Paralyzed Religion

Isaiah 43:9-13                            John 5:16-47

Paralyzed Religion

Most folks are well acquainted with the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes. For those of you who are not, here’s a quick summary:  Once upon a time, an Emperor decided that he wanted, not just new clothes, but the very best clothes money could buy for his annual public appearance. Tailors throughout the land were summoned and each applicant was interviewed by the Emperor himself. But he seemed dissatisfied with every possible candidate. This material was not the correct shade…that material was not the right texture. 

Then one day, two brothers walked in, apparently carrying nothing. They explained to the emperor that their cloth was so fine and so excellent that it could only be seen and appreciated by the truly enlightened and the truly refined. Not wanting to appear unenlightened or unrefined, the Emperor praised the beauty of the cloth and put the tailors to work. They measured him and began their task in one of the castle chambers.

Every day the Emperor would look in on them working hard at something he still could not see, but he was assured that the task was well on track as scheduled. The brothers praised him for his ability to distinguish between true beauty and false beauty and they hailed him as the most advanced and civilised of all rulers. Everyone in the palace agreed…the minstrels composed songs about the beautiful garments…the poets wrote odes about the weave and the stitching…the playwrights wrote and performed dramas…the philosophers composed proverbs. 

Even though the Emperor and the members of his court saw nothing, his pride and their compliance prevented them from admitting that something was wrong, and so the day dawned when he was to appear in public. The tailors dressed him with great pomp and circumstance and, as trumpets blasted and people cheered, the Emperor stepped out into the bright light of day as naked as the day he was born. A hush fell over the crowd. The Emperor thought it was because they were all amazed at his beautiful new clothes. Yet no one had the courage to tell him that he was quite nude…no one except one little boy whose voice broke the silence. “Mommy, why isn’t the Emperor wearing any clothes?”

Why, indeed. As E. L. Cammaerts once said: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing. They then become capable of believing in anything.”

Now, if you recall, the last talk was about the Jewish man healed at the pagan pool of Bethesda. We examined the evidence and concluded that something was very wrong here…this was a healing totally unlike any other healing recorded in the Gospels. The man did not know who Jesus was, there was no faith nor repentance nor gratitude expressed at any point throughout this event, and his testimony before the Jewish leaders appears to have been vindictive.  So, why did Jesus heal him? I believe that what we have here is an acted parable in which the drama and the players are a mirror image of the people of God at that time. 

Not only were some of the leaders weaving together elaborate new laws and traditions, but their peers were praising them for it, dropping names of famous rabbis in defence of human rituals and regulations, while the people remained largely silent. Until the voice of Jesus revealed that, like the lame man at the pool, their faith was misplaced and, unless they stopped to re-evaluate and repent of their dead-end religion, something far worse than their present oppression would happen to them. Perhaps a suitable warning for the modern day revisionists…

In the discourse that followed on the heels of this healing, Jesus first spoke about the reality of God in verses 19-30. He had come to reveal the Father, and what they heard in his words and witnessed in his deeds was what could be called a divine symmetry. There was a balanced and proportionate similarity between God the Father and God the Son. Their words and works were the same. A simple knowledge of the revelation of God in the Scriptures is sufficient information to come to this conclusion. So, Jesus’ healing on the Sabbath ought to have been evaluated in the light of all his works as they mirrored the works of the Father. If the unbelieving Jews had done their homework, as it were, they would have seen that it was their understanding of Sabbath keeping that was faulty, not Jesus. 

You see, we do not live on a globe randomly revolving around in a vast expanse of nothingness. God did not create the earth and then abandon it. No, Jesus said that the Father has always been working and that the Sabbath did not negate that fact. Clearly, God’s “resting” on the seventh day did not mean that he stopped all activity. God had to cease "working", the universe would implode as He upholds all things by the word of his power. 

So, clearly, their elevation of Sabbath observance as something other than simple faith and trust in God’s goodness and kindness was misguided. Indeed, the Sabbath teaches us that God continues to "work" even when we don’t. But what is this work of God? Well, ever since the Fall, the primary "work" of the Father was seeking to fulfil the promise he made in Genesis 3:15 – to set the world right side up once more by defeating Satan, the supplanter. He was and He is making all things new…

In short, he wanted to heal the world, but he would heal it his way, not man’s way. We only need to read the Old Testament to see that the way of man always fails because man is essentially flawed. All have sinned. All fall short of the glory of God. So, we could say that adding rule upon rule, ritual upon ritual, tradition upon tradition, and spiritual high jump after spiritual high jump, in an attempt to be healed from sin, was like the man lying at the pool of pagan superstition.

Now, in discussing his relationship with the Father, Jesus revealed the kind of relationship believers ought to have with God. “I do not seek my own will,” Jesus said, “but the will of the one who sent me.” Indeed, his whole life displayed an all-encompassing desire to do only the will of God, and therein lies the essence of the relationship. Life can only issue from an obedient love. Reconciliation and resurrection and restoration can only come through repentance. 

This is not a judgement to question or to challenge, as it is a just judgment pronounced by a just judge. Jesus told the man healed at the pool of Bethesda to stop living in sin or else something worse would happen to him. In the same way, those who wish to have life, must cease to live in death. Only those who hear and believe, and love as defined by Jesus, pass from death to life. Seeking life elsewhere is like lying at a pool of magic or like clothing your body with nothing.

In the second half of this discourse, verses 31-47, Jesus addressed the error of the unbelievers in the light of the truth he had just revealed about God and the way humans are to relate to him. By comparing and contrasting himself with them, Jesus revealed that they were a compromised people, a complacent people, and if they refused to repent, a condemned people. 

They were compromised as they sought to validate their religion amongst themselves…in other words, they bore witness to each other and therefore their witness was invalid. By rejecting the true testimony of John the Baptist…by rejecting the works of Jesus that perfectly matched the works of the Father (indicating that the two were one)…as well as by rejecting the Scriptures that testified about him, they deliberately dismissed the way to life to follow the way to death. Instead of seeking spirituality in divinity, they sought it in humanity, but ultimately only the author of life can give life. The Scriptures clearly state that humanity is dead in trespasses and sins. Life begets life…death begets death. You cannot find spiritual healing by following the ideologies of fallen humanity. 

But in their prideful arrogance, they became complacent. Like the man at the pool had resigned himself to his condition, so the people of God made no effort to change. Again, it is worth asking ourselves why this Jewish man was lying at a pool steeped in pagan superstition. Clearly, he had at some point abandoned his faith in the one true God and embraced a faith in something that was, in truth, nothing. You might ask how this was even possible given that the whole of life for a Jew revolved around the Scriptures. Well, this happened because the religion of the people was founded not upon the Scriptures, but upon an interpretation of the Scriptures. True, Jesus said, they diligently searched the Scriptures, but they did not find God because they were blinded by their own predetermined decisions and therefore, they were unwilling to accept and apply the clear teaching of his Word. As Jesus said in Matthew 15:3-9, they nullified the Word of God by their tradition…they gave up the wisdom and witness of God for the folly and foolishness of so-called learned men. Does this sound familiar?

At this point I would issue a word of caution not to point fingers here. How often have we not defended our doctrines without properly subjecting them to the scrutiny of Scripture, bolstering our position with more emotional bluster than fact, while quoting copiously from random texts taken completely out of their original context? We do not see the wood for the trees because we have already declared ourselves right and we surround ourselves with those who praise us and congratulate ourselves for demolishing the strawmen we build of the positions of our opponents. And so, we muddy the clear waters of God’s Word in our pride and our arrogance…declaring ourselves more moral than God. Do not be fooled, dearest beloved brethren. We cannot have the love of God in our hearts if we do not accept and apply his truth in our lives.

As such, those who refuse to abandon the ways of the world to embrace the way and the truth and the life of God, remain under the penalty of death. In short, they remain condemned.  There can be no release or pardon for people who refuse to repent and believe. There is only one truth and that is God’s truth because God alone is the creator and sustainer of all that exists. Like the Emperor, we too might fool ourselves into believing there is something when there is, in reality, nothing, and we might languish beside the pool of untruth forever without ever experiencing the healing offered freely to all who truly desire it. 

“Do you want to get well?” Jesus asked the man at the pool of Bethesda. The reply to this question ought to have been yes, please, and thank you. But those who do not wish to believe will always offer up excuses and rationalisations…anything other than to repent and believe the truth as revealed in the Scriptures. 

Dearest beloved brethren, if the one to whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hidden had to walk into your life at this very moment, what would he see? A heart clothed with the love of God? 

Or if he were to stand at the door of our particular denomination, would he ask us why we have left our first love? Would he declare us wretched, pitiful, poor, blind, and as naked as the foolish Emperor in our opening story? 

And if he were to ask us if we truly wanted to be healed, what would we say in reply? 

Shall we pray? 

© Johannes W H van der Bijl 2023