The Lord’s judgment against Babylon is explained in verse
six, “I gave them into your hand; you showed them no mercy; on the aged you
made your yoke exceedingly heavy.” His
judgment against Israel resulted in them being in Babylon for seventy years but
the Babylonians mistreated them and now judgment was coming to that kingdom in
the form of Cyrus the Persian king. The
Lord accuses Babylon of saying, ““I am, and there is no one besides me…” Do you hear in that the words we heard nearly
every day last week in the readings? The
first two words should startle us, they are the name of the Lord and He is the
one who said these words, the only one who is able to say them. Babylon’s pride was her downfall. The Chaldeans were the magicians and diviners
who we meet in the book of Daniel who are unable to tell and interpret
Nebuchadnezzar’s dreams. The nation has
relied on these men’s wisdom and yet Daniel proved that the wisdom of the
Lord’s servants was far greater. Through
this passage the Lord speaks of charms, enchantments and sorceries, the things
on which the king relied instead of the God who had proven Himself to
Nebuchadnezzar. His son was a man like
the Pharaoh in Exodus, the one who remembered not Joseph.
As I wrote recently, the pool here was one that venerated by
the Romans as a healing pool and dedicated to either the god of healing,
Asclepius or possibly to the goddess of fortune, Fortuna. The pool itself was a man-made thing, created
by damming and re-directing water into the city in order to provide water for Jerusalem
dating back eight hundred years or so before Jesus’ time. John refers to the pool not as an asclepieion
as the Romans would but simply the pool at Bethesda. The man, an invalid for thirty-eight years,
may or may not have believed that the pool’s healing powers were from an angel
(as at least some Jews apparently thought) or from the god but his hope was in
some magical force. Jesus asks if he
wants to be healed and the man’s response is to tell why he hasn’t been healed
yet. The order of things given by John
is Jesus’ command, healing, response in obedience to the command. It seems that the man knew that He had been
healed and obeyed the command at the understanding. He believed in healing, he had been like the
Babylonians, however, putting faith for healing in the wrong thing. Everyone seems to miss the point because of
the carrying of the bed, no one was interested in the healing. They had the witness but overlooked the
testimony.
Faith in Jesus’ sacrifice is all we have and all we need to
enter the throne of God without fear.
The finished work of Christ cannot be added to in any way and any
attempt to do so makes a mockery of the cross by determining it has limited
value, it isn’t fully efficacious.
Likewise, the writer says, if we go on sinning deliberately after
receiving knowledge of truth there is no sacrifice for sins. Here, the point is that righteousness
matters, deliberate sin tells another story altogether and makes a similar
mockery of the cross by denying Jesus’ righteousness was what made His
sacrifice acceptable. Our pursuit of
righteousness in our own lives testifies that we actually believe that God
values righteousness, and that we value Jesus’ righteousness. Otherwise, we essentially are saying that
righteousness isn’t particularly valuable to us and therefore Jesus, the
righteousness of God, isn’t valuable except as a “Get out of jail free” card.
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