How to Be Healed and Find Wholeness in Despair

In John 5, we find an amazing incident in the ministry of Jesus where we discover a picture that reveals the true and underlying condition of the nation and why religious people rejected him. When we develop a distorted view of who God is, we have a difficult time receiving what God wants to do and bring into our lives. In John’s telling of a paralyzed man, we discover someone who had given into despair and hopelessness. Yet, no one is beyond a miracle. The response to this incredible healing by the religious leaders was indifference toward the miracle and antagonism toward Jesus. They focused on a wrong understanding of God’s purpose for the Sabbath. Merrill Tenney writes: “The law was ‘holy and righteous and good’ (Rom. 7:12), and its requirements of the observance of the Sabbath was intended to provide men with a pause in the week’s exhausting toil. When the regulation became a barrier to the performance of that which is inherently right, revision was necessary.” One of the key reasons for the hostility that Jesus experienced by his opponents was their fixation on the ‘tradition of the elders,’ which was their interpretation of the law, in which they, as F. F. Bruce points out, “distinguished thirty-nine categories of work which might not be undertaken on the Sabbath; the thirty-ninth of these was the carrying of a load from one dwelling to another. By this standard, the man’s action in carrying his pallet home was a violation of the sabbath law. What Jesus embarked on was a challenge to the unhealthy religious patterns that had developed over time. The nature of a healthy spiritual life is one of continued renewal and growth in our relationship with God.