Look to Jesus

John 5:2-9 Now there is in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate a pool, which is called in Hebrew, Bethesda, having five porches. In these lay a great multitude of sick people, blind, lame, paralyzed, waiting for the moving of the water. For an angel went down at a certain time into the pool and stirred up the water; then whoever stepped in first, after the stirring of the water, was made well of whatever disease he had. Now a certain man was there who had an infirmity thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there, and knew that he already had been in that condition a long time, He said to him, “Do you want to be made well?” The sick man answered Him, “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.” Jesus said to him, “Rise, take up your bed and walk.” And immediately the man was made well, took up his bed, and walked.

 

This incident in the Bible has always helped me to look beyond the seemingly obvious source and to the root source in spiritual reality. Here was a crippled man waiting for a angel to stir the water in the pool of Bethesda, which produced a supernatural miracle physical healing of the affected, but seemingly only the first one to get in. God incarnate (in the flesh) asks this man the obvious question, if he wanted to be well. The man replies that there is nobody to help him and someone else beats him into the healing pool every time the water stirs. Jesus doesn’t say, “Let me help you into this pool to make you well.” The Lord supernaturally heals the crippled man on the spot, next to the healing pool. The water wasn’t the power or the source of healing and restoration; the “great physician” Jesus was. The contrast of what we put our faith and trust in is so swayed by the material world that we live in, that the unseen reality can so easily be missed. Jesus is truly the great first cause and source. 

 

Mark 4:41 “Who can this be, that even the wind and the sea obey Him?!”

 

Though we live, move and have our being in a physical existence, the natural is under the authority of nature’s God; the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them. Look not at nor trust in the water, but to the One who walks on the water, the Christ, the Son of the living God; the Way – Jesus, the Savior of the world.

 

In Christ, Brian