He Remembered ...
Thirty-eight. Thirty-eight long years the man at the pool of Bethesda had lain on its perimeter, hoping, wishing, he had someone to help him get in the pool at the precise moment the angel moved the waters so he could be healed. But there was no one. And so he lay by the pool, hope withering away every day a little bit more. Until the day Jesus came.
Scripture does not tell us Christ's age at the time of this miracle. We are told that He began His ministry about the age of thirty. So he had to be at least thirty, but not older than thirty-three, that being the age when He died on the cross. So somewhere between thirty and thirty-three, Jesus came to the pool of Bethesda. And there lay the paralytic, the man who had suffered from his infirmity for thirty-eight long years.
He might have been born with his affliction and was thirty-eight years of age or it could be that he suffered an illness or an accident that left him in that debilitated state for thirty-eight years and was actually older. We don't know. We just know that for all the negatives that kept him from entering the pool at the right time, he clung to hope. He had nothing else.
Some of my Bible study friends hold his infirmity against him. After thirty eight years, they posit, he should have found some way to enter the pool in a timely manner. I just shake my head. When someone is infirm, their movements are compromised. And he had no friend, no relative, to come to his aid. To my way of thinking, criticizing him for not entering the pool fast enough is tantamount to blaming a sick person for not having enough faith to be healed instantaneously. Who said healing would always be immediate?
Faith is a funny thing. It's believing in God to fulfill His promises, but it has absolutely nothing to do with a specific timeframe.
Wasn't Abraham a great man of faith? Yet it took 25 years from the divine promise of a child to its fulfillment. Simply put, believing God for something isn't a guarantee that His timetable is yours.
To begin with, our concept of time is extremely limited. With his train experiment, Einstein proved that speed and gravity affect how fast time passes for each of us. My time, within its own personal parameters of motion and gravity, are different from someone else's. If we as humans have to struggle to perceive such fluctuations in time, how can we think we can hold the Eternal One to miniscule, finite human time frames? He is God. And yes, He is faithful. But the when He decides to fulfill His promise is entirely up to Him. Ours is to believe ... and then to wait, believing. Not an easy thing to do. Yet paralyzed Bethesda guy did it.
While the healing was great, the thing I find so endearing about the story is this. Jesus was up in Heaven seeing paralyzed guy before He ever came to earth and took on this moral coil. He saw him ... and He did not forget him. In due course, as He walked the dusty roads of the holy land, He took the time to come to him. With all the important things and teachings He had to accomplish in His whirlwind three and a half years of ministry, at the divinely appointed time, He detoured to seek out paralyzed guy. He remembered his longing and desperate faith, the things He had seen in Heaven before the incarnation. And the incredibly awesome thing? He did not think less of him for his weakness and impotence. No, He remembered him. And He came to him.
Sometimes God's promises seem a long time coming. But He is always, always faithful. He remembers. He remembers you. He remembers His promise to you. And whatever He has promised you will come. Because He is faithful. And because, just like deprecated-in-the-eyes-of-the-world paralyzed guy, you are precious to Him.
"Thy gentleness hath made me great" (Psalm 18:35).
"Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear him"(Psalm 103:13).
"... my kindness shall not depart from thee, neither shall the covenant of my peace be removed, saith the Lord that hath mercy on thee" (Isaiah 54:10).
"But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day" (2 Peter 3:8).
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