Rise, Take Up Your Mat, and Walk
When Mercy Interrupted Thirty-Eight Years of Waiting Jerusalem in the days of Yeshua was never a quiet place, especially near the Sheep Gate. Pilgrims entered the city there, animals for sacrifice were brought through, merchants shouted their prices, and the streets were constantly filled with movement. Yet just beside that busy entrance to the city there was a place where time seemed to move very differently. It was the pool called Bethesda, a place surrounded by five long stone porticoes where those who were sick gathered together, not because it was comfortable, but because it represented the last hope many of them had. “Now there is in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate a pool, which in Hebrew is called Bethesda, having five porticoes.” John 5:2 Under those shaded colonnades lay people whose bodies had failed them. Some could not see. Some could not walk. Others were simply too weak to stand. Each person had a thin woven mat spread beneath them on the stone pavement, and each on...
