“Healing is hard“, I once told a friend of mine. “What do you mean?“, he asked. “If it was easy, every one would be doing it,” I countered. Instead, one has to search far and wide to find churches where there is more than a mouthed acceptance of the fact of divine healing.
If it was easy, we wouldn’t have to create elaborate theologies for why healing is not for us today, or why God moves in such mysterious ways that He no longer means what He said. I like to think of it this way, if healing wasn’t a part of the Atonement, God could have said so quite simply and avoided misunderstandings. So we wouldn’t have “…by His stripes we were healed” in 1 Peter 2:24 or the 103rd Psalm verse 3 would end with, “He forgives all our sins.” period.
As a little kid reportedly said to a teacher explaining why Jesus didn’t mean what He said about receiving what you believe, “If Jesus didn’t mean what He said, why didn’t He just say what He meant?” I take the same approach with healing, if God didn’t plan on healing today, why didn’t He just say so? Why did he inundate the Bible with all these scriptures promising the exact thing?
Why didn’t Jesus-the will of God in action-just tell us salvation of the soul was all we could expect from Him and act accordingly? Why didn’t the disciples in Jerusalem get the memo? The fact is God left a multitude of scriptures in the Word because that is exactly what He meant. Think about this carefully:
Healing is not God’s Word because people get healed; but because Healing is God’s Word, people will get healed.
I’ve always thought it best to begin with the right foundation. That’s why healing is forever God’s will even if all the people I pray for in this life do not recover. Anecdote is never the foundation of God’s Word. That’s why we are so creative about stretching theology, to explain our corporate failure to see God’s Word realized. I think we can do better. Those scriptures e.g., “I am the Lord who heals you..” and others, couldn’t be there just to tease us, to tantalize us, could they?
However, healing is hard. In my next post, I’lll share why I believe healing is hard. Notice I didn’t say impossible. My question to the ministers of healing among my readers is: “Is healing hard for you?” “Do you move in gifts that make healing easy?” “Do you follow up the people you pray for to hear the eventual outcome?”
