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Good morning. It’s Wednesday, September 2nd!

🥳 Congratulations on starting today with God, and thank you for letting us be a part of it.

📖 Verse Of The Day

— John 5:4

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🧠 Devotional

Here’s something you may have never noticed in your Bible.

Open John 5 in the NIV and look at the verse numbers. You’ll see verse 1, 2, 3…and then 5.

John 5:4 is missing.

Before anyone panics, no, someone didn’t accidentally forget a verse.

John 5 tells the story of Jesus healing a man at the Pool of Bethesda who had been suffering for thirty-eight years. When Jesus asks if he wants to get well, the man says:

“I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred.” — John 5:7

Okay…why does stirred water matter?

If you have a KJV, there’s actually a verse explaining it. John 5:4 says an angel would come down and stir the water, and whoever entered first afterward would be healed.

But many newer translations put those words in a footnote instead.

Here’s why.

Before the printing press, Scripture was copied by hand. Today we have ancient manuscripts from different times and places that can be compared. Some of our earliest copies of John don’t contain verse 4. The verse appears in later manuscripts, sometimes with differences in its wording.

One likely explanation is that verse 4 began as an explanatory comment from a scribe giving readers context about the pool. Somewhere in the copying process, that explanation made its way into some copies as part of the passage.

At first, that might sound like a problem.

But think about how we discovered it.

We don’t have one lonely copy of John that everyone has been copying for 2,000 years. We have manuscripts from different times and places that scholars can compare. They can see where the manuscripts agree and where they differ.

That’s how we can spot something like John 5:4.

And modern translations aren’t hiding it. They tell you about it right there in the footnote.

That’s really the lesson behind this strange little missing verse.

The Bible was copied by human hands for centuries, and those copies aren’t identical. But because so much manuscript evidence survived, those differences can actually be studied.

Something that might initially look like a reason to doubt the Bible actually shows us how closely its text can be examined.

John 5:4 isn’t something we have to hide from. We know about it because we have the evidence to find it.