Smoodock's Blog

One of the tragedies I’ve discovered and had to deal with in my walk with Jesus is that many folks, even good respectable people, don’t seek the truth. Instead, they take comfort in believing they already know the truth, and they don’t wish to be confused with the facts. Folks simply want to believe they’ve been taught the truth as a child or as an adult by folks they love and respect. They don’t want to believe that **they** could possibly believe a lie and have come under the influence of false doctrine. Perhaps, one of the most enlightening and life changing experiences for me was to discover my faith was overcome by a man, and, indeed, I did fall for his false doctrine: hook, line and sinker. I know how easy it is to believe a lie and how difficult it is to embrace the truth in the wake of persecution.

After the man, whom Jesus healed (John 5:8-9), went to the Jewish authorities and told them it was Jesus who had made him whole (John 5:15), those same authorities began to persecute Jesus and sought to destroy him (John 5:16). We never hear of the man-made-whole again. For the rest of the chapter the narrator of John’s Gospel records a discussion between Jesus and the Jewish authorities, but keep in mind that we are speaking of embracing Christ for the first time and entering the Kingdom of God, perceiving it for the first time (cp. John 3:3). John 5 unveils how a man, who is completely helpless, is born again of the Spirit and begins to discover his new life in Christ. The men of authority, whom we discover in John’s narrative, can be understood in two ways. First, they are folks in authority who would seek to destroy the new believer’s faith, because their own authority seems threatened and must be defended at any cost.

Secondly, they may be understood as our inner authorities, our own five senses, which cause us to doubt our new birth. How so? It is because, in ruling all of what we’ve come to understand about this world (1Corinthians 2:11), our five senses consider whatever they can’t see, hear, touch, taste or smell to be foolishness and we, through considering what those five gates tell us, seek to destroy our new faith by doubting what it tells us (1Corinthians 2:9, 14).

Consider for a moment that there is a striking similarity between the man-made-whole of John 5 and the water-made-wine in John 2. At the wedding feast they had no wine (John 2:3). That is (spiritually speaking), they had no behavior-changing (life-changing) spirit. In John 5 it is the man who was impotent and couldn’t walk (John 5:7), and he was as a dead man (Ephesians 2:1-2). The mother of Jesus (John 2:3) represents the heart of man, or that part of us that is willing to confess we are helpless and in desperate need. The man-made-whole confessed that he, too, was helpless and in desperate need (John 5:7). In both instances the facts were laid bare, and anything that could be done was left completely to the mercy of Jesus.

Jesus’ mother yielded her will and her abilities, vis-à-vis her heart, to Jesus’ will (John 2:5, 7-8), and the man-made-whole obeyed Jesus’ command to ‘rise, take up your bed and walk’ (John 5:8). The governor of the feast (John 2:8) represents the authorities within man: sight, hearing, taste, scent and touch. The governor wasn’t told that the wine he tasted was once water, so he pronounced the wine good, in fact, the best in quality. In chapter five, however, the Jewish authorities of John 5:10 were told what was done (John 5:11-13) and by whom (John 5:15). On the one hand, we discover what occurs when all authorities submit to the will of Christ (John 2), but, on the other hand, we also see what occurs when the physical clashes with the spiritual (John 5).