Jesus Healed a Paralyzed Man. So Why Was He Persecuted?
THE SABBATH POLICE Sometimes, when we read through the Gospels, we’ll see passages where Jesus does something remarkable, then everyone gets mad. On occasion, the Gospel writers explain why people got angry, but often we don’t get much overt explanation—which causes some twenty-first-century Bible readers to scratch their heads. In the excerpt below from the brand-new Signs of the Messiah, Andreas J. Köstenberger unpacks the John 5 passage in which Jesus heals a paralyzed man, then faces persecution. . . . the narrative (in John 5:5–9a) focuses on one such invalid, a man who had been in this condition for thirty-eight years. This must-have seemed like an eternity for the man to be languishing without a realistic chance of being healed. One of the reasons John may have chosen to include this sign is that there was virtually no way this miracle could have been staged. The man had been lying there for thirty-eight years, and countless people had seen him. This is not an individual who had...