Rise, Take Up Your Mat, and Walk
When Mercy Interrupted Thirty-Eight Years of Waiting For thirty-eight years a man lay beside the pool of Bethesda hoping for healing, until the day Yeshua stopped, spoke to him, and changed everything with a single command. 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 t...