Do you want to be made well? No matter whom you ask this question, it is likely to be viewed as either impertinent or absurd. Those who are physically whole and reasonably well-adjusted are likely to respond, “Are you daft? There’s nothing wrong with me! I don’t need to be made well!” Conversely, those who are physically disabled, injured or ill or who are in any way mentally or emotionally wounded are likely to respond, “Are you daft? What’s wrong with you? Of course I want to be made well!”
But this is precisely the question that Jesus asked the crippled man He encountered by the Pool of Bethesda in Jerusalem. This encounter as recorded in John 5:1-9 of the Bible says that the crippled man had already been in that condition for 38 years and that Jesus knew this before He even spoke to him. And yet Jesus had the audacity to ask the poor man, “Do you want to be made well?”
What was Jesus asking? Was He being facetious or cruel? Hardly. Jesus’ question hinted at a much deeper but hidden problem for the crippled man that we as human beings know intuitively is true for all of us but which we still often try to deny: that apart from God, we are all hopelessly broken on the inside.
Like the crippled man by the Pool of Bethesda, the sad truth is that without God, no matter what we might try to do in our own effort and strength to “get into the pool” and get our circumstances fixed on the outside, we still have a deep inner problem of the heart.
This problem of the heart is a restless inner bent for self-destructive behavior that we can’t fix. It is a force that warps our lives and inexplicably drives us to act in irrational ways that repeatedly violate God’s laws, harm ourselves and others, and leave us miserable, empty and defeated. As illustrator for the Pogo comic strip Walt Kelly once famously said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
The Bible has this to say about the human heart: “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. Who can know it?” Jeremiah 17:9. Another rendering of the term “desperately wicked” is “incurably sick.” This sickness of the human heart afflicts us all and if unchecked leads us into ever mounting and unresolved guilt, anxiety, depression, fear, conflict and despair.
There is no natural remedy for this inner sickness, and all human efforts to resist, control or eradicate it are futile and doomed to failure. Moreover, if we are honest with ourselves, we will admit that this inner sickness is terminal, and that without drastic intervention and treatment, this sickness will inevitably end in both physical and spiritual death.
If Jesus had not come along, the crippled man by the Pool of Bethesda likely would have laid there in misery for the rest of his natural life hoping in self-deceived futility for the wrong remedy: someone to help him into the pool to secure a mere physical healing when what he really needed was a cure for his much more serious problem of the heart.
Physical health waxes and wanes, and fortunately for most of us physical sickness is temporary. But the incurable sickness of the heart that Jesus hinted at, what the Bible calls sin, is hopelessly ingrained within each one of us and pulls us all down like gravity toward death and the grave.
Jesus physically healed the crippled man by the Pool of Bethesda, but He also later warned him, “See, you have been made well. Sin no more, lest a worse thing come upon you,” John 5:14. Sin always brings suffering and death, and despite the temporary relief of being physically healed by Jesus Himself, the man by the pool still died and is long dead and gone now.
Since we are all naturally born sinners afflicted with this same incurable sickness of the heart that we know will end in death, the question that Jesus asked the crippled man by the Pool of Bethesda He also urgently asks us today: “Do you want to be made well?”
Do You Want to Be Made Well? 