Rest and Conflict

Immediately the man became well, and picked up his pallet and began to walk. Now it was the Sabbath on that day. So the Jews were saying to the man who was cured, "It is the Sabbath, and it is not permissible for you to carry your pallet." (John 5:9-10)

It was the Sabbath on that day. Interesting.

The word Sabbath literally means rest. But it is far more than simply restraining the urge to go out and work at a job. When God talks about rest He is not primarily referring to physical activities. When we get fixated on defining rest or Sabbath observance in terms of checklists that we measure our life against (or more likely other people's lives) then we have fallen firmly into the trap of externalism and our religion has lost its true locus of control.

The Jews had gotten into that trap and are still largely caught there even yet today. But they certainly do not have a corner on that problem. Focusing on outward behaviors is just inherent in our sinful nature. It is so much easier to try to control our externals and appearances than it is to face squarely what is really going on in the heart and to be honest before God and ourselves. But if we fail to allow the Spirit of God to expose and deal with what is going on in our heart we will never be prepared to live in the land where everything is transparent and real and full of light.

This sick man had been trapped by the effects of sin in his life for many years. On top of that he lived in a culture that had strict regulations and traditions that circumscribed how everyone was supposed to function when it came to religion. Although these people had been entrusted with the most truth from God for many centuries they also had the reputation of being the most negligent when it came to obeying that truth from the heart. But then, how different are we, really?

When Jesus came to this man and asked him if he really wished to be well, He was not just referring to the condition of his body. There was so much more in this question that is difficult to discern without sensing the much deeper implications that must have certainly been felt by this man's heart. The very demeanor and voice tone of Jesus likely conveyed much more than the words that we now read on sterile paper. Jesus was not only speaking of his physical healing but was reaching down inside where a much greater pain had tortured this man for so many years. His heart had felt alienated from God and his soul longed for peace as well as comfort and healing.

Then God Himself showed up one day in the person of Jesus Christ and asked this poor wretch, Do you wish to be healed? This man knew that something was being offered him that was far out of the ordinary. People don't just come along everyday and ask a sick man if he might enjoy getting healed. When someone can say that to a person with the kind of authority that Jesus can say it, a person's heart will resonate with the conviction that they are in the presence of Someone that can see far deeper than what most people look at on the surface.

Initially this man's response was typical of how many of us feel in our lives. We have believed all of our lives that it is up to us to help ourselves to some supposed source of healing. We berate ourselves or blame others for not getting the right treatment or talking to the right expert or not being strong enough to achieve the level of performance needed to overcome our obstacles. Eventually we may become discouraged and fall into hopeless despair. We begin to acknowledge that we simply cannot perform well enough to meet the incessant demands of religion or the lofty expectations of those who claim to be the leaders of religion in our particular culture. We finally fall into resignation that we must be the ones destined to be the counterparts of those who will be saved and we are just doomed to be the refuse, the outcasts, the broken ones who cannot measure up and are just here to make the others look better.

We live in a religious culture that is intent on making sure we know how lost we are and how much we are to blame for our wretched condition. Our religion often reinforces our dark views of God and the kinds of punishments that He reserves for those who don't measure up to His expectations. The pious among us too often seem to delight in pointing us out as examples of what not to be like because obviously we are suffering under the judgments of God or we would not be in such miserable conditions. And our own hearts can easily see how our own mistakes and wrong choices have certainly brought on many of our problems and so the accusations and insinuations are given even greater weight to crush out all hope and reinforce the perception that God really does despise us.

But all of these perceptions are really a mirage that obscures from our hearts the real truth about how God feels about us. Our greatest problem is not the effects of sin that we experience and the consequences of so many wrong choices in our past but is the lies and misconceptions about God and how He views us that keeps us from living life in freedom and wholeness. Religion itself can often prove to be one of the greatest curses that keeps millions from accessing the saving grace of God that it purports to offer to people. Until Jesus Himself shows up and begins to speak directly to our hearts, the effects of religious rules and expectations and traditions may only tend to drive us into deeper hopelessness instead of toward the only Source where we can find relief and true rest.

This whole system of religious forms, regulations and expectations by others and even ourself drives many to feel that they must perform to some level of righteousness before God will begin to consider helping them. And it is this very mindset that is reflected in both the words of this man's response to Jesus and the Jew's words to this man after he was healed that God wants to address in the rest that is to be found in the true Sabbath. Ever since sin came into this planet and caused us to focus more on ourselves than on God we have been trying to appease God, to placate Him, to induce Him to feel more kindly toward us, to impress Him with our achievements or to turn away from Him in disgust because of the reputation He has received from those who claim to represent Him.

But when this man chose to turn away from all of that and simply respond obediently to the invitation of Jesus to live in wholeness and joy, he discovered to his amazement that not only did he experience physical restoration but he also began to experience true internal rest in his spirit that he had not known for most of his life. It was no accident that when he chose to obey Jesus and was infused with new life and energy that it was the same day that God had originally designed for all of His children to live in the closest intimacy with Him and be restored and revitalized for another week of activity.

The true rest that this man entered into at the invitation of Jesus suddenly stood out in stark contrast to the imitation kind of rest that the Jews had cultivated through centuries of tradition. They had come to believe that God was some kind of demanding dictator that was mostly interested in outward conformity and performance and obedience to long lists of rules. But they had ignored the real issues of how they related to others, especially those less fortunate or less religiously capable. As a result they heaped condemnation on anyone who didn't measure up to their assumptions about what God demanded of people and were quick to censure and shame anyone who didn't fit into their mold, their little box that they insisted contained the God of the universe.

The Jews had so externalized religion and their concept of God that they believed that when God spoke of Sabbath rest that He was demanding that people just limit their outward activities to meet His arbitrary demands for compliance. This is always the result of living in a fear-based religion, a view of God that is focused more on outward performance and rule-keeping than having anything to do with the condition of what is in our spirit. But God sees not as man sees, for man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart. (1 Samuel 16:7)

Whenever a person chooses to respond to God's invitation to enter into the kind of rest that only God can give – that true Sabbath rest that God desires all of us to experience – we are going to find ourselves in sharp conflict with those who refuse to believe or participate in that kind of real rest. A person who begins to demonstrate in their experience and spirit the peace and joy that God's kind of rest produces will act unconsciously as a light that begins to expose the hollowness, shallowness and hypocrisy of all other claims of religious piety. Real rest and counterfeit rest can never live in close proximity without sooner or later creating conflict.

We will be faced yet again with the same kind of showdown that this man ran into soon after his own healing. If we choose to enter into the real kind of rest that Jesus invites all to come into we are inevitably going to find ourselves accused of disobedience and heresy by those who are unwilling to relax and rest in the righteousness that can only be found in trusting and obeying the direct words of Jesus and following the promptings of His Spirit in our hearts. True Sabbath rest can only be found in a heart belief in the goodness of God and trusting in His care for us, not in trying to live in perfect compliance with a list of rules and restrictions in order to avoid offending a stern God.

Where is my Hope?

Jesus said to him, "Do you wish to get well?" The sick man answered Him, "Sir, I have no man to put me into the pool...." (John 5:6-7)

As I have been dwelling on this passage for some time now I too have been hearing Jesus say each day, “Do you wish to get well?” As I looked at this again today I heard Him saying something else in the way these verses are laid out above.

I have learned a great deal about what is sometimes called 'inner healing ministries' over the past few years. Most of what I have learned has been very helpful and my own journey had been greatly enhanced and advanced by new understandings of what is really going on inside my heart and mind. I have learned how much my past affects my present reactions to situations and how hidden lies play a pivotal role in skewing my perceptions of reality and relationships. These false ideas are almost always linked to events much earlier in my life and are often buried under years of subsequent experiences and repetitions of being triggered by similar circumstances that confuse me about what is going on.

But as many of these false assumptions and beliefs have been exposed through various trials designed to flush them into the open or times of focused ministry, and as I have been willing to accept responsibility for my own 'stuff' instead of blaming others, God has shown me that these times of feeling triggered can actually become vital opportunities to discover these inner land mines and allow His Spirit to deliver me from them by bringing truth to those deep and painful places in my soul.

But here is one of the most important aspects of being able to participate in that healing process that God is wanting to accomplish in my life. I have to give Him permission each time to access those places of deep pain, fear, shame etc. or else He cannot finish what He so wants to do effectively in my life to grow me up into greater maturity. If I cling to the idea that my problems are someone else's fault, then I am not taking enough responsibility for my own actions, feelings and choices to allow God to do what He longs to do to deliver me from these enslaving problems that control so much of my life.

This is where I see some of what Jesus was dealing with in this man's life. When Jesus saw that this man had been stuck in the trap of dealing with a sick body and mind for so long, He did not just come up and heal him without discussion. He was restrained by the rules of engagement that are in place in the supernatural realm which dictates that there are certain things that simply cannot be done without the permission of the human involved. God is fiercely protective of our right to choose who will be the supernatural power that is in charge of us and He respects that choice even when we make it against Him. But He longs to free us from the enslavement of Satan when our previous choices have put us into various chains that imprison us in one way or another so that we can have another chance to live the kind of life He wants for us.

Notice that at first this man was still in the mode of blaming others for his problems. He seemed to miss the main point of Jesus' question to him. And this is where many of us can get stuck if we are not careful. Blaming others is one of the most subtle but dangerous attitudes that can hinder so many of us from receiving the healing we desperately need. As long as we choose to believe that our problem is our spouse, our children, our neighbors, our enemies or our government, we can often block our own deliverance from the control of sin in our lives and hearts.

Blaming in effect hands someone else the key to our prison and then continues to accuse them of being the one keeping us in there.

If they didn't do that – act that way – say those things etc. then I wouldn't have all these problems.

If people would just be nice to me I wouldn't get so angry.

If others were more fair then I could be more honest.

If others would give me the good things that I deserve then I wouldn't have such problems.

If the government would just give me the money and services that are due to me then I wouldn't be so helpless.

On and on our excuses go but all of them circle around the same center of logic; the focal point of all our problems is somewhere else besides in my own heart.

As long as I make my healing and deliverance contingent on someone else's actions, choices or attitudes I am deferring my own recovery to depend on their choices instead of mine. But Jesus did not buy into that false logic even though this man was caught up in that way of thinking at first. He brushed right past that counterfeit way of seeing life and offered this man a direct invitation to take full responsibility for his own condition and choose to directly act in faith in the presence of the only One who could really save him.

But there is one more thing I am seeing here as well. This man was fixing his hopes on an assumed source of deliverance based on folklore and hearsay rather than on the one and only Source of life and healing and hope. He had based all of his dreams and hopes on trying to get to a pool of water that was popularly believed to actually bring healing to people even though the evidence of such power was anecdotal at best. So when Jesus brought up the subject of the potential of this man being healed, the man immediately reverted to thinking about what he assumed was the only way he might receive it – jumping into the pool before anyone else.

How many times have I latched onto some program, some person who has been rumored to have a powerful healing affect on those who have been there before. I am not saying that others have not really experienced healing through those avenues – God may well have used that to bring healing to many others or He may not have, that is not the issue for me. What I am saying is that if I put more hope in some agent that may have been used by God to heal and deliver others above trusting God to work in my life in possibly a very different way, then I have shifted my faith from trusting God's heart to work directly for me to putting faith in a lesser instrument that well may have some serious hidden faults I know nothing about.

Does that mean that people with secret faults cannot help others come to real healing? I wouldn't limit God so much as that. All of us have faults and many have secret sins that are unknown to most everyone else and yet still God works through their ministries in mighty ways in spite of what is going on behind the scenes. I believe it is dangerous to judge people and try to point out who is being used by God and who is not. It is true that if God reveals something important to us about a person's character that we might do well to be cautious about getting too involved with them. But at the same time we are too easily allured into judging others involved in healing ministries and then feel a bit smug in pointing fingers of blame and censure while at the same time overlooking serious faults of our own.

This can be a very confusing area of life for many of us. I have heard so many people judging others in ministry while promoting their own ways of doing things as if to create competition or discount the integrity of others. But those accusations or insinuations themselves can become a source of doubt for me at times as to the complete integrity of the person leveling those charges. There is a very fine line between analyzing the fruit of someone's spirit and judging others. Jesus made it very clear that it is very dangerous to judge for it exposes us to judgment which is not usually something we want to invite upon ourselves.

But the main point I see here is that whether or not someone else's ministry is legitimate or not or whether some particular method is from God or is a self-promotion of some person seeking control and influence over others is maybe not the main thing God wants us to focus on. I have seen God use all sorts of various people and situations that seemed clearly to be far less than holy or sanctified or devoted to the glory of God exclusively. God is not limited to working only through those who are perfect or totally submitted to His control in their hearts, and we should be extremely restrained in how we jump to judgment about the ministries of others. “Judge not that you be not judged.”

What we do need to pay attention to is that fact that Jesus may be showing up in a very different way than how we expect at times and it can be dangerous to spend our time fixated on some other method of deliverance than what Jesus is offering us right now in the present. He may appear as a very humble-looking, ordinary person with no compelling features to identify Him as our Savior and friend, but His Spirit will always draw us away from our excuses and compel us to face our own issues internally. If we miss this opportunity because we stay too focused on why we have not received help in the past we might just miss the greatest opportunity we have ever been given.

I want to get my mind more open to accepting the fact that God very well might come to me in a most unexpected way to accomplish my healing and deliverance. I don't want to create such limitations in my mind, such tight parameters believing that God cannot possibly work outside of them so that I refuse to recognize an offer of healing because it doesn't fit my expectations. If this sick man had insisted on getting Jesus to help him into the pool the next time the waters moved instead of acting in faith on the invitation of Jesus to immediate healing, who knows how sadly this story may have ended.

Obviously at some point here this man chose to turn away from his excuses and embraced Jesus' invitation for a whole new way of thinking and acting. He threw away his former reasoning and hopes and took a bold step in a direction he had never considered before. He broke out of his little box and allowed God to bring into his heart a new potential for believing and living that he had never known before. He chose to trust in the heart of the plain-looking man in front of him and take full responsibility for his own life and trusted in the words that spoke directly to his heart.

Do I want to be well? Do I want to walk and jump and dance and celebrate and be free of my past, my inhibitions, my fears, my pain, my timidity? Yes I do.

But it is not enough to just wish to be well. This man had wished to be well for a very long time, but he had to move beyond wishing and respond immediately in faith – faith in the heart of the One who was the only real source of hope and life for him. Then his faith motivated him to act on that faith by obeying the instructions of the One who was offering him the seemingly impossible. But as a result the impossible became not just reality but the source of immense joy in his life.

Unusual Rest

Immediately the man became well, and picked up his pallet and began to walk. Now it was the Sabbath on that day. (John 5:9)

I have been sensing the call of God to my own soul in this story for several weeks now. I have been hearing Jesus whispering to me that it is time for me too to pick up things I have been lying on for so long, to put aside my excuses and doubts and to begin to walk. I have been seeing developments taking place in my life in which I am challenged to get outside of my comfort zone, to deliberately make choices that are uncomfortable and potentially frightening to me that require faith in the power of God to enable me to do things that I have in the past failed to do very well if at all.

Just like this sick man I was raised in a culture that put great emphasis on the lists of things a person was not supposed to do on the Sabbath day. Very much like the Jews we had created many restrictions and regulations and detailed instructions about what was allowable and what was sinful concerning activities during the hours of the Sabbath. Like the Jews we were taught to be very careful to guard the edges of the Sabbath and we knew to the very minute when it began and when it ended so as to avoid offending God by doing or saying something that might get Him upset.

I am not trying to diminish the importance of true Sabbath observance or of guarding the edges of the Sabbath from profaning it. But what I am seeing so clearly now is that if a person's heart is not truly engaged and growing in a love affair with the Creator of the Sabbath, then all attempts to keep the Sabbath holy are nothing but smokescreens and charades that only serve to deceive our own hearts into thinking that we are obeying the will of God for our lives.

Jesus was the very author of the whole idea of the Sabbath to start with. It was Jesus who created the world in the beginning and it was Jesus who rested on that first Sabbath. After creating a most amazing masterpiece of beauty and perfection and synchronized love, the whole universe burst out into spontaneous celebration at this fresh revelation of the glory and magnificence of God. It was this very same Jesus who's words had literally brought into existence everything that existed on this planet and who was standing before this pitiful victim of the effects of sin. Jesus had a deep longing to restore into the lives of His precious children a sense of what the Sabbath was originally intended to be – a guarded, sacred time of intimacy with the greatest Lover of the universe, free of all distracting influences that would detract from their paying attention to each other.

The Sabbath was made for man, not the other way around as Jesus stated quite clearly. Yet religious people prompted by the deceptive spirit of Satan have worked incessantly for centuries to distort, defame and invert everything about the true Sabbath that God had originally designed to draw people back into intimate fellowship with Himself. The whole purpose for God's rules about avoiding work on the Sabbath had everything to do with removing distractions from experiencing intimacy with Him, but humans had turned it into a concept of appeasement for a demanding, selfish, threatening Dictator in heaven.

Not a great deal has changed even in our own day quite sadly. There are still very many of us who cling to the dark pictures of God similar to what the Jews espoused in the way we view how God intends for us to 'keep' the Sabbath. Because we have never accepted the truth about God's desire for intimacy with Him we have fallen into the trap of obsessing over external forms and regulations while completely ignoring and even discounting the most important purpose for the Sabbath – a time when God wants to come and have a date with His chosen bride each week.

Given this sad state of affairs, Jesus found Himself in the midst of a whole nation filled with prejudice and false ideas about God and that enforced hundreds of petty rules with great rigidity about how to supposedly keep the Sabbath from being profaned, while in their hearts where the Sabbath was intended to take place they harbored selfishness, pride and self-righteousness. This atmosphere of misapprehension about God and His true desires for His people was so suffocating that Jesus had to be careful to not stir up their anger and prejudice too much lest He cut short His time on earth.

Yet the compassion of God's heart could not be suppressed completely even in this oppressive atmosphere of unbelief and His heart longed to heal every person around that pool. Seeing this most wretched victim of sin that was so bad he was approaching the end of his hope and even his life, Jesus could refrain no longer from expressing His compassion and He came to offer this man the greatest gift He could give.

But we in our own prejudice and confused ideas about God still might miss the main point of what Jesus was about in this story, for it is no accident that this mention of the Sabbath is so closely linked to the event of this man's healing. As important and wonderful as the healing of this man's body was, that was not the greatest gift that Jesus had to offer him. Rather it was the gift of true soul rest that is only found in a real appreciation for what the Sabbath is all about. And this gift was not only being extended to this one man only but was actually being offered to everyone who would be willing to open their eyes a little and begin to perceive what God was really wanting for them.

Jesus came to reveal the heart of the Father more than anything else. Every act, every word, every gesture and look that came out from the life of Jesus was meant to unravel and destroy the massive web of lies from the enemy about how God feels about lost sinners. Since the Sabbath is at the very core of the intimate relationship that God wants to have with His children it has become the object of special attention by the enemy in His attacks to defame the reputation of God on earth. Likewise, the Sabbath also became the focal point of Jesus' ministry in His work to unmask Satan's lies while Jesus time and again tried to get through to His people the true purpose and role of celebrating the Sabbath the way heaven designed for it to happen.

The Jews had improperly assumed that because the laws about the Sabbath included prohibitions against common work, that making even more meticulous laws along this line would make God even more satisfied. But because their hearts were far from God while their professions claimed to be obeying Him, they were unable to see that they were only destroying the real rest of the Sabbath instead of enhancing it. Instead of seeking to come closer to God during these sacred hours of intimacy, their pictures of God caused them to impose ridiculous and burdensome regulations and punishments that caused others to resent God instead of wanting to know Him better. This is the problem that Jesus came to redress and that still needs to be dealt with yet today.

According to the Jew's idea about Sabbath-keeping – and no different than what many yet believe today – they felt that what God wanted were tight restrictions on the physical activities that a person was allowed to perform to keep an arbitrary God from getting upset. But what they seemed to completely fail to comprehend was that the restrictions about working on the Sabbath were meant by God to sweep away all the competing priorities of His people for 24 hours each seventh day so that nothing would interfere with their heart communion with their Creator. As a result the Jews and most of us yet today, failed to realize God's intention for us to experience the real rest of the Sabbath day.

The very word 'Sabbath' quite literally means 'rest'. But while it is true that billions of people over the ages have 'observed' the correct day of the week as the holy Sabbath day, according to the author of the book of Hebrews we have still failed to really appreciate and truly enter into the kind of rest that God created the Sabbath for us to experience.

So there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God. (Hebrews 4:9)

This whole passage in Hebrews is a clear indictment both of the Jew's understanding of the Sabbath and the very similar way that many of us still view it today. We think that we are obeying God by refraining from our checklists of forbidden activities during a 24 hour period of time each week while living in total ignorance as to the true nature of the kind of rest that we need the most, a complete relaxing and refraining from our attempts to be righteous or to provide for ourselves and a corresponding reliance on the goodness and righteousness and provision of our Saviour.

When Jesus had this healed man pick up his pallet and walk around on the Sabbath day, He was not unaware that this was going to create a confrontation about proper Sabbath observance. Far from making a technical mistake, Jesus actually intended for this to be a lesson for all who would be willing to rethink their assumptions about the kind of rest that Jesus has to offer. This experience is often very different than the sort of rest we usually impose on our families when we think we are keeping the Sabbath. What appeared in human opinions to be a clear violation of the Sabbath commandment was in the eyes of heaven a wonderful celebration of the original purpose of the Sabbath – for broken, perverted, sickened humanity to be restored to wholeness and joy and fellowship with the heart of God once again.

In obeying the words of Jesus this man not only received physical healing of his body but he also began to experience the kind of soul rest that empowered him to respond with confidence and assurance when confronted by the technical enforcers of religion's petty rules. This man had entered into a relationship with His Creator who had just restored his body and he now was living under the authority of a different government internally. As such he found his actions and attitudes in sharp contrast with that of the religious 'right' and he was not afraid to say that it was more important for him to obey the words of the One who healed him than the mass of strict regulations imposed on people by the religious authorities of his church.

I know there is much more in this passage waiting to come into the open and I look forward to spending more time listening to what the Spirit has to say to the churches – His people.

Breaking the Sabbath

Now it was the Sabbath on that day. So the Jews were saying to the man who was cured, "It is the Sabbath, and it is not permissible for you to carry your pallet." (John 5:9-10)

There is so much awakened in me when I read these verses that there is simply no way I can begin to cover much of it in just one day. But I want to begin to unpack the wonderful things about this incredible gift of God's Sabbath that has been so obscured by traditions of men and the counterfeit religions of this world.

As I ponder the context of this encounter between this freshly healed man and the stern attitudes of some of the Jewish religionists, I see a stark contrast between the true purpose of the Sabbath as given to us by a passionate, caring, loving, healing Savior and the stern, rule-oriented, legalistic notions of Sabbath-keeping as imposed on people in religious groups dedicated to the idea of appeasing a fearsome God waiting to punish all evil-doers who dare to offend His sensitive nature.

That is not to imply in the least that the Sabbath is not extremely important to remember or that ignoring the central commandment given by God Himself on Mt. Sinai can be without serious consequences. But the greatest lies that keep us from properly understanding and relating to God as we need to has more to do with how we perceive His heart and His feelings towards sinners more than a need to figure out in detail every rule and regulation that He has given humanity over the centuries. We may be ever so accurate in detailing and expostulating on which Old Testament laws were eclipsed by the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross and which ones reflect moral principles than can never be obscured. But if our spirit is not in harmony with the Spirit that emanates from the heart of God, then our logic and 'truth' will prove to be worse than worthless.

This fact has been demonstrated clearly by the very Jews who were involved in this story itself. The Jews had spent hundreds of years trying to perfect their understanding of the Scriptures and God's instructions to His people in order to try to align their lives perfectly with His commands for them. But because of their mistaken focus on the externals at the expense of connecting with God at the heart level even more intently, they had slipped into a mode of thinking that eventually resulted in such hardened hearts that they felt compelled to murder the very illustration of those laws who had come to reveal their true meaning in the life of Jesus Christ.

Jesus' main purpose for coming to this earth was to reveal the heart of the Father to sinners who had been lied to about Him. All of us have very little concept of the reality of the truth about how God really views us. We have thought that God uses our methods and principles to motivate us to be 'good'. We usually believe firmly in a mixture of enticements and threats, of using a 'carrot and stick' approach and we treat each other the way we believe that God treats us. (I believe this is a legacy of eating of the Tree of both Good and Evil.) We confirm this in our religious thinking by compiling supposed proofs from Bible stories and firm up our religious notions about an angry God who, if considered by a clear-thinking, unaffected child-like simplicity would be seen to be something of a schizophrenic the way we teach about Him.

God knew that we were buried very deeply in lies about Him and that religion is one of the greatest sources of those lies. That is why He sent His Son to live among those who were promoting many of those very lies in His name – to expose them for what they were by demonstrating in person what God is really like and how He really feels about us. For some people it began to seep in; for many others it only confused and hardened them even more and made them enraged that anyone would dare to challenge their firmly entrenched opinions about what God has to be like.

To look carefully at the difference between how Jesus viewed the Sabbath and how the Jews and many others have viewed it is to step into the very center of these conflicts relating to how we perceive God and the many false beliefs that still infect our hearts yet today. In this story Jesus had just demonstrated unequivocally how He felt about sinners and helpless people who had been taken down by the results of sin. In contrast the religious people were certain that sickness and disasters were nothing less than arbitrary punishments by an offended God who was determined to get even with anyone who disagreed with His demands. They believed that keeping their meticulous rules about the Sabbath were far more significant than bringing relief and grace to the problems that sin had caused in a person's life.

When we put the blame on God for the bad things that happen in our lives instead of placing it squarely where it really belongs, on the author of sin and on our own evil choices to remove ourselves in various ways from under the protection of God, then we will always find ourselves firmly in the grasp of deep deceptions about how God really relates to us. The Jews were immersed in these kinds of notions about God and many of us are exactly like them today but without being willing or able to perceive it. An externalized religion always produces a deceived heart and a deceived heart will always be in the process of being hardened against the real truth about God's mercy, kindness, compassion and grace.

Later in this story Jesus did indeed warn this man to avoid sin lest he find himself in deeper problems than the ones he had just escaped through the kind healing of God. It is very likely that this man's sickness was a direct result of his own bad choices and that he had needed much more than simply physical healing. But the way Jesus responded to his plight was in stark contrast to the uncaring attitude of the Jews only concerned that this man was violating the external regulations they had put in place to supposedly safeguard the holiness of the Sabbath hours.