Objection: Jesus Did Only What He Saw the Father Do.  He Only Saw the Father Heal ONE Person at the Pool of Bethesda.

Jesus ministered as a man anointed by the Holy Spirit.  He was God, but He stripped Himself of His divine privileges and lived under the same limitations that we have.  He healed many people through special manifestations of the Holy Spirit, whereas many others were healed through their faith when they came to Jesus.  This latter part is undeniable given the times that Jesus told people that their faith had healed them.  (If many modern preachers were around back then, they would have boycotted Jesus’ meetings and encouraged others to do the same.  They would have considered it an invitation to spiritual pride to tell someone that his faith, rather than Jesus Himself, did something.  But in the Bible, it is unquestionable that the individuals’ faith in Jesus, the Anointed One, was responsible for many healings.)

The man at the Pool of Bethesda was obviously not in faith.  He was healed through a manifestation of the Holy Spirit, just as unbelievers today are sometimes healed in services with no faith of their own in operation.  We cannot control the manifestations of the Spirit in individual cases, and neither could Jesus.  If He could have done so, He would have had an unfair advantage over the rest of us, and it would no longer be true that we can do the works that He did and greater.

The Holy Spirit only manifested Himself in this particular way for this one person.  It is common today for one or two people to be healed supernaturally in a service with no faith in operation.  I have heard people say that they were healed even though they were not expecting anything to happen.  This is how the Holy Spirit often operates when it comes to so-called gifts of the Spirit.  But what people miss is that anyone can get healed through faith in God’s Word without ANY special manifestation of the Spirit.  If the others at the pool were in the same faith that the multitudes elsewhere had, they could have been healed as well.

The objector who brought this up continued that once the others at the pool saw this divine healing, they surely would have asked Jesus to heal them, and so He surely turned them down.  There is NO evidence for this; that’s pure speculation.  I can prove to you from the Bible that just because one person gets healed does not mean that anyone else will want or get anything.  In the famous incident where a paralytic was let down into a room through the roof, only that one man got healed.  Yet Luke records that the power of the Lord was present to heal them – the religious leaders who were present (Luke 5:17-26).  The power was present, but only one person got healed.  Every sick religious leader could have been healed, but not a single one of them got anything, even after they all saw a miracle happen right in front of their religion-blinded eyes.  No one else asked for healing, let alone came for healing in faith.  The others who could have been healed but weren’t healed simply thought that they had seen something strange.  That proves that when one man received healing from Jesus Christ, other sick people who saw it would not necessarily ask to be healed.  Also, remember that Jesus healed this man when he saw their faith (the faith of the man and his friends), and this kind of faith was obviously lacking in the religious leaders.

The others at the pool may have thought that they had seen something strange, but they did not approach Jesus.  Like the man, they were probably still trusting in their healing shrine to do the work, not Jesus.  It was hard enough for Jesus to get that man’s focus off the pool let alone get the others to change what they were trusting.

As far as Jesus seeing the Father heal only one person, clearly Jesus offered healing to all who would believe, and that is what He saw the Father doing.  It was not His Father’s fault (or His) when people did not receive healing from Him.  Did Jesus see the Father only healing the paralytic?  Because Jesus was the Anointed One, the anointing was available to heal the others.  They just didn’t receive it.  Jesus was anointed, but the people at the pool did not recognize this.  The woman with the issue of blood believed that Jesus was the Anointed One, and she came and received healing even when Jesus was just going about His business traveling from one place to another.

Jesus did not turn down those who came to Him for healing, but He did not necessarily go around healing people who did not ask to be healed.  There are exceptional cases such as this incident where He did.  The rule was for people to come to Him to be healed.  He never told anyone who came, “Sorry, but I just don’t see the Father healing you.”  Jesus never made anyone sick for some spiritual reason, as the religionists of our day maintain that God does now.  This objection should be neatly turned on its head.  The mass healings that Jesus did were what He saw the Father doing.  Going around healing those who were oppressed of the devil was an expression of what Jesus saw the Father doing.  If Jesus always did what the Father wanted, and He healed people in His earthly ministry, never making anyone sick, what can we conclude about what He saw the Father doing?  The opposite of what this objection says!