Can doing good ever break the Sabbath?

In John 5:1-18, Jesus heals a man who had been unable to walk for thirty-eight years — and the religious leaders are furious, because He did it on the Sabbath. In this study, Dr. Toby Holt contrasts Christ’s mercy with man-made rules.

At the pool of Bethesda, Jesus seeks out a long-suffering man and heals him with a word: “Rise, take up your bed and walk.” Instead of rejoicing, the leaders object that carrying a mat breaks the Sabbath — one of dozens of extra rules they had piled on top of God’s law. Dr. Holt explains that works of mercy and necessity were always lawful on the Sabbath. The deeper offense comes when Jesus calls God His own Father, making Himself equal with God — the claim that sets the rest of John’s Gospel in motion.

Questions this study answers:

1. Why were the leaders angry about the healing? Because Jesus healed on the Sabbath and told the man to carry his mat, breaking their man-made rules — though not God’s law.

2. Is it ever right to “work” on the Sabbath? Yes. Works of mercy and necessity — like caring for the sick — have always been lawful. Jesus showed mercy, not lawlessness.

3. Why did this healing stir such opposition? Because Jesus called God His own Father, claiming equality with God — a claim that drives the conflict through the rest of John.

“Rise, take up your bed and walk.” — John 5:8 (NKJV)

Speaker: Dr. Toby Holt is the President of New Geneva Theological Seminary, a Reformed seminary in Colorado Springs. He is known for clear, down-to-earth Bible teaching, and his sermons have been downloaded more than 1.9 million times on SermonAudio.

Listen and go deeper: This sermon is part of the John Explained study from New Geneva Theological Seminary. Find more verse-by-verse teaching across the Bible at newgeneva.org. To support this teaching ministry, visit newgeneva.org/give.

In John 5, Jesus healed a man who had been paralyzed for 38 years. But instead of being excited about this miraculous event, the Jewish leadership was angry at Jesus. They accused him of breaking the Sabbath. In today's study, we'll talk about the contrast between Christ's mercy and the Pharisees' legalism.

One of the things that God just hates is when you call evil good and when you call good evil. In today's text, the most wonderful thing's going to happen. There's going to be this paralyzed man, a sick man for 30 years, he hasn't been able to move. Everyone knew this guy. You pass him by, it's, "Oh, it's that guy." This man that the people knew was sick, was ill, was helpless, was hopeless. This man is healed to the point he's able to stand up and walk and jump, "It's me, remember the guy who was lying there?" The reaction to that by the Jews of his age was not joy, it was anger. And this is the sort of thing that just boggles the mind of God, when we routinely call that which is good, evil, and that which is evil, good. And the Pharisees were experts at this. If you want to know why the Pharisees were constantly at odds with Jesus, it's because time and time and time and time again, he would do something good and they would call it evil. They would flip-flop the two great moral imperatives. And because they would flip-flop it, they would demean the one who undertook them. They would demean Christ, they would denigrate his miracles, they would refute his words. They would turn others against the things that he was saying. And in place of the grace that he was offering, and the kindness and the mercy and the charity and the like, they substituted something. They substituted works and laws and legalism, and things that made religion just a chore. Just this albatross around the necks of broken, hurting people that were already under the boot of Rome. You have a guy show up and he's preaching grace, and these people are preaching laws. All the while, they're all under the boot of Rome. And you would think one day the Pharisees would wake up and go, "Boy, this doesn't seem to be working out so well for us. We're all constantly miserable." Well, Jesus came to set them free, and their response again was to kill him. Now furthermore, of the things that they messed up, of the things that they distorted, of the things that they took something wonderful and made it just awful, towards the top of the list in their day, in the first century, was what they had done to the Sabbath. Why did God give us the Sabbath? Is it something that's meant to be hard or laborious or difficult or arduous? Of course not. The Sabbath is made for men. It's made to give us rest. It's a good thing. It's a blessed thing. It's a joyous thing. Sabbath is meant not only to give us physical rest from our labors, but to instruct us to the great rest that awaits. The Sabbath's wonderful, absolutely wonderful, but the Pharisees had made it just the most joyless thing imaginable. And part of it's because they departed from the book. We talked about this in our Sunday school class. One of the things that the Pharisees did, and Rome has done later on and the like, one of the things the Pharisees did is they took the Bible they had up to that point, the Old Testament, but they took that and they said, "That's a good start, but on top of that, we're going to add some stuff." Specifically, they said, "We're going to have our traditions." The rabbinical schools had been meeting for centuries, and the rabbis had great traditions, or at least a lot of traditions. Now, among the traditions, which are recorded in various places, including something called the Jewish Mishnah, there were 39 laws for things that you had to do on the Sabbath, or that you couldn't do on the Sabbath. So God says, "Honor the Sabbath, keep this holy, it's a day of rest." They say, "Okay, okay, amen and amen, but also, do this." There was 39 laws. Among those laws were these. I'm not going to read all 39, it would take some time. But among the things you couldn't do: you could not sow, you couldn't sow seed. You couldn't plow, you couldn't plow your fields. You couldn't bake, you couldn't weave, you couldn't tie things up. You couldn't build anything, you couldn't destroy anything. And notably, for today's text, about this guy who's going to carry his bed, you know what else you couldn't do? You couldn't carry things. The amount of things that were limited, the amount of things that they told you, you cannot do. Has anyone ever lived in an HOA that was really restrictive? Your grass is an inch too high and you get a letter, that sort of thing? The Pharisees were those sort of individuals. [chuckles] The Pharisees were like the HOA people. Ah. Looking around to see who had your grass one inch too high. And because of that, they see this guy dancing, he's got his bed and he's healed. And they don't see the happiness and the joy and the miracle, they see him carrying a bed. And so they say, "That's wrong." Now, where did they appeal to? Did they appeal to the book and say, "It's wrong here?" No, they appealed to their traditions. And the traditions, in almost every case, were silly and impossible to enforce. And when you did enforce them, the enforcement was stupid. And I'll give you an example. A few years ago, I went to Israel. Went to Israel and had a wonderful time, saw the sights, had good encounters with other believers. It was wonderful. With that said, we stayed in a hotel, I think it was in Tel Aviv, but we stayed in a hotel. And on the Sabbath, I encountered something I'd never encountered in my life. There was two elevators in this hotel. And on the Sabbath, one elevator was just a normal, standard elevator, and the other elevator was called the Shabbat elevator. Anyone have an idea what that elevator did and didn't do? Well, here's the thing. If you were a devout Orthodox Jew, one of the things that the 39 laws said that you couldn't do, remember the 39 rules? Was that you couldn't start fires.

So fast-forward all these centuries later, with the invention of electricity and the like. You know how they've interpreted electricity? They've interpreted it as a start of a fire. So what they've created in these hotels and the like, is they've created elevators. One's a standard elevator. You go in, you go boop, and you ride up to whatever floor you're looking. The other elevator, on the Sabbath, what happens? That elevator stops at every single floor, up and down. And an Orthodox Jew will get on that elevator, why? Because they don't have to push a button to start a fire. This is the whole idea. They'll go into the elevator. Stepping isn't against the 39 laws. You can step into something. But they don't have to take any action. No work. I don't have to push a button. I don't have to start a little tiny fire that's going to send this to the seventh floor or what have you. The Shabbat elevator stops at every single floor, even to this day. That's legalism. It's silliness. But it's also the sort of silliness [chuckles] and legalism that we see here, where the Jews and the elites and the Pharisees and the scribes and the Sadducees and whoever was gathered there sees a guy carrying his bed, and they freak out because he's carrying his bed onThe Sabbath. Today's text involves this one-on-one encounter with this guy, but you know what this text is really about? The winds of persecution begin to blow right here. The things that would lead to the last two-thirds of the Book of John, where Jesus is going to be persecuted and ultimately crucified, here the winds start brewing because Jesus is going to do two things they're not going to like. Number one, he's going to do a healing on the Sabbath, and this man is going to respond by breaking the Sabbath regulations and carrying his bed. So that's going to offend them at the outset, but then he's going to do something they're going to hate even more, and they're going to say, "We're going to kill you." He's going to say something that is going to link himself, Jesus the Son, with God the Father, and it's going to break their brains, and for the rest of the Book of John, they're going to be out to get him. All right, let's look at verses one through four and then work our way through this passage. Verses one. Verse one says, "After this there was a feast of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem." As a side note, we have no idea what feast it is. It isn't named here. And secondarily, when it says Jesus went up to Jerusalem, in that context, it didn't necessarily mean that he went from the south to the north. Going up to Jerusalem is this idea that you went up to the mount, up the hill, up into Jerusalem because the altitude was higher. So 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, the blind, the lame, the paralyzed, waiting for the movement of the water. For an angel would go down at a certain time into the pool, stir up the water. Then whoever stepped in first after the stirring of the water was made well of whatever disease that he had." All right. In verse one, Jesus goes to this unnamed feast in Jerusalem, but he's really going right into the hornet's nest, so to speak, because the overwhelming majority of the enemies who would make it his life are going to be right here in Jerusalem. In the holy city, God's holy city, ironically, are the greatest enemies of God. So he goes up into this holy city in verse one there. Now, interestingly, just as a side note, in verse two, it says that he goes in by the Sheep Gate. Now, what went in the Sheep Gate? I'll give you one guess. [laughs] It was sheep. Principally, it was sheep that went in through the Sheep Gate. That's why all the sick people are hanging out there. This is the smelly gate, right? He goes in through the Sheep Gate, which is fascinating when you think about all the ways that he could have entered the city. He goes in through the Sheep Gate. Well, the Sheep Gate obviously is where the sheep went in. But why did sheep go in the city? Were they crazy about sheep? Why did the sheep go in the city? Well, the sheep were taken into the city to be what? Sacrificed. Sacrificed. Jesus goes to the Sheep Gate. All right, so you have him go to the Sheep Gate, and then near the Sheep Gate, there's this pool that's believed to have these miraculous healing properties. And because of these miraculous healing properties, verse three says that multitudes would hang out there. All the sick and lame and diseased people in Jerusalem, if they were going to go anywhere, they would go to this pool. And the reason they went to the pool, we see there in verse four, is because an angel would come down, apparently daily at these intervals, and would stir the waters, and the first person in would be healed. Now, as an aside,

not all translations include verse four. The ESV does not. The New King James does. Not all translations include verse four because some of the original text, there is some question mark as to the authenticity of verse four. There's the thought that maybe this doesn't depict something that actually happened, but this depicts something that the Jews believed happened. So you may find that verse four, especially if you open the ESV, that it is not there. I think there is a greater burden of proof that it is part of the biblical narrative, and part of the reason I believe it is part of the biblical narrative and not what we call marginal gloss to the side. But part of the reason I believe it is a part of the biblical narrative is because it's the only way to make sense of the verses that follow. The reason people hung out by this pool is because something happened. The reason they waited to get in and their desires, and this guy for years hung out there, is because people were healed. I think the burden of proof is certainly on those who would say that verse four is not part of the witness. I absolutely believe that it is. With that said, there was a biblical precedent for immersion in water followed by healing. Going to the water, we see in 2 Kings 5, you have the Syrian general, a guy named Naaman. He's healed. He goes down in the Jordan River, and he's healed of his leprosy. If you were a sick person sitting there by this pool, you could look back at your own text. You could look back at the Old Testament and say there was other examples of water having these healing properties. And water was obviously symbolic of purification and cleanliness and the like. So there's more than one reason why the people were there, but at the very least, they were there because people got healed there. And this one individual who'd been sick for 38 years, he hoped that day would come when he would be healed, too. All right, let's look at verses five through nine. "Now a certain man was there who had an infirmity for 38 years. Now when Jesus saw him lying there, and knew that he had already been in that condition a long time, he said to him, 'Do you want to be made well?' And the sick man answered him, saying, 'Sir, I have no man to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up.'" Again, it doesn't make sense if that water wasn't being stirred up. "'But while I'm coming, another steps down before me.'" Verse eight. "Jesus said to him, 'Rise, take up your bed, and walk.' And immediately the man was made well. He took up his bed and he walked." And then we hear something ominous. "And that day

was the Sabbath."

All right, verse five. Jesus spots this man who was a fixture at this pool, a fixture at this pool at Bethesda. And what we see there is that Jesus sees him in verse six, and he knew that he'd been in this condition for a long time, and so he approaches him. It wasn't the other way around. It wasn't like the guy clamoring for Jesus. Here he approaches this guy, and he says, "Do you want to be made well?" Now, if you're the guy, what was your answer? Yes, absolutely. You see, my problem, good sir, is, yeah, I want to be made well, but, see, all these other people have people who care about them, and the water gets stirring, and the people are clamoring, and relatives are bringing them, "Let's get him in the water," and the like, and they get in, and I don't. And I've been waiting, and sir, I lack a man to help me out in this regard. So Jesus asks him the question that in a greater sense, he asks all of us, "Do you want to be made well?"And he answers in the way that some of us do answer, "Yeah, yeah." But notice here that he saw this one, this Jesus, as the means to an end, but not the end. Yeah, if you can wait right here and when the water moves, you'll see. When the water moves, you take me down into it, and I'll be good. And I'm going to jump up, and all is going to be well. He saw Jesus as a means to an end. Jesus came to him with the question, "Do you want to be made well?" He affirms, "I do want to be made well," and he sees Jesus as the means to that end. How often do we do that? It's not hard to get people interested in Jesus as long as the Jesus that you propose to them is the Jesus who can cure their finances, who can cure their cancer, who can heal their illness, who can make some miraculous provision for their circumstances. People want that Jesus. You will have a line up and down the road. If Jesus did as small a thing as give everyone a free po'boy here in town, they'd come for that, let alone if everyone got healed who came in here. If everyone who walked through these doors right here could be healed, all of Gulfport would show up. People have no problem turning to God, turning to the church, turning to Jesus on the basis of their lack of wellness. "Do you want to be made well?" "Yes, I do. Absolutely." But their problem is they don't necessarily come to Him. And the sad thing we're going to see about this guy is he's going to affirm, "Jesus, I want to be made well," and Jesus is going to heal him, but the man doesn't want Jesus thereafter. And we're going to get to that in just a few moments. With that said, again, verse nine, we need to linger on this point, [chuckles] verse nine. This passage really isn't about this dude. He's not the focus here. The focus is on this phrase, "And it was the Sabbath," because everything is going to turn. Everything's going to hinge. The trajectory of Jesus and his relationship with everyone in Jerusalem is going to hinge on this verse and the response that the people are going to have to him healing the man on this day. So that day was the Sabbath. Verse 10. "Now the Jews therefore said to him who was cured." So they go to the guy, they see him, he's carrying his bed, and he's excited. The Jews said to him who was cured, "It's the Sabbath. It's not lawful for you to carry your bed." What a weird thing to say to this guy. Debbie Downers here. Verse 11. "And he answered them." So look at his response. They come to him, and all the fire is, they're just, "Err." You know, "Who did this? What's going on? Why are you doing this? What's the deal here?" In verse 11, he said, "He who made me well said to me, 'Take up your bed and walk.'" So they come to him and say, "Why are you carrying your bed?" And then he says, "That guy told me to." "Which guy?" "Oh, gosh, I don't see him." "Did you get his name?" "Uh, no. But he told me. The reason I just broke the law and one of the 39 laws is because that guy told me to do so." We see that in verse 11. So verse 12, "Then they asked him, 'Who is it? Who is the man who said to you, "Take up your bed and walk"?'" Because now they're rolling up their sleeves and say, "All right, we're going to find that guy then." So who is the man who said, "Take up your bed and walk"? But the one who was healed did not know who it was because Jesus had withdrawn, a multitude being in that place. All these sick people just everywhere and He gets lost in the crowd. But then, interestingly, verse 14, "Afterwards, Jesus found him in the temple." Jesus seeks this guy out twice. Jesus comes to this guy twice. He finds him in the temple, and he said to him, "See? You have been made well." But then he says something interesting. He says, "Sin no more, lest a worse thing

come upon you."

And finally, verse 15, "Then the man departed and told the Jews it was Jesus who'd made him well." All right. Rather than rejoice in this man's healing, as we said a few moments ago, the Jewish leadership of that day, they did a holy harumph. "Harumph," they said to this man. "Harumph, what's the deal here?" They're like that overzealous HOA board we talked about earlier. So they ask him, "What's the deal? What's going on? You're carrying your bed. Put that thing down. And who did this?" And he says, "That guy." "Which guy?" "I don't know. He went somewhere else." So that led up to this moment where then Jesus goes and finds him. Jesus comes and finds him and tells him, "Hey, see? You've been made well." But then interestingly, Jesus then says, "Now sin no more, lest a worse thing should come upon you." Now, there's a lot of ways that could be interpreted, and most of them are wrong. This verse does not mean that everything bad that's ever happened to you is a form of judgment. There are those who will have something happen to them. They'll get into a fender bender. They'll have a sickness. They'll have a cold. Something will happen in their vocation or their finances. Something will happen, and their instinct will be to say, "This happened because I did something wrong. This is punishment for what I did." That's simply not the case. Everything bad that has ever happened to you is not a function of your sin. How many bad things happened to Jesus, and how many of them were a function of his sins? Zero. This is true of Paul virtually most of his ministry. Paul's doing wonderful, good, righteous things, and yet suffering and bad things are happening to him. So there's not a one-to-one correlation between I messed up and God's punishing me in some form. I did this thing wrong, so tomorrow I can expect Him to deal with me in some way. So that's the wrong conclusion, but it's also the wrong conclusion to think that He never responds to our sins through some sort of temporal punishment, because He does. And this is what he says right here, "Sin no more, lest a worse thing should come upon you." We don't know how and when God doles out such punishments, but I know this much, that there are temporal consequences for temporal deeds, and we are wise to walk righteously and to avoid the discipline of our master. So we see this in verse 14. That's effectively what He is telling this individual. And then in verse 15, so the guy hears that, sin no more, he's like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah." And then verse 15, the man departs. It's like the moment the conversation ends, the man departed and told the Jews that it was Jesus who made him well. Now, what was his motivation? Honestly, we don't know. There's commentators who say all sorts of things. They ascribe every possible motivation to this guy. But while we don't know exactly what was going on in his heart, we can look at this text in John 5 and compare it to when Jesus heals the blind guy in John 9. Now, the blind guy that He heals later on is excited and professes and tells the leadership straightforward it was Jesus. He does not shirk, does not hide, does not run. He openly confesses, "This is the one who healed me." Not this guy. There's no signOf his promotion of the healer. There's no sign that his response was one of faith. And some read into verse 15, they say, you know what he did? Jesus comes and finds him. He'd been looking to point him out to leadership earlier so he could get himself out of trouble, and then Jesus came and found him. And so he goes to the Jewish leadership and says, "See? It's that guy right there in the temple. That's the guy. That's the guy." He did it to save his own skin. I don't know. I don't know what his motivation is. But I know this much, that him identifying Jesus put all the eyes like laser beams upon him there in the temple. Let's look at our last verses for today, 16 through 18, to see the response of the Jewish leadership of this time. Verse 16, "For this reason," this, this, this reason, "the Jews persecuted Jesus." Remember, because he healed someone and told him to carry your bed. That was it. The bar for killing Jesus was pretty low. For this reason, they sought to kill him, because he healed someone and told him to carry his bed. Okay? Apparently, that's the death penalty. If they had described that sort of thinking inwardly to themselves and all to their malevolence and naughty deeds, man, they'd all be smited moments later. But here, this guy does this wonderful thing, and the response, "For this reason," verse 16, "the Jews persecuted Jesus and sought to kill him, because he had done these things," and not just he'd done them, but he'd done them on the Sabbath. Remember the laws of 39 things? He broke one, therefore, it's all over. But verse 17, "But Jesus answered them and said, 'My Father has been working until now, and I have been working.'" He's saying this to people who had 39 laws that they could pull out. Here's the 39 things you can't do. Don't work. Don't work. Don't carry. No fires. Don't push a button. And he goes and says to them, "My father's been working," which is okay, because God the Father, he was exempt from their laws. They did have an understanding that God is at work. God is always working. So they understood that. That's not the part they have a problem with. He says, "My father has been working," there verse 17, "and I have been working." That they understood with no equivocation to mean he was yoking himself to him, yoking the Son to the Father. Jesus' answer said, "My Father has been working until now, and I have been working." Now, how do they respond? How do we know that they made that connection? How do we know that he was testifying and explaining to them his divine nature? How do we know that that's what he did? Because look at how they responded. Verse 18. Verse 18, "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." They understood exactly what he said and what he meant. Exactly. So to summarize these verses and the overall persecution that was manifest here and that was going to follow, there were two reasons they wanted him dead. The first of all, breaking their made-up laws. However, again, healing a man is not a violation of God's laws. If anyone tells you that you can't work on the Sabbath, they're wrong in this regard. You can work as long as your work is confined within the fields that we would call mercy and necessity. If I have a heart attack, do we have any doctors in the room? If I have one, I hope a doctor comes up. I hope that there's doctors in this room, and I know that there's several. I hope a doctor comes up and helps me out. That doctor would be working, but the work would be a work of mercy, and I would argue necessity. Mercy and necessity would be manifest at that moment. At the same time, I hope that Gulfport's finest are out thwarting crime and dealing with evildoers. Again, this is mercy and necessity. These are good and appropriate works to be done on this day. With that said, healing a man who was born in this condition or for 38 years was in this condition certainly falls within the realm of mercy and necessity. Secondly, they want him dead not only because of that, but because of what he said in verse 17. Again, in the Jewish, it's in the Talmud. The Talmud says that God can and does work on the Lord's Day, and Jesus said, "I can, too." And so they understood that he was saying, "I am God, and I'm equal with God." That was the implication. They heard it and wanted him dead. So this sets the stage. We'll wrap up in just a moment here, but this sets the stage for all the rest of the book. We're only here in chapter five, but what we have seen right here is what we would call the catalyst for everything that's going to happen. All the persecution and anger and hatred and animosity, it starts here. And not simply because a guy healed someone and not simply because a guy carried a bed, but because of this claim we saw in verse 18, where Jesus is identifying himself as divine. People heard it, and they wanted to kill him. This morning, the Good Shepherd came through the sheep gate,

and he came to broken, hurting people saying, "Do you want to be made well?"

This morning, there are broken, hurting sheep in this room. Numerically, I can bet the house on it. There are broken, hurting sheep in this room. Jesus comes to you and says, "Would you like to be made well?"

Almost all of us will say yes. Jesus, I want you to cure this issue, this cancer, this illness, this hardship, this relationship, this financial issue, this occupational issue. Cure it all. Yes, I want to be made well.

But that's not the wellness that Jesus came to bring. He did heal those who were hurting, and he does answer prayers. God answers prayers with regards to the hardships in our lives, but that's not principally the problem that you have. Your problem is not singularly your relationships, your finances, the other things going on in your life, even your health. In due time, all that can and probably will be taken from you. Your problem is that you've offended a holy God, you stand under his wrath, and the wages of sin is death. Jesus, the Great Shepherd, came through the sheep gate with the intention not only to heal the people he found on the periphery, but to go to the cross, to take his message, to take his gospel, to take himself, and to be hung up visibly for all those to see and for our sins to be imputed to him that his righteousness might be granted to us. Do you want to be made well? What do you want to be made well of? If the answer to that is my sin and the cataclysmic gap between me and the one who's made me, that's what I need to fix. If that's your object, if that's your desire, then two things. Number one, Jesus did come to do exactly that, to save us and to reconcile us with our maker. And number two, that should be the great priority of our life and of our testimony to the fallen world. Jesus came to offer temporal good and temporal miracles and temporal healings and all these things, but principally, he came to save us from the wrath of the Father by laying down his own life. If that's what you want, if that's the wellness that you seek, Jesus comes to offer it and to offer it abundantly. Turn to him and live. Let's pray.

[gentle instrumental music] To search through an archive of Dr. Holt's previous sermons, please visit us at fpcgulfport.org, or you can look us up at sermonaudio.com.