"5 After this there was a feast of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.
2 Now there is in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate a pool, in Aramaic called Bethesda, which has five roofed colonnades. 3 In these lay a multitude of invalids—blind, lame, and paralysed. 5 One man was there who had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. 6 When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had already been there a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be healed?” 7 The sick man answered him, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, and while I am going another steps down before me.” 8 Jesus said to him, “Get up, take up your bed, and walk.”9 And at once the man was healed, and he took up his bed and walked.
Now that day was the Sabbath."
John 5:1-9
In many ways, Christ's second word to the man, 'Rise, take up thy bed, and walk' is the most astonishing and extraordinary in all the New Testament. To rise up and walk was precisely the one thing the man could not do, and it was this inability that had kept him at the pool these long years in growing despair. He certainly would not have been lying there if he had been able to do so. And yet, when Christ gave the command, he rose, being made immediately whole. There is a wonderful verse in Proverbs which says, 'Where the word of a king is, there is power'. This is what is displayed here. Behold your king, says John. This is what I am writing about in my gospel; behold the power He exercises: To command the impossible, to call the things that are not as though they were, this is the prerogative of Deity. John began his gospel with the statement, 'In the beginning was the Word...', and he means to say that it was this Almighty Word, by whom all things were made, that stood before the impotent man that day, and spoke him into newness of life. When we think of it in these terms, there can be no surprise at what happened. The surprise would have been if the man had not risen and walked!
He speaks, and, listening to His voice New life the dead receive.
One further point must be noted. The verbs used in the narrative in 6 are deeply suggestive and significant. 'Jesus saw, knew...saith'. He sees our need - no one's need is outwith the range of His all-seeing eye; He knows how long it has been going on and how deep it is; and He speaks, on the basis of what He sees and knows. What hope and assurance are here: He speaks to us in His Word; and when that word is backed by the power behind all powers in the universe, it becomes more than a word, it becomes an experience and a salvation and an unspeakable joy.