Foreword
Healing is
a difficult subject to talk about.
Many of us
have known people close to us who have been seriously sick or who have died.
It may even be we ourselves who are sick. We or they have done everything that we or
they knew what to do and yet the sickness remained. We always want to be compassionate with those
who suffer, and we don’t want to be like Job’s friends who turned out to be
“miserable comforters.” It is often easy
to talk and offer solutions when we are the ones who are healthy.
Yet we must not lose sight of the
fact that our goal is to help each other.
We may say
that it is not God’s will to heal us, yet we continue our medications and
religiously follow our doctor’s instructions.
Whatever it is that God wants, we still want to be well.
Yet there are others I have known
who have chosen to remain sick. They
believe this suffering either shows God their devotion to Him or in some way it
makes them feel more worthy of God’s favor.
If you have tried to be healed
supernaturally and nothing seemed to happen, we do not want to add to your
burden by adding guilt or blame. To say
that there is more that we can do is to offer hope, not condemnation. To say that it is entirely in the hands of
God and there is nothing more for you to do does not really offer hope,
especially when it is believed that God may very well want you to die in your
disease.
It is our belief, on the contrary,
that God does want people to be well, that sickness is not what He wants, and
that, frankly, the choice is ours. Yes,
there is more to life that we will ever understand while we live, but health
and healing should be the norm rather than the exception.
The fact is that serious illness
will face all of us at some point in our lives, whether in our own bodies or in
someone we love. Now is the time to
prepare for that and to understand God’s purposes and His provisions. If you knew that some time in your life, you
would have to face an adversary in physical combat to the death, would you not
now prepare for that time? Would you not
train and do what you could to be ready?
When you hear the doctor pronounce the grim news of his diagnosis is not
the time to learn about healing. Now is
the time.
And, of course, the benefits are far
more than just feeling better. You will
see that God’s love really does make a difference in your life now, that God is
more than just a sympathetic bystander but indeed the deliverer of His people.
In this book I have tried to reach
as broad of an audience as possible.
That means that I have tried to assume little or no prior Biblical
knowledge in the main text. I have also
tried to keep the main text free from theological jargon. I believe it is also necessary to write to
the professors and teachers and pastors who teach our future pastors and who
feed their flocks every week. If they
are not convinced that this is relevant and important and, most importantly,
true, then my book will simply become another fad that will pass when the new
latest fad appears.
With this in mind, I have included
the original Greek and Hebrew texts of many of the Scripture verses I have
quoted. The translations are my own, and
I have tried to stay as literal as possible, though at times the English may be
a bit clumsy. To save time, I would
print out an English translation of the text and then change what I needed to
make it more literal. I know many recent
popular books have used whatever modern translation sounds the best for what
the author is trying to say. I think
this can give the impression we are trying too hard to convince someone of the
truth of our message.
I think too
that we as a Church have gotten away from a serious engagement with the text of
Scripture. We judge the validity of a
translation by its readability rather than by its accuracy. The more “modern” the translation, the more
the translator has had to interpret the text for us to make it more
understandable. There are also too many
passages of Scripture that we just don’t talk about anymore. So they are here, and the original texts are
included, so that we might listen anew to the Word of the Lord.
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