About Healing

"Healing" … we all need it from time to time. If not us personally, our loved ones do. How many wives or husbands (as it says in James 5:16) pray as fervently and effectually as they can for healing when their partner in life is sick or on their death bed? What about children, your very own flesh and blood; is there anything worse than watching the child God created for you to love and nurture, pass from this world to the next because for whatever reason … God didn't heal?

I will be the first to admit when it comes to … "healing" … I just don't understand. So … I've been thinking about what the Word has to say about this perhaps most important subject there is next to salvation itself.

This short discourse is my attempt to answer two main questions …

1.) "Is healing really God's will for us?"
2.) "Why aren't we healed every time we pray?"

The Apostle John wrote about God's love and His "will" for us with these words through the anointing of the Holy Spirit in 3rd John 2 …

"Beloved, I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth." K.J.V.

I have always thought and continue to believe this verse means …

"I wish above all things that you may prosper in the following two ways, spiritually and with good health physically." (my translation)

Several years later when the Amplified Bible came out I read this …

"Beloved, I pray that you may prosper in every way and that your body may keep well, even as I know your soul keeps well and prospers." Amp.

God wants your soul and body to prosper and if you prosper in other ways, great. Most people just quote the part about prosperity as if that is what the most important part of this verse is about. The meaning of the word "prosper" in its original context is not about material things … it is a term which means to have "a prosperous journey" as you travel the road of life.

If it is God's "will" for us to be in health then why aren't we healed more often when we pray? Why would God make it so difficult to receive something that Jesus already paid the price for? I'm speaking of the stripes from the Roman whip that left His back torn and bloody from the scourging He received before going to the cross. I thought He suffered the stripes for our healing?

Isaiah 53:5 … "But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon Him; and with His stripes we are healed."

Some thirty years later the Apostle Peter must have remembered the scourging he watched Jesus receive that fateful morning before his Lord was crucified, from the fact that he was inspired to write almost the same words as Isaiah had written hundreds of years earlier; words that most people believe to be a promise … "by whose stripes ye were healed."

But as Peter writes his 2nd letter he changes one word; in place of the words "are healed" that was pinned by Isaiah, Peter uses the words … "were healed" … making it past tense, meaning Jesus appropriated our healing for us when He was scourged.

If we by the grace of God, repent and confess Jesus as our Lord and Savior, receive as a gift both faith and salvation that has been paid for in full by the death of Jesus on the cross; then I ask this question … why can't we also receive healing as a gift since Jesus has also already paid the price for it?

In truth … "I don't know." This is one of those secret things that belong only to God.

I am starting to believe what I just alluded to … that we have already received the power for healing when we received Jesus as our Lord and Savior. Maybe we don't need to ask for something we already have … just declare it so … "by the blood of the Lamb and the word of our testimony" … as a declaration of our faith.

Speaking of Peter, I also remember the question that Jesus asked him after Peter's faith failed and he started to sink when he walked on water. That question was … "Why did you doubt?" Could doubt be why we are not healed every time?

So … "Why do I doubt?" For me it's simply this …

"I can't find in the Word where God has promised to heal every person, every time, in every situation."

Am I doubting God? No … not God.

I just doubt that all of God's "will" for each of us has been revealed in the Word. His general "will" has; but as I have already stated, not the unrevealed secret things that are known only to Him. Things like the number of days we have left.

Why do I keep praying for healing? Because we are instructed to. It's that simple.

Let God be God. Pray, trust God and go on.