, we know this, that when people would see someone blind, lame, or paralyzed, they, as they did to the man born blind, said to Jesus in John nine, "Uh, Rabbi, let's ask a question.

Who sinned first, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" They thought if you had a, a physical difficulty, disability, a, a malformity, that they're like, "Oh, that's because of sin." It was a prosperity gospel.

They're like, "Oh, the reason why the person's like that is either the parents sinned or they sinned, and that's why that guy's blind." So they...

This would've been a place of great shame, of being ostracized, where it's like these people would have gathered and nobody would have gone there.

The Pharisees wouldn't have g- They're like, "That's the gathering of sinners.

The multitude of invalids is also the multitude of sinners.

That's why they're like that, 'cause they didn't fear and follow Yahweh." And Jesus just rolls up.

I mean, they're not just like him.