John 5:1-16 | What's the connection?

Throughout these devotions, we have spent a lot of time drawing connections to water in various capacities and how Jesus exceeds and even replaces those things. His baptism was better than John's. The purity that Jesus brings was greater than the ritual purity of the Jews. The baptism that is of the Spirit is greater. Jesus' healing is more sufficient than this pool. This narrative continues the trend. There are a couple ways in which this is accomplished through what we have written in John.

First and foremost, the understanding around the pool is that whoever got there first is the one who would be healed. The effort had to be done on the part of the one seeking healing in order for it to be accomplished. Not only that, you had to seek it more diligently than anyone else. You had to be the fastest to be there first. Jesus subverts the whole principle in being the healer searching for the sick man. Now, usually people would be brought to Jesus and would seek Him out. In this case, Jesus zeroes in on the paralytic and brings the healing to him.

Going beyond that, we have Jesus' statement when He encounters this same man in the temple. He instructs him to go on and not sin, lest something worse come upon him. In short, Jesus brings, not only a physical healing, but a spiritual one as well. It appears that the illness this man had was a consequence of sin in some fashion. Jesus is giving him another chance; something the pool did not do for him.

What connections are you making?