To Fast or Not to Fast, Parables of the Garments and Wineskins, Jesus Heals a Man at the Pool of Bethesda

We're working out today with all of this going on. Very beautiful special music. That was really, really nice. Certainly a beautiful song, and we certainly do worship a great and awesome God. We're going to learn a bit more about that God today. Paula, did you get to get the...

OK, all right. Kind of just got her hands full for some reason here.

I don't know why Sandra can't sing and take care of Walker at once, but thanks very much for that special music. That was very, very beautiful. OK. All right, now we're cooking. As you can see from this title, we're going to cover quite a bit of material today. The title of today's study is The Gospels. To Fast or Not to Fast? Parables of the Garments and Wineskins, and Jesus Heals a Man at the Pool of Bethesda. We're continuing with our study today on the Gospels. Last time we left off with the calling and background of Matthew, the tax collector, and the historical and cultural background of what tax collectors were like, how they were viewed, and so on. The overall theme of that was Jesus Christ called Matthew to be a disciple, or a talmid, or a student, one who would strive to become, like his master, his rabbi, his teacher in every way. And that was the goal of every talmid, every disciple. And it is our goal as well as followers of Jesus Christ, whom he has called. And that is why we are here. That's why we gather here together on the Sabbath day. And that is why we are going through this in-depth study of the Gospels to learn more about him, our rabbi, our teacher, and his teaching, so that we may become like him in every way. And now we come to today. We'll be beginning on the bottom of page 21 of your Harmony. So if you'll take that out, we'll begin there. And with the section under the heading, Jesus defends his disciples for feasting rather than fasting. And although it appears that this is a continuation of where we just left off last time with the banquet that Matthew has hosted for Jesus Christ, I think this is actually a different occasion for several reasons.

Note, first of all, that the cast of characters is a little bit different from what we covered in the top part of the page there. Now we have a new group of people introduced who are the disciples of John the Baptizer. They weren't mentioned at all in the earlier sections that we covered last time. They are mentioned here in Matthew 9 in verse 14 and Mark 2 in verse 18, as you can see from those columns there. But they are nowhere mentioned in what has taken place before. And now the other tax collectors and sinners that were referred to before are no longer mentioned. They're apparently gone from the story. So the characters are a bit different indicating that this is a different event, a later event that takes place at some undeterminate time later.

Note also here that, as it says in Matthew verse 14, that the disciples of John came to him, which indicates that again this is a different location or a different event because, again, earlier everybody is right there with Jesus at this banquet that Matthew is putting on.

And also Mark says that the Pharisees also came to him, whereas earlier they were again all there together at the banquet. So these little subtle hints in their clues indicate that this is probably a different and later event altogether. To say for Mark to write that they came to him, what it would indicate, since they were already there earlier, that this is a different event. Mark just would not say that they came to him if they were already there. And this we're talking about the same occasion as earlier. So if this is a different event, and I believe it is, why do Matthew, Mark, and Luke all put it in the same sequence, all following the events of Matthew's calling in that banquet? Well, I think it's for two reasons. Most obvious is probably chronologically this is the order in which events happen. But I think they also put it there for reasons of theme and story flow. And the gospel writers do that. They don't always arrange their material chronologically. They arrange it according to themes and story flow, bigger or larger pictures that they're trying or stories that they're trying to convey there. And what is the theme that we covered last time of the calling of Matthew? I didn't emphasize it at that time. I was more focused on the details of what it meant for Matthew to be called like that.

But it's also about Jesus calling disciples. And in the larger sense of who he calls, which as we covered last time was him not calling the righteous but sinners to repentance.

So the overall theme is who Jesus Christ calls to be his followers, or who God the Father calls, and what he is calling them to and to become. That's the overall theme that now carries over into the sections we'll be talking about today. The section above ends with Matthew, Mark, and Luke all quoting Jesus as saying, I did not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance. In other words, he's not calling those whom the Pharisees or the religious authorities of the day would have considered those most likely to be the successful followers or students of the rabbis. He's dealing with another type of people, and that's what is covered in the two sections we'll talk about today. So we'll pick it up now, beginning in Mark 2, and since Mark has more detail than Matthew and Luke, we'll start reading with Mark's count, Mark 2 verses 18 through 20, and then we'll go back and dissect it. So it says, the disciples of John and of the Pharisees were fasting. There's another indication that it's not talking about earlier because earlier what's going on. It's a banquet. People don't fast at a banquet. There's another clue that this is a different event.

Then they came and said to him, to Jesus, Why did the disciples of John and the Pharisees fast? But your disciples do not fast. Now, where does this comment come from? Is this saying that Jesus's disciples never fasted? Never fasted at all? No, that's not what this is talking about because Jesus did clearly teach his followers to fast. Let's notice Matthew 6 and verses 16 through 18, a little bit later in our story. But Jesus is talking to his followers, and he says, Moreover, when you fast, not if you fast, but when you fast, so they were expected to fast, do not be like the hypocrites with a sad countenance. For they disfigure their faces, that they may appear to men to be fasting. Assuredly, I say to you, they have their reward.

But you, when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, so that you do not appear to men to be fasting, but to your Father who is in the secret place, and your Father who sees in secret will reward you openly. So Jesus clearly taught his followers, including us, because we are his followers, to fast, but to do it in a right spirit, a right spirit of humility and not for show, as is indicated here in Jesus's words. People who fasted and went around, you know, looking obviously like they're miserable, they're in suffering because they're fasting. That's not what we're to do. We're to, as Christ said, you know, clean ourselves up, wash our faces, don't appear to others as though we were fasting. So what is going on here? Why do they even bring up this point to Jesus regarding his disciples? Well, to understand this, again, we need to go back and look at the historical and cultural context. In the first century, it was very common for very strict religious Jews, like the Pharisees, to fast two days a week. Two days a week. That was done on Monday and Thursday. It wasn't a full 24-hour fast, sundown to sundown. It was only during the daylight portions of the day. But still, it was referred to as fasting twice a week.

Does this sound familiar? Well, it should because there's a passage over in Luke 18 where Christ is talking about two men who went up to the temple to pray. Let's read about it here. Luke 18 verses 10 through 12. Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a text collector.

The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself. I like this. He's praying to himself, not to God.

God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this text collector. And notice this, verse 12. This is what I wanted to point out. I fast twice a week.

I give tithes of all that I possess. So here we see Jesus in this parable of the Pharisee and the text collector referring to the fact that the Pharisee is fasting twice a week. And again, this was quite common. Jesus is using a real-life example that the people of his day would have been familiar with. So this is what the Pharisees, at least some of them, maybe not all, because again, as I mentioned before, not all Pharisees were alike. A lot of it depended their practices on who they considered their rabbi or their supreme religious authority. But in this case, certainly the Pharisees coming to Jesus here and asking him about fasting are among these who are fasting often, at least twice a week like this. So their question to Jesus in coming to him is, since Jesus is gaining stature and a reputation as a great rabbi and teacher, why doesn't he command his followers to fast two days and a week so that his disciples can be as righteous as they are? That's really the underlying theme. Why aren't your disciples as good as we are?

There, just reading between the lines. So Jesus then responds back with his answer here in Mark 2 and verse 19. And Jesus said to them, Can the friends of the bridegroom fast while the bridegroom is with them? As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast. But the days will come when the bridegroom will be taken away from them and then they will fast in those days.

There are a couple of interesting things here in his response that we kind of miss if we're not reading it carefully. Notice, first of all, that his response does not put them down. He's not being deliberately antagonistic to them. It's a polite response, but he simply points out that there are appropriate times to fast and inappropriate times to fast. And in the first century, it was well understood by everybody in the culture that you did not fast during a wedding occasion or wedding feast. A wedding feast typically lasted about a week long in that society and culture of that day. And after all, a wedding feast was a time to rejoice.

It was a time to be happy and fasting would take away from the joy of that occasion. So you simply didn't fast during this week-long wedding feast. This is what Christ is pointing out here. That is not an appropriate time to fast when there's a wedding feast going on. So Jesus is saying that that this is a time, not that there's a literal wedding feast going on, don't get me wrong, but He's using that as an example to show there are times to fast and times when you should not fast.

Fasting was often associated with mourning. We see that as the same throughout the Bible when we talk about fasting. And this is the association that Jesus is drawing here, that contrasting the celebration of a bride and a groom at a wedding feast with mourning. You just did not mourn at a wedding. A wedding was a time to be happy. So nobody would mourn at a wedding because it just was not done. It was not appropriate. As for the symbolism of Jesus being the bridegroom and other allusions to marriage in the Bible, I gave a sermon if you want to listen to it back in November two years ago that's on the denver.ucg.org website that goes into detail about various wedding customs and practices of those days. And I discuss that in great detail. I don't have time to go through that again today. But you can go back and listen to that again. It's from November of 2012 if you want to listen to that. We'd like to point out a couple of other things going through here. Notice verse 20 here. The days will come when the bridegroom will be taken away from them.

And what is going on here is that Jesus is stating, or at least very strongly hinting, as to how his ministry is going to end. It's going to end with him as the bridegroom not going away but being taken away. Taken away by force to be crucified. In other words, we see that here, quite early in Christ's ministry, he's already dropping these hints of what is to happen, how his ministry is going to end. So it's quite sobering there. And this, of course, is a reference to his crucifixion and death. But let's back up a little bit now and say, what is his overall point about fasting? Why do we fast as Christians, as followers of Jesus Christ? Why do we fast? Well, I think the answer we hopefully all know is that we fast to humble ourselves, to draw nearer to God. That is the purpose, the point of fasting, to humble ourselves and draw nearer to God. Now, why did Christ say that his disciples did not necessarily fast at that time? Well, what was their situation? Do they need to draw nearer to God? Well, think about it.

They are right there with God in the flesh 24-7. They're with God constantly. They don't need to necessarily fast to draw nearer to God because they're with him. He's right there as God in the flesh, Jesus Christ is. You can't get much closer to God than being with him 24-7, walking and spending time with him day in, day out. So there was not a great need for his disciples to fast at that time. But later, as he points out here in verse 20, the time would come when he would be taken away and then they would need to fast there. And again, now moving forward, this segues into a deeper discussion of what it means to be a follower or a disciple or a talamite of Jesus Christ with the parables of the new and old garments and new and old wineskins. Continuing on now, let's flip over to page 22 and pick it up there. And we'll read from Luke's accounts. Luke has the most details. So let's read through that. Luke 5 verses 36 through 39.

Then Jesus spoke a parable to them, No one puts a piece from a new garment on an old one, otherwise the new makes a tear, and also the piece that was taken out of the new does not match the old. And no one puts new wine into old wineskins, or else the new wine will burst the wineskins and be spilled, and the wineskins will be ruined. But new wine must be put into new wineskins, and both are preserved. And no one, having drunk old wine, immediately desires new, for he says, the old is better. And one of the study questions I sent out regarding this is, what is the common Christian, quote-unquote, explanation of these parables, of the old and new garments and the old and new wineskins? Anybody want to answer that? Anybody come out of a background where you heard the explanation of this? Well, the answer most people give about that is, well, it's just clearly talking about all the old covenant laws and so on are done away, that being a Christian cannot mix this new life with the old lifestyle, trying to live according to those laws, and so on. That's the common interpretation of that, that you just have to throw away all that obsolete old stuff because it's no longer relevant to us as Christians. You just can't mix the two. But if you look at this carefully, Jesus Christ's own words totally blow that idea out of the water because his whole point about the old garment isn't to throw away the old garment.

The whole point there is how do you fix the old garment so that it can be preserved?

There. And same thing in verse 38 with the new wine and the old wineskins. The point there is that both are preserved there. So it's not a matter of Christ saying, you need to throw away the old. No. His point is entirely different from that. So with just a minimum of thought, we can see that the common interpretation of these parables is way off the mark.

So what is the point? What is the point about this? Let's explore this a little bit more. First of all, he talks about repairing an old garment, and he says you don't cut a piece out of a new garment and sew it onto an old garment because you ruined both of them in that process. You've ruined your new garment by cutting a patch out of it, and you're ruining the old one because you take that patch and put it in, and as you wash the garment, the new patch is going to shrink, and it's going to rip and tear the old garment. It's not going to fit right, and it's going to create a problem, so you end up ruining both of them. There. And then he uses a similar analogy with a wine skin. And for those of you not familiar with wine skins, here's what a wine skin looked like. Wine skins were generally made out of the skin of a goat. They would scrape off all the hair, all the flesh clinging to it, and so on. And then they would sew the openings for the legs and where the head had been taken off, and so on. They would sew that shut so they could hold liquids there. And these were commonly used as containers to hold liquids in those days. Small amounts of liquid you would keep in pottery jars and stone vessels and things like that, but large amounts of liquid, several gallons that you needed to take somewhere, would be commonly transported in a wine skin like this. And when you had new wine, because the new wine had not fermented yet, you would pour it into a new wine skin, because a new wine skin was somewhat flexible. And as the new wine fermented and started releasing gases and so on, it would expand. And the new wine skin would and could expand with the fermentation process there, so that eventually it would be stretched out. There, as Christ is talking about this, it would stretch without bursting. But if you put that new wine into an old wine skin that's been used, it's already stretched to its maximum, and the new wine starts fermenting again, what's going to happen? It's going to burst, it's going to rip or tear the old wine skin, and then both are ruined. Your wine skin is ruined because it's got a hole in it from the fermentation there. And the wine itself will then spill out of the hole and be spilled out onto the ground or the floor, and you've lost both of them. So what's his point? What is the lesson that he's given here that applies to us? Well, again, one of the study questions I sent out is, what is the context for these parables? Because it's in the context so we understand the real meaning. And if you don't consider the context, you can come up with all kinds of unsound interpretations.

So what is the context? Again, it's what it means to be a follower of Jesus Christ, what it means to be a disciple. So how do these two parables relate to that? I think there are actually several different interpretations that could apply here, but they all revolve around what it means to be a true follower of Jesus Christ. And that, to me, is summed up quite well in 2 Corinthians 5 in verse 17. A familiar scripture to us. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.

All things have passed away. Behold, all things have become new. And we understand this from the symbolism of baptism. What happens in baptism? What is the symbolism there? The symbolism is, we go down into a watery grave, we are buried there, and then we rise up out of that water as a new person, as a new creation, as a new person with Jesus Christ living again within us, a new person alive in Jesus Christ. And what happens to the old person? The old person is dead and buried and left there in that symbolic watery grave of baptism. So this is the kind of transformation that Jesus Christ is talking about here that his disciples will need to undergo, to go through, to truly become a disciple. Now, who is Christ talking to here? Who is it who comes with these questions to him? Well, again, it's the Pharisees and some of the disciples of John the Baptizer. Now, what was the problem with the Pharisees that we see again and again in the Gospels? Well, we see a lot of problems, but just to kind of briefly sum it up, we see that they try their best to obey God, which is right and good. That's the part that ought to be preserved. They are doing the best they know how, under their belief system, to obey God, to please him, to serve him. But the problem was that their minds were like old wineskins. They are hard, they are firm, they are no longer stretchable, they are no longer flexible, they can't take and absorb new knowledge, new truth of the kind of teaching that Jesus Christ brought to them.

They couldn't understand and incorporate the new truth and the new way of living that Jesus Christ came to teach about there. He was revealing a new way of life and new knowledge that required God's Holy Spirit to properly discern it and to understand it and to apply it and to live by it and put it into practice. And with rare exceptions, the Pharisees just couldn't do that. Some did. Paul was a Pharisee. Again, we read from the book of Acts of other Pharisees who were called near the church. But for the most part, they couldn't do that. They couldn't make that mental change, that mental adjustment in their thinking that they needed to because they thought they already knew it all. They thought they already had it all and didn't realize that spiritually speaking, they were poor and blind and naked and just didn't realize what they were lacking. They rejected the new wine that Jesus Christ came to offer them. It's interesting that wine is a symbol of what?

In the Gospels. A symbol of the New Covenant. It's one of the two signs of the New Covenant that Jesus Christ came with. And with their rigid mindset, they were like the old garment that you couldn't patch or an old wine skin that is so that simply is not flexible enough to accept new wine.

And that's not a problem limited just to the Pharisees either. It's a problem common to all humanity. The majority of people who come in contact with the truth reject the new teaching and the new way of life and the new life that Jesus Christ brings. To put it simply, they know everything that they want to know. They're not interested in learning more things. They already have their own religious ideas and nobody's going to tell them any different. They're comfortable where they are and they simply don't want anybody to rock the boat. To tell them they need to change. To tell them they need to observe the Sabbath or they need to tithe. They need to start keeping the feast days. They need to take off work to do those kind of things. They're just not willing to make those changes in their lives that God requires. They're comfortable again where they are and they're not going to rock the boat. That's the common reaction to most people to learning about God's truth. To be a true follower of Jesus Christ, his whole point in these parables, is that we must have a humble and converted mind, an attitude that is receptive to God's leading us.

Must be humble and converted to obeying God and doing whatever He requires of us to be totally surrendered to Him. That is again what it means to be a disciple because a disciple gave up everything to follow his teacher, his rabbi, or in our case, Jesus Christ. He gave up everything for us and he expects us to be willing to give up everything in return to follow Him. That is the point of these two parables here. Any questions on any of that before we shift gears and go on to a different topic? Okay, good. Okay, we'll continue on then. We'll move on now to the next event that is recorded in the Gospels, which is the healing of the man at the Bethesda pool there in Jerusalem.

We'll read through this first here at the bottom of page 22 and then come back and comment on it.

So John 5 beginning in verse 1, we'll read through verse 18.

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 which is called in Hebrew Bethesda having five porches.

In these lay a great multitude of sick people blind and 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 had 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.

And Jesus said to him, Rise, take up your bed, and walk. And immediately the man was made well, took up his bed, and walked. And that day was the Sabbath. The Jews therefore said to him, who was cured, It is the Sabbath. It is not lawful for you to carry your bed.

He answered them, He who made me well said to me, Take up your bed and walk. Then they asked him, Who is the man who said to you, Take up your bed and walk? But the one who was healed did not know who it was for Jesus had withdrawn, a multitude being in that place. Afterward Jesus found him in the temple and said to him, See, you have been made well. Sin no more, lest a worse thing come upon you. The man departed and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had made him well. For this reason, the Jews persecuted Jesus and sought to kill him because he had done these things on the Sabbath. So now let's go back and dissect what is happening here and what we can learn from it. First of all, this is after this, there was a feast of the Jews. One of the study questions I sent out last night is, Why is this called a feast of the Jews? It is called that because, again, who is John writing to? John is writing to a more universal audience, not a Jewish audience like Matthew's Gospel is. As we covered back in some of the background of the Gospels in the beginning of this series, each of the writers wrote to slightly different audiences. They are universal in the sense that everyone benefits from them. But again, there are hints and clues throughout that they are written to specific audiences. John has written to a universal audience quite different in the way he treats and explains things from Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

This is one example of that because in the Greco-Roman world of that time, there were all kinds of feasts. The Greeks and the Romans and the other pagans had all kinds of feasts and festivals to their different gods and goddesses. So John is making clear that this was a different feast. This was a feast kept by the Jewish people. Why does he mention that? He is mentioning it to explain why Jesus is in Jerusalem. He is not up in Galilee at this time. He is down in Jerusalem. This is why Jesus has gone to Jerusalem. He is doing it in accordance to God's instructions in Leviticus 23 and Deuteronomy 16, about the three times a year that they were supposed to go to keep the feasts in Jerusalem. John doesn't give all of that background. He's just kind of giving a shorthand for it here. Continuing on, verse 2, now there is in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate. This is on the north side of the Temple Mount, so called the Sheep Gate because the sheep that were to be sacrificed were brought in through the Sheep Gate into the Temple where they would then be sacrificed.

So there is in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate a pool, which is called in Hebrew Bethesda, having five portraits. Here's a map. This isn't shown on your map of the Temple in the back of your Harmony. So I put this one here to give you an explanation of what we're looking at here. This map is oriented with north off to the right. This is the Temple Mount here at the bottom middle. Here's the city of Jerusalem. Right in this same period, give or take a few years, the city was expanded quite a bit to the north. The city walls expanded out.

And that's what this is indicating here. It's a new part of the city, so it's not that inhabited at this point. So here's the Temple. This is the north side. And the sheep would have been brought in somewhere. That gate has not been found yet. It's under there's about 30 to 50 feet of rubble and new construction in that area there. So archaeologists have not been able to dig down in there. However, there is this little rectangular structure right here, and that is the location of these pools here, or pool, the Bethesda Pool. It has been excavated, and this is the location of it in relation to the temple. So again, it is on the north side of the Temple Mount near the Sheep Gate as described here. Let's see here. So this pool has been been found, and I talked about this as an example in a sermon several months ago about archaeological proofs of the Bible. That it is a historical reliable document. And I talked about this as a specific example because for years people wondered about this pool having five porches.

Was this a five-sided pool? A structure shaped like the Pentagon? Well, for many years scholars and people read this and said that he's got to be making this up because there's been no five-sided structure found in the ancient world. That just was not done. So they assume that John or whoever they author of this Gospel, supposedly John, just simply made that up. And you'll find this as an example in some of the older criticisms of the Bible. Well, they don't criticize it that much anymore because 50 years ago in 1964 archaeologists were excavating in the area on the north side of the Temple Mount. And this is what they found. And it looks like a real mess. And it is. You go there and it's very difficult to interpret what's going on because, again, you're looking at a pit that's deeper than this room here with all kinds of intersecting walls and columns and layers of things like that. And very near this there's actually this very deep pit.

And if you look down in the bottom of it, you'll typically see water. I don't know if this is...

I can't really make it up, make it out right here. But when they were able to analyze the different periods of the architecture and the styles and construction methods and so on, they were able to dissect it and analyze what these different structures were. Because on the highest level was modern construction, then underneath that was an ancient Byzantine era church. Underneath that was a temple. And underneath that was the pools. These pools. And when they dug down and excavated that, they reconstructed it into a model that looks like this. This is a model.

But how many porches are there? Count them up. Four sides. One, two, three, four, and number five going down the middle of these pools. So here is a five-sided structure, five-porched structure as John calls it here. A porch, in this case being a roofed-over colonnade supported by columns. And this is what they found there when they did dig down to the first century there. So here was proof that John knew exactly what he was talking about. Now again, Bible critics before this was found would say that, again, he's just making this up. But keep in mind that Jerusalem was so totally destroyed in 70 AD when the Romans invaded there that the historian Josephus says the city was so leveled that you could walk through and not even tell that a city was there. Josephus tends to exaggerate a bit at some times, but his point was Jerusalem is so thoroughly destroyed. So by all the fighting and the battling there, that it was just a huge junk pile, we might say, a dump. It was just utterly destroyed, not a building left standing there. So if the Gospels were written, as some critics say, much later by somebody else and not the authors of the Gospels who they claim to be, how would a later writer know that there is a five-sided pool there on the north side of the Temple Mount, something that's buried under many feet of rubble? Well, obviously he wouldn't. Only somebody who was alive and lived there in the first century and saw that pool would know that it was there. And again, it took nearly 2,000 years for archaeologists to come along and verify exactly what John wrote in his Gospel there. So here is, again, clearer archaeological evidence of the accuracy and the truthfulness of the Bible.

So continuing back with John's account here, after the five porches in verse 3, he says, In these porches 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, is this literally what happened? Possibly so. It does sound a bit unusual for God to operate this way. And this, again, is one of the study questions that I sent out. Because you might check your Bibles that you have on yourself at home. And probably what you'll find is a number of them will have a little footnote saying that this latter part of verse 3, the waiting for the moving of the water, here in verse 4, don't appear in some of the earliest manuscripts of the Bible, some of the oldest ones that we have. So a number of people believe that this was added later by some scribe. So what's going on here? Let's look at a few possibilities. One possibility, again, is that this was inserted by a scribe later. Scribes didn't have typewriters, they didn't have computers, everything was copied by hand.

And we know there are errors in the ancient manuscripts where sometimes a scribe might skip a line there. One line may say Jesus told them and go on and explain that, and then a line down. It may say Jesus told them again, and they skip from the one phrase down to the other and leave out a line or two. There's documented evidence that that happens in some of the older manuscripts. There are also a few places where scribes have added things for John 5, 7, and 8 about the Trinity. Clearly a verse that's been added because it doesn't show up in any manuscripts of the Bible before, let's see, I want to say about the 1200s, 1300s, somewhere along in there. So there are differences in some of the older manuscripts, and this is an example of that.

So this is one possibility that this was something that was added. But maybe not, because a very good rule of thumb when looking at differences in ancient manuscripts is that this is an odd thing to add to a text. Because if you're a scribe and you're copying a biblical manuscript, making a copy of it, and that's pretty much all that the scribes did, that would be a very odd thing to add to the text. One rule of thumb when scholars find something odd in the text like there is which is more reasonable? That a scribe would add something that is odd to the text, or that they would take out something that was odd from the text.

Now what this means is that if a scribe is going to either add something or delete something, which is more likely to happen? Is a scribe more likely to add something that sounds strange, or is he more likely to delete something that to him sounds strange when he's copying the text? Well, I think the answer is obvious. He wants to make God look good, wants to make Jesus Christ look good. So odds are he's probably going to delete something if it sounds really odd to him, than to add something in that sounds odd. So based on that rule of thumb, it's counterintuitive, but generally scholars will prefer the harder reading, as it's called, of the text, not the easier reading, because odds are the harder reading, it's easy to take out something that is hard, it's not so much the other way around there. So the odds are that the scribe is going to take out something that sounds strange, rather than add something that sounds strange. So I think this is a good argument that, yes, this does belong in the text. There's other evidence we'll get into later, but that's something for you to think about. Another possibility here is that, John, is just saying that this is an explanation of what people thought was happening here.

In other words, there wasn't an angel literally stirring the waters in the pool, but that's what people thought was happening. And John includes this to explain why there are all these people, sick and ill and blind and lame and so on, gathered there. There is a parallel for this, down just a few verses in this same chapter. Verse 18 here, John explains something that isn't literally true, but he's giving it as an explanation for people's motivation. And there we read, "...therefore the Jews..." This is at the very end of the same account. "...therefore the Jews sought all the more to kill him..." To kill Jesus. "...because he not only broke the Sabbath..." Is John here saying that Jesus broke the Sabbath? No, of course not. Jesus never broke the Sabbath because had he broken the Sabbath, we would not have a Savior who sinned. We could not have a Savior who sinned. So we know that Jesus never violated the fourth commandment. What John is doing here in verse 18 is explaining the motivation for why the Jews wanted to kill him because according to them, to their rules, to their regulations, he broke the Sabbath. That's why they wanted to kill him. So here's a parallel where John is stating something that isn't literally true but giving it as an explanation for what people thought, what their motivations were there. Hope that's clear. So perhaps this is that John has put this in here. Not that an angel literally did this, but that that's what the people believed and that's why they are gathered there waiting for the waters to be stirred so they can jump in and be healed. Now a third possibility, I'm giving you three different options here to think about, a third possibility is that this is indeed exactly what was happening, as John describes it here. That from time to time an angel would stir the waters and the first person to get in would be healed of this. If this is the case, then you probably have the same reaction that I did when I read this. That is, why would God do it this way? Because again, it sounds very odd, very unusual for God to heal people like this. Why were only some people healed and then in a rather random way? Just happen to be whoever, not who was most deserving, not who was the sickest, not who was hurting or suffering the most, just whoever got in the pool first was healed. Why would God do it in such a random way? That's an obvious question, but let's let's think this through. Is there a way to make sense of God operating in this way? Let's first of all ask ourselves a question to address this. Did Jesus always heal the people he encountered? No, he didn't. There's a classic example of it.

Classic example of it here. There were times when he healed one person but didn't heal others.

There were times when he could not heal people because their lack of faith.

There were times when he said he wouldn't heal someone and later changed his mind and did heal, as requested. There were times like this when there are dozens of people, and we know I've covered this earlier, and discussing Jesus Christ's healings, that it's estimated that at that time, as many as possibly one in six people had had some serious chronic injury or disease that they were dealing with. It would have amounted in the tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people living in the Holy Land at that time. How many of those did Christ heal?

Hundreds, maybe up into the few thousands, but certainly not into the tens or hundreds of thousands. He just didn't. He did not heal everyone he encountered to. Had he done that, he could have spent his entire life 24-7 going around and healing people and never got to all of them. They're in the Holy Land. So there were times like this when he picks out one person apparently at random and heals that person. Just a matter, you might say, of being in the right place at the right time. On the whole, it seems like a rather random process of healing people who happen to be there at the right place at the right time. Perhaps what is going on here, in a way we can make sense of this, is that maybe at times God the Father randomly healed people at this pool to send a subtle but powerful message. Because what was the condition of Israel at that time? Israel in this context, meaning the remnant of Israel, mostly Jews, Judea from the Kingdom of Judah, who lived there at that time. What was their condition? They had been enslaved centuries before, taken away into Babylon to Assyria, had been scattered.

Remnants of the people had returned under Ezra and Nehemiah several centuries earlier.

For a while, they had had an independent Kingdom there. Then they had been conquered by different forces, by Assyrians, by the Greeks, by the Romans. They were now being ruled over by the Romans. They were expecting a Messiah. Did God just occasionally randomly heal people at this pool just to let them know that he was there? That he hadn't totally abandoned them?

That he was there? That he could and did at times heal and forgive people's sins?

Is it just a subtle reminder to them to not give up hope? That I will do what I promise, that I have not abandoned you? I am still here. I am still watching over you.

And don't completely give up hope, because they were in a pretty hopeless situation, as we see. That's why people were so intent and so excitedly expecting them, expecting a Messiah at that time, because they knew the prophecies.

And they believed those prophecies there. So perhaps this is what is going on, that God, from time to time, and frankly, you see this in the Church today. We don't see a lot of healings, but we do see them from time to time. Pretty powerful. Dramatic healings, but not a lot of them.

Was God dealing with them as he deals with the Church today?

Sometimes saying, yes, I will heal this person, but not now for this other person.

I think that makes sense. I think that is the way God operates. I think that's the way God, the Father, operated here at the pool of Bethesda. I think that's the way Jesus Christ operated, from what we see in the Gospel, sometimes healing people, but many times passing through towns and villages and not healing people there. I think that's the way he's operating in the Church today.

Again, this is a way I think we can make sense of it, that God isn't all that inconsistent, that this is a pattern throughout history of the way that he is operated.

There. So, it may also be another possibility here is that these healings may have been a type or a forerunner of what Jesus would do there on this day. We don't know when these healings at this pool supposedly started, that perhaps this had been going on for a few years, maybe a few decades, maybe a century or more there. However, this had been going on with these random healings, maybe that was a type or a forerunner or a symbol somehow of pointing forward to the day, the very day, this day we're reading about, when Jesus would come there and pick a person out at random and heal him. Perhaps that's what is going on, because we know many, many things in the Bible point forward to Jesus Christ's ministry and mission and work in many ways. So, I think either of these is a rational and reasonable explanation once we give it some thought here. Any questions about that for many of you? Some pretty heavy stuff, pretty deep stuff to think about there.

But again, that's why God gives us some of these puzzles sometimes to sit and think through and try to understand his mind, his thinking in different ways. Yes, Connie? I'm sorry?

Right, right. Yeah, Connie's observation seems like that's the numbers I referred to earlier.

Yeah, that's what, incidentally, those numbers I covered it some time a year or so ago. I don't recall exactly when, but that's based on estimates of the population. It's based, frankly, on kind of modern comparisons with people living in similar circumstances where you don't have modern health care, as we know it, where you don't necessarily have good, clean, running water, sanitation, disease prevention methods, that sort of thing. It would not be that uncommon to go to a number of third world countries and see similar percentages, where maybe one out of six to one out of ten people have some serious chronic disease or injury. You know, somebody in that day could break a leg, and if it's not carefully set and splinted properly, that leg could be infected. The person could lose the use of that leg. The bones could grow back crooked. Any number of things could lead to situations like this man here, who is an invalid. It doesn't specifically tell us the cause of his malady there or condition there, but just says he was clearly not able to get up and get into the pool by himself. He couldn't get around by himself. He had people carry him there. So I think there are modern parallels for that. You might think about the Ebola crisis that's going on in several countries of West Africa there. I've talked to some of our men who have been in those areas. The health and sanitation there is just horrendous. They don't have running water. They don't have bathroom facilities, latrines, things like that.

You can think about how people would deal with in that situation. dysentery, typhoid, all kinds of diseases, malaria, many, many illnesses there. So this would have been that the Jews were no doubt more healthy because of a knowledge of God's laws regarding diet and quarantine and things like that. Nevertheless, they would still be nowhere near as healthy as we are today with our access to sanitation and running water and that sort of thing.

Good observation. That's just pretty much the way life is. We see that again reflected in the Gospels where Jesus does heal a lot of people, where he encounters people with leprosy, people who are blind, people who are crippled, all kinds of flow of blood and different things like that.

We'll cover and go into more detail in a lot of these healings as we go through the Gospels. But we're just focusing on one particular one today. Getting back here to the story, continuing in verse 5. A certain man was there who had an infirmity 38 years, 38 years, long, long time there. When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he already had been in that condition a long time, how did Jesus know that? Apparently he walked through and seen the man earlier. Jesus is coming to Jerusalem at least those three times a year for the Holy Days and probably had seen the man there before. Jesus knew he had been in that condition a long time, and 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 trying to crawl or whatever to get to the pool, another steps down before me. Again, this is fairly random as I was talking about there. Now interestingly, and this is why we see here in verses 3 and 4, the man giving the same explanation...excuse me, here we see this man giving the same explanation we read earlier in verses 3 and 4 about an angel stirring the water. So this is some more evidence that this is probably indeed the authentic reading there that John originally wrote there about the angel stirring up the water. What this man says here tends to confirm that. Nobody doubts that this verse here is authentic here. So this does tend to support that difficult reading that we talked about earlier. Verse 8, Jesus said to the man then, Rise, take up your bed, and walk.

Immediately the man was made well, took up his bed, and walked. Now bed, let me clarify, this is not rather humorous. I was looking through for some illustrations to illustrate this last night. I came across this mosaic of Jesus healing this man. The man is standing up and he's got a full-sized bed on his back. This was from about 400-500 AD, something like that. Bed frame, mattress, and all this kind of stuff.

No, that's not what it's talking about. What it's talking about is what we would call a pallet today, kind of like a thick blanket. That's what people typically slept on at that time. It's not talking about a big four-pulkster full-frame water bed or something like that. This is the bed people slept on. There was a pallet, just again, a thick blanket there. So something a man could easily pick up and carry under his arm or lay over his shoulder, something like that.

Notice also here that Jesus deliberately told the man to pick up his bed and walk. That's rather interesting. Jesus didn't have to tell the man to do that because both Jesus and the man knew what the conventional rules of the day were about what you could and could not carry on the Sabbath. So Jesus frankly is being deliberately provocative here by telling the man specifically to pick up his bed and walk because that was against the rules of the religious authorities of that day.

The man, having just been healed, naturally does what the man who had just healed him tells him to do. Verse 10, the Jews therefore said to him who was cured, it is the Sabbath that is not lawful for you to carry your bed. Another study question I sent out, I believe, is who were the Jews here who were so hostile to Jesus? When we see terms like this used, we need to consider the context again.

Context is important in understanding the Gospels. That's why I spend so much time going through the context here. Obviously John isn't talking about all Jews because John is a Jew. Jesus is a Jew. All of the disciples are Jews. And we know that many of the common people flock to Jesus to hear and to learn from him as a teacher here.

They respected him as a great rabbi and teacher. The way John uses the term often in his Gospel is he's using it as kind of a verbal shorthand for the religious leadership of the Jews, the religious leadership, specifically the religious leadership there in Jerusalem, who were determined to maintain their positions and their authority, and who saw Jesus as a threat to that. And again, the bed here is something like a thick blanket that Jesus tells the man to pick up and walk. Some of you probably have a briefcase or some of you ladies probably have purses that are heavier than this bed that the man was carrying there. So again, this is something a man could have easily picked up and carried with him once he was healed.

But to the Jewish religious authority, the religious establishment there in Jerusalem, this was an unacceptable form of work that was forbidden on the Sabbath. Their rules, as we see a number of times in the Gospels, went far beyond the commandments that Christ had given, which were really quite simple. Six days shall you labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the eternal God. Your God, you shall not do any work on that day. They had taken that command and created 39 different classifications of what constituted work on the Sabbath day.

What could not be done at bearing burdens was one of the types of work. What was covered in this prohibition? One forbidden item that got so picky to state that you could not carry a needle that was stuck in your garment on the Sabbath because that was an unnecessary burden. I mentioned this one before. You could not wear shoes that had nails in the soles. Now we use glue in our shoe soles and all that, but many of us remember a few decades back shoes had the soles nailed together.

They were little nails, kind of like tacks in there. They did that back in the first century too. They used nails to hold the soles together and assemble them, bind them to the upper part of the shoes. You could not carry a pair of shoes that had nails in them because that was too much weight. That was unnecessary weight. You could wear other type of shoes or go barefoot on the Sabbath day. The rabbis and religious authorities even argued whether it was lawful for a man with a wooden leg to wear his wooden leg on the Sabbath because it wasn't a natural part of the body.

It was an unnecessary weight. So they argued back and forth whether it's allowable to wear a wooden leg on the Sabbath. This one to me takes the cake. They even argued whether a person who had a false tooth could wear a false tooth in his mouth or her mouth on the Sabbath day because again it wasn't a natural part of the body. It was an addition. So that was unnecessary weight, some of the rabbis argued there. This is how picky they got about what was allowable or not allowable or what constituted a burden to carry on the Sabbath day. This is how ridiculous they got on that. So in their mind for somebody to carry his pallet was obviously an unnecessary weight to be carrying on the Sabbath day and was forbidden. So they were condemning the man.

This sounds ridiculous or funny to us but it was deadly serious to them.

And again their intent was good. Their intent was to keep God's commandments, to make sure they never broke the commandment about the Sabbath. Not working on it but they carried it to ridiculous extremes and made the Sabbath day itself a burden, an unbearable burden, instead of a day of delight and joy that God intended it to be. And this as we see throughout the Gospels would lead to many conflicts between Jesus and the Pharisees and the religious authorities over what was lawful or not lawful or forbidden on the Sabbath day. So back to the story then again. We'll pick it up in verse 11. The man who was healed answered them, those who were criticizing him for carrying the burden, he who made me well said to me, take up your bed and walk. And again the man knew that somebody had the power to heal him so he had no problem at all doing what Jesus had told him to do, to pick up his pallet and walk. Walk away with it. Verse 12, then they asked him, Who is the man who said to you, take up your bed and walk? But the one who was healed did not know who it was, for Jesus had withdrawn a multitude being in that place. So this sounds a little bit odd. Jesus heals the man and apparently, while he bends over to pick up his pallet, Jesus disappears into the crowd. That apparently is what is being described here. The man didn't even realize who it was, who had healed him there. So what's going on here? Why did Jesus slip away quietly, slip away from the man like that? Well, it says here, verse 13, a multitude being in that place. Well, again, what's the context here? Archaeology shed some light on that and other things we know do as well.

But not only were there the dozens—we saw the model of this earlier—that those portraits could have held maybe hundreds of people. I figure there were at least dozens of people there in the city of Jerusalem, maybe hundreds who were gathered around the pools waiting to jump in. But archaeologists—this is where archaeology again sheds light on some of this because archaeologists have determined just in the last few years—I think I first saw this maybe four or five years ago—that the design of this pool was such that it was also used for ritual washing. Now, what does that mean? That was critically important in that day because—and some of you have been to Jerusalem and seen the different mikvahs they're called—all around this big massive temple complex were ritual pools. It was required for somebody to go and rinse themselves in one of these pools before going up to the temple to pray or to offer sacrifices.

The symbolism being that you would clinge, you would purify yourself because you're coming to the presence of God. So you would ritually rinse in one of these pools before you went up to the temple.

It's actually a forerunner of baptism in a lot of ways there because what does baptism symbolize? The washing away of our sins, the spiritual cleansing of us so we can go and live a new life before God. Archaeologists—last time I was there I asked one of the tour guides how many of these mikvahs have they found around the temple mount? At that time it was more than 100.

Some of these pools are huge. The Bethesda pool we're talking about here, I believe, was roughly an acre in size. Roughly an acre. Quite a large pool. Another one, the Siloam pool on the south side of the temple mount, which is another pool that was used for washing, is about two-thirds the size of this room here. Quite a large pool. Part of it hasn't been excavated so they're only estimating how big the rest of it is. There's another large pool about a third the size of this room just at the southern entrances to the temple mount. But again, they found more than 100 of these pools. The Bethesda pool is, to my knowledge, the largest one of all of those that they have found. Again, about an acre in size. There was actually up to 20 feet deep. These were ritual pools. Think about this. Again, what day is this?

First verse of John that we read about there says that there was a feast of the Jews. It's one of the Holy Days. Josephus says that there were perhaps a million or more people who had come to Jerusalem for the Holy Days. This is a Sabbath. Whether that Sabbath means it was this Holy Day or whether it's a Sabbath during the Feast of Tabernacles or during the Passover week we're not told. But regardless, the bottom line is whichever Holy Day or weekly Sabbath it was, there would have been literally tens of thousands of people going to the temple that day. Before they did, they would all be stopping by one of these pools to ritually rinse themselves.

This pool is not just the crowd of people there waiting to be healed, but there are literally tens of thousands coming and rinsing in this very same pool before going up to the temple mount. The scene would have been something like the parking lot down at Bronco Stadium, 10 minutes before kickoff or something. There's literally tens of thousands of people trying to cram through and quickly rinse and get up to the temple. There are other parallels between football stadiums on Sunday and temples that I won't get into, but you can draw those conclusions for yourself. But my point is this is not an isolated incident. It's not Jesus and a few dozen people around. There are literally thousands of people in the sitting here. That's what it means here when it says there was a multitude being in that place. This is why. John doesn't explain it, but we know from archaeology and history this is what is going on.

So why did Jesus slip away? Well, the answer is pretty obvious. Had he stayed there and made it obvious that he was healing people, there were tens of thousands of people, probably at this moment a couple of thousand people gathered into a fairly small place, and it would have caused a stampede, you might say, a huge uproar among the people. Had Jesus stayed there and started healing these people because of these huge multitudes. So Jesus, again, doesn't do that. It's a random healing. He picks one person out of the crowd, heals him, then slips away. Again, in a way that he operates a lot of times there. So it clearly would have been a huge scene had others notice what had happened and he healed more people. So he just quietly slips away and then later finds the man at the temple and talks to him privately there, which we see in verse 14. Afterward Jesus found him, found the man in the temple, and said to him, See, you have been made well. Sin no more, lest a worse thing come upon you.

And the man departed and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had made him well.

So this statement about, See, you have been made well. Sin no more, lest a worse thing come upon you. This is quite interesting because here Jesus clearly draws a connection between sin and this man's condition because he tells him, Go your way and don't sin anymore, lest something worse happen to you. In other words, if he continued to sin, something worse could come upon him.

So there is here a clear connection between sin and sickness. And yet on the other hand, there are places... well, let's look at it. John 9 verses 1 through 3. This is another miraculous healing of a man who has been blind since birth. Notice the explanation that is given here.

As Jesus passed by, he saw a man who was blind from birth. And his disciples asked him, saying, Rabbi, who sinned? This man or his parents that he was born blind. And Jesus here noticed a very different answer. Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but that the works of God should be revealed in him. So here we see in the case of this man who is born blind that it was not a matter of sin.

Obviously, he couldn't have sinned in the womb because he's born blind. And it's not a matter of his parents sinning either. So the point here is that sometimes these things just happen.

Sometimes illness, injury, and so on is the result of sin. And sometimes they're not. We see two examples from John's Gospel illustrating both sides of the story there. So when we see or hear or read about prayer requests from somebody who is sick or injured or something like that, that doesn't mean that they have sinned. And it certainly doesn't mean that we are in a position to judge them for that. We are not. We live in a corrupt world with bodies that are physical that are designed to break down over time. And none of us lives forever in this life.

And sometimes God heals, as we've talked about here, and sometimes he doesn't.

It's God's purpose. It's God's choice. The only sure healing that we will have is when we are resurrected to immortality. And we will be resurrected and healed of anything and never again subject to illness or injury or disease or death or anything like that. That is the only sure healing that we are promised here. So continuing back here in John 5 and down in verse 15 now, the man departed and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had made him well.

For this reason, the Jews persecuted Jesus and sought to kill him because he had done these things on the Sabbath. And we probably read that and it's just unfathomable for us to comprehend this mindset, this hard-and-mindset, because here's a man who's been crippled for 38 years, 38 years, who may have been lying there at that pool for many of those years. And some of these people had probably walked by and seen him there and knew how long the man had suffered there. And then the day comes when the man is finally healed and wants the reaction to these people. Their reaction is they want to kill the person who healed him. Again, just an unfathomable mindset there. It's hard to comprehend people being that hard-hearted, but clearly they were. Incidentally, it's about at this point in our studies of the Gospels that we begin to see a marked change in people's attitude toward Jesus by peoples, the Pharisees, and the religious leaders. Here we see very clearly the religious authorities, the Jerusalem religious establishment, want to kill him at this point. And just a couple of pages over, we will read that the Pharisees start plotting how they can destroy Jesus as well or kill him.

So we see a change now. These people that Jesus has somewhat had a tenuous, maybe strained, relationship. Now it's starting to turn decidedly hostile toward him to where they begin to plot to destroy him and to kill him. So this is a kind of a sea change. They've had an uneasy truce, you might say, up to this point. And of course, the Jerusalem religious establishment, Jesus has already antagonized them from day one when at the first pass over his ministry, he cleanses the temple. So he's already bent at odds with them, but now others are starting to turn against him. And we see the hostility start to build. Verse 17, But Jesus answered them, My father has been working until now. This is his response about the accusations that he's breaking the Sabbath. This is his response. But Jesus answered them, My father has been working until now, and I have been working. Therefore the Jews sought all the more to kill him, because he not only broke the Sabbath, but also said that God was his father, making himself equal with God. And of course, there's nothing in the law of Moses or God's commandments to prohibit what Jesus had done or told the man to do in taking up his paladin and walking. But that was worked by their rules, not by God's rules. And this is a good breaking point here in the story, because continuing on in John, it transitions into a long discourse by Jesus about the relationship between him and God the Father that is much too long and detailed to cover in the time we have. And that is so detailed and important. We'll wait and cover that next time. However, there is something else that I wanted to bring out in our remaining time here. One of the study questions I sent out was, how many miracles does John record in his gospel that appear only in his gospel? John, as I mentioned earlier, clearly includes a lot of information in his gospel that Matthew, Mark, and Luke don't. It's very clear, it's very obvious, that he is deliberately avoiding repeating the same material that Matthew, Mark, and Luke cover.

Most of the miracles that John includes, including this one right here, it's not mentioned in the other gospels, the other miracles we've talked about earlier, in John's gospel, don't appear in the other. So why does he do that? Is there something we're missing there? This is fascinating. I came across this recently and I just felt like I had to share it with you here. Here are the miracles that John records. I'll just go through these very clearly. Changing water into wine in John 2, verses 1 through 11, we've covered that. Only John records that miracle. The healing of the nobleman's son. This is when Jesus is up at Knaa, and a nobleman in Capernaum comes to Jesus saying his son is dying and asks him to heal him. Jesus does long distance. Many miles away, we've already talked about that in John 4. Only John covers that. This healing of the pool in Bethesda. We've just talked about only John covers that.

The next miracle is the feeding of the 5,000 in John 6. All four Gospels talk about that. This is actually the only miracle that all four Gospels talk about. Walking on the water.

John, plus Matthew and Mark talk about that miracle. The healing of the man born blind. We referred to that just a few minutes ago. Only John talks about that miracle.

The resurrection of Lazarus. Shortly before Christ's crucifixion and execution. Only John talks about that. Powerful miracle. Raise somebody, a friend of his from the dead. But only John talks about that. And then last, of course, Jesus Christ's own resurrection and ascension, which all four Gospels talk about. So see here very clearly that John includes specific miracles that the other Gospels don't talk about here at all or leave out. Is there a deeper message to that? To address this, let's start by asking the question, where did John go after Christ's death and resurrection and the scattering of the church? We know from the book of Acts, John appears there with Peter in the early days of the church.

There are different miracles events recorded there in the first few chapters of Acts. We know that John is there at the crucifixion. There when Jesus tells him to take care of his mother.

But then John disappears from the book of Acts. Where did he go? What did he do?

We know from circumstantial evidence that later he writes this Gospel of John. He writes it well after the other Gospels, which were written probably in the 50s and 60s AD.

John writes much later. He writes his three epistles, 1, 2, and 3 John. Then near the end of the first century, he writes the book of Revelation there while he's exiled on the island of Patmos in the Aegean Sea. So what happened in the meantime? Where did John write his five books from? The Gospel of John, 1st, 2nd, 3rd John, and the book of Revelation. According to tradition and the earliest non-biblical sources after the first century, John went to Asia Minor, which is modern-day Turkey, and specifically to Ephesus, which is right here on the coast of Turkey. This seven-shaped figure is the seven churches of Revelation, where they are located.

It's interesting, they're actually formed like a numeral seven turned on its side there. And right here is the island of Patmos. So John goes to this area, according to the earliest historical sources we have outside of the Bible. And again, I think there is that solid conclusion because, after all, when he writes the book of Revelation, who's it addressed to? It's addressed to these seven churches up there, which John is obviously familiar with. He describes conditions of those seven congregations. And he also refers to himself in writing to them as their brother and as their companion in tribulation. So why would he do this unless if he were not familiar with them and did not personally know of their circumstances?

So that makes sense there that John would have been familiar with those areas in living and serving in that area around that time. So are you with me so far? This is the way historians would look at and analyze the evidence for some of these things. So another question now. So if John is living here in Asia Minor, who were the primary gods of Asia Minor at this time? We know that the Greeks and Romans worshipped all kinds of gods, and the names and the duties, responsibilities of the gods changed a little bit from place to place. But who were the specific gods, primary gods of Asia Minor in this area at the time John would have been living there and writing the gospel of John? And later, first, second, and third John and Revelation from Patmos. Who were the primary gods? Let me show you just a few of the main ones. First is Dionysus, the god of wine.

There are a lot of people who worship him today. Dionysus was thought to be the son of Zeus and a human mother, Zeus being the primary chief god of the Greeks. According to the beliefs of this cult, the followers of Dionysus, followers who drank wine to the point of a drunken stupor, literally became one with Dionysus. So worshipers would gather around his altar, they would gorge themselves on raw meat that had been offered to Dionysus, and they would drink until they became stumbling, falling down drunk. And then they would engage in orgies to be blunt about it. Dionysus' worship was so corrupt and degrading that it was outlawed in Rome because it was too corrupting. That's saying something. If you get so bad the Romans outlawed it. That had to be pretty bad. But this is how degrading the Dionysus cult was. Another god in Asia Minor at this time, or goddess, was Demeter, the goddess of grain and crops and bread. Because bread comes from grain. Her name means Mother Earth or Grain Mother. And like Dionysus, she was a very popular goddess because you worshipped her because she provided your food. She was the goddess of groceries, you might say there. She was believed to be responsible for providing fertile crops of grain so that the people would have bread to eat. So a very, very popular goddess there. Another very popular one was the Sclepios, who was the god of healing. Notice his staff and snake there. Does it sound familiar? Or look familiar? It's where the medical symbol comes from of the staff with a serpent intertwined around it. It comes from this god, Sclepios, the god of healing.

Hundreds of temples to Sclepios have been found in the Roman Empire, including several of them in Israel. Sclepios was thought to be able to overcome all or to heal all human ills. And his followers even thought that he eventually developed the power to raise people from the dead.

Again, his symbol was this serpent in this staff here. His temples were often built around water or springs, and they appeared to have played a part somehow in his healing powers. His temples are often found around springs, flowing water streams, that kind of thing. I mentioned earlier that the...let's see, actually I got a little bit out of sequence here in my pictures. But I mentioned earlier the the Pool of Bethesda, built as archaeologists dug down through the debris of 2000 years. They went through a lot of modern construction, then excavated through a church from the Byzantine area of 500-600 AD. Below that they found a temple. Below that was the pool of Bethesda. I didn't mention the temple. It was a temple of Asclepius, the god of healing who healed through moving water. See the connection? Here are some archaeological evidence that clearly the Romans, who cared nothing about the Jews or Jewish beliefs, built a temple to their god of healing on the spot of the Pool of Bethesda, where people in Jesus' day thought people were healed. Here's some archaeological evidence, totally unrelated to the Bible, that supports what we just read about there. And John, again, pretty mind-boggling stuff. That's why I love digging into archaeology and studying some of these things. Another of the major gods was Serapis, a god who could heal sight, heal people who were blind, in other words. Now let's go back and look at... Here's where I get a few of my pictures out of sequence. Here is an artist depiction of a temple of Asclepios, based on archaeological evidence of what they found.

Again, here are the ruins there in Jerusalem. We're digging down. They found that.

Again, here's actually a modern reconstruction of a temple to Asclepios at a pond, a pool, a lake, moving water there. Again, now let's go back and quickly review John's miracles.

First miracle, changing water into wine. Only John records that.

John had to contend with people in Asia Minor who worshipped who? Who worshipped the god of wine?

Who could supposedly turn water into wine? And did so at his temples. So John could say that Dionysus is a fake. John, being a cousin of Jesus, knew that Jesus was born of God, the one true God. The pagans believed that Dionysus was a son of Zeus and a human mother.

John knew that Jesus was the son of God and a human mother and was an eyewitness to these things, including the miracle of turning water to wine. John had seen this firsthand and talks about it there. Is this why John is the only gospel writer to include the miracle of turning water into wine? Because of what he had to counter and deal with there in Asia Minor? I think so.

The other disciples didn't have to contend with Dionysus. They are not in that area.

But John was. Let's look at another healing, the healing of the nobleman's son in John 4.

No other gospel writer mentions this. Again, John is the apostle who lives in Asia and is the only gospel writer to include this story. What is notable about this story is that it is a long distance healing. Again, from Kana'a to Capernaum. It's a distance, I don't recall, I think it's about between 15 and 20 miles, where the nobleman comes to Jesus and says, My son is dying. And Jesus says, Go your way. Your son is healed. The man returns home and finds out his son was healed at the exact time he had talked to Jesus the previous day.

Those who came to Asclepios, the God of healing, would spend days or weeks or months at the temples there to be healed. They had to come to Asclepios to be healed. Jesus can heal long distance, as we saw in the case of the nobleman's son. Asclepios, of course, really couldn't heal at all.

But people believed that he could. And John was an eyewitness to the events of Jesus Christ, long distance healing there. So again, Jesus had seen Jesus heal people many, many times.

Something that no God like Asclepios could do. Next, there's the healing that we just talked about here, the healing of the Pool of Bethesda. Again, the temples of Asclepios were built near springs or pools of moving water. John is the only author of the Gospels to include this story, a man who was not healed by the moving water, but a man who was healed personally by Jesus Christ.

And again, Jesus could do what Asclepios could never do, which is truly heal the sick.

Next, we come to the feeding of the 5,000. Again, who was another goddess that we just mentioned briefly? Demeter, the goddess of grain and bread, who supposedly provided all of this to her worshippers there. And John could counter this counterfeit goddess as well, because he had seen Jesus not once, but twice multiply bread to feed thousands of people. There's the feeding of the 5,000. There's another similar miracle later. So John knew that Jesus was the true provider, and miracle worker, and the true bread of life. The next miracle is the walking on the water.

Matthew and Mark also mentioned that there is some evidence, I haven't been able to track this down, that the followers of Asclepios believed that he walked on water as part of his temple healing. Again, his temples being built near water, springs of sources of water there, that he was believed to be able to walk on water. And yet John had seen Jesus walk on water, along with the rest of the 12 apostles. He was a personal eyewitness to this. The next miracle, the healing of the man born blind, who was another of the major gods of Asia Minor, Serapis, the god who could seal sight, heal the blind. So John could counter this false god as well by his own personal eyewitness testimony of Jesus healing the blind, including a man who was blind from birth, as recorded there in John 9. Not to mention all the other blind people that Jesus had healed.

Next miracle is the resurrection of Lazarus from the dead. Asclepios was supposed to be so good at healing that he could raise the dead. But of course, that didn't happen. We know he couldn't as a false god, but that didn't stop people from believing in that lie. But John knew that Jesus Christ had raised people from the dead and records Lazarus from the dead not just right after Lazarus had died, but several days after he had died and his body had begun to stink and decompose, as we read in John's account. So here is John able to counter Asclepios by his own personal eyewitness testimony of Jesus raising people from the dead. And then the last miracle is Jesus' resurrection and ascension, which all four Gospels mentioned. And Zeus, as I mentioned, well, Zeus, the chief god, had supposedly raised, according to Greek mythology, Asclepios from the dead. But John knew that Jesus Christ, a man whom he had known from childhood, they were cousins, the man with whom he had spent three and a half years with as a Talmadim, as a disciple day in and day out, the man whom he had seen alive and seen crucified and seen die and had seen raised to life again and with many other witnesses had seen walking and talking and interacting and appearing to dozens and then hundreds of other people after his resurrection. John knew that Jesus had died and had been raised to life again. There were no such eyewitnesses to Asclepios in his mythical death and resurrection. But John knew there were many eyewitnesses to that death and resurrection of which he was one, personally. So why does John include some of these stories of Jesus Christ's miracles and none of the other Gospel writers include? I think a number of them, probably most of those we've talked about here, he included to counter the pagan gods of Asia Minor who were worshipped by the people that he would encounter and work with and deal with in serving the churches there in Asia Minor where he spent the lighter years of his life and probably where he wrote his Gospel of John Frum. I think that's really some amazing food for thought. Again, John doesn't tell us why he included these miracles, but it's interesting when you, again, get into the culture, get into the history, get into the background, and explore some of these things. So let's see, any quick questions before we wrap up then? Okay, if not, we'll wrap it up and pick it up again, hopefully next Sabbath. So that's it.