Is Healing for Today?

Is Healing for Today?

            Healing is the 800-pound gorilla in the Christians’ living room.  It may not be the only one, but it is not my intention here to survey all those issues that people don’t want to talk about and that still won’t go away.  Occasionally it may be mentioned in a sermon or the classroom, and the pastor or professor may offhandedly make such a comment that suggests that the issue has been long settled, and not only is there no need for you to bring it up, but to do so would show that either you haven’t been listening or you must be relatively new to the faith or at least not very well grounded.

            But the issue persists.  And the reason that it does is that sickness is no respecter of persons.  And when our lives are threatened or that of someone we love, we find ourselves trying to apply what we have been taught about such times, and something just doesn’t feel right. 

            I know a pastor whose son died of cancer.  It was not pretty.  The son left a young wife and a small child.  No, I have not talked with this pastor about what was going through his mind.  I can only imagine what would go through my mind if this were to happen to me.

            We can, and do say, that God is in control.  Well, if this is what can happen if He is in control, He seems to be running a pretty loose ship.  How is this comforting?  What is this saying about God?

            If the thing that I might dread most can be a part of God’s magnificent plan, then all bets are off.  How could I rule out any other evil and say that I am protected from that?  If my son dying from cancer can be a part of God’s perfect plan, then so might my daughter’s rape or my wife’s death in a car accident.  (Yes, these are all hypothetical situations.)

            We might say that God allowed it, and therefore it must be all right.  We think of Job who was afflicted by Satan, yet Satan was limited by as to how much evil he could inflict on him. 

But we are not Job.  Before Job’s problems started, he was a prosperous, blessed man of God.  He was afflicted severely for a specific time.  It had a beginning and it had an end.  We don’t know how long his trials lasted.  It could have been three months, or it could have been three years.  There is no reason to think that it lasted for a long time.  It was the severity of his problems, not the duration that was the issue.  His problems ended, and he lived another 140 years in the blessing of God. 

I don’t want to minimize what he went through.  He lost his children, which he never got back.  He had ten more children with the same ratio of sons and daughters, as if it is being suggested that this is to be understood as God giving back to Job all that he lost.  I know many parents who have expressed their disagreement with this point, but our task in interpreting the Bible is to try to understand how the text was meant to be understood.  And I will stick to my conclusion here.

But even still.  Everything that has ever happened since the beginning of time, every murder, every rape, every war, every disease, plague, or famine, every rotten thing that has ever been done has been allowed by God.  True, some of these are the results of human free will, and others not.  But there are still victims to these acts of free will, and God chose not to intervene.  Or maybe there were other rules that determined God’s inaction.

The point is that the fact that something happened is not made better by the thought that God allowed it, because there is apparently almost nothing that He won’t allow. 

We can say that God indeed sometimes intervenes in human affairs and miraculously heals a person from a life-threatening disease.  More often than not, this is not the case.  More often than not, the disease runs its course, though temporarily slowed by a massive influx of drugs, and we are again confronted by the death of someone leaving behind small children.  And we scramble to make sense of this, but very quickly the verdict is in.  God has some reason that we will not understand this side of heaven, but there must have been a very good reason why this happened.

Many of us have heard stories of how a tragic death was the means by which many people were brought to Christ, either through the testimony of the person dying or through that of those who were left behind.  No doubt good can come from the worst tragedies.  I guess I just wish there were some Biblical precedent for this to confirm that this is God’s best for us in this situation.

Still others will say simply that evil exists in the world, and no one is exempt from its reach.  God’s power and love are not seen in our protection from them but in the grace to endure them.  And endure them with peace and joy.

Whole books have been written on these questions, but the question posed here was about healing.  All these suggested answers have one thing in common.  They essentially say that the outcome is not in our hands.  There is a possibility, on the order of winning the lottery, that God might deliver us from this affliction, but this is all bigger than us, and we need just to wait for the outcome.  Just try to enjoy the ride.

I would like to suggest that there is another way to look at healing, and one that I believe is more in line with the story of Scripture.  There certainly isn’t enough space here to present all the evidence in support of this position or to answer all the questions that might come up.  It would take a book, and I can recommend a good one for that.

In the Old Testament, there are two main themes which run throughout it.  The first is the deliverance of the people of God from the land of Egypt.  We know that this was a picture of our salvation.  By the blood of the Lamb, we were saved from the penalty of sin (death) and from the power of sin (bondage). 

And in many churches today, this is their entire message.  Jesus died for our sins, and now we can go to heaven when we die.

But there is another theme in the Old Testament: the possession of the Promised Land.  This cannot be a picture of heaven, because the land was not something that they could just walk in and enjoy.  They had to take the land.  They were told a number of times to be strong and very courageous.

The question is: is this a picture of the Christian life as well?  And if it is, what is it a picture of?  This land was occupied, and that by giants.  This land was a land of abundance, of cities that they did not build and vineyards that they did not plant.  All for them, but they had to take it.  And when they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, the first time, God was angry and let them wander in the wilderness until they died. 

So, if this is a picture of the Christian life, where would we put ourselves and our churches?  I think most of us would give ourselves good grades as Christians.  But what criteria are we using?  If that had been us at Kadesh-Barnea, hearing the stories of giants in the land, would we have sided with the majority report and said that this was obviously a closed door and we must have misunderstood God’s timing of this?  Or would we have stood with Joshua and Caleb and no one else and say that this indeed was God’s time and we can do this?  If that was our church there instead of the Israelite nation, how would they have fared? 

In the Old Testament, we find that almost the entire first generation of Israelites could not believe God to take the land.  The next generation was able to succeed as long as they had Joshua to lead them.  Without Joshua’s firm and strong leadership, the following generations failed to live up to what God wanted for them. 

Some time later, under the rule of David and Solomon, Israel reached a measure of what God had promised for them.  When David first came on the scene, the entire Israelite army was paralyzed by the threat of a certain Goliath.  Not one soldier was able to stand before him to kill him.  David did, and soon others were able to kill giants as well. 

The picture of life that we get from the Old Testament is that there are many good things that God wants for His people, but they are not just given out like pamphlets on a street corner.  It’s not just that people reject God’s free offers, but the image is that of warfare.  The God of love, in His infinite wisdom and power, in His glorious, magnificent plan for His people, ordained that they would have to fight to obtain the promises He gave to them. 

In the New Testament we read about loving our enemies, but we soon learn that there are other enemies, which indeed we have to fight against.  The fight of the Old Testament is a picture of the fight in the New Testament.  And how does healing fit into all of this?

In the Old Testament, the enemy was clear as well as the stakes.  They knew exactly what they were fighting for and who they were fighting.  Today that is not the case.  Christians today have very little idea of what they are fighting for and who they are fighting. 

When it comes to healing, the average Christian today has no idea what God’s will is.  God may choose to miraculously heal one person, let another be treated medically, and another to die a miserable death in great pain and suffering.  And all of these can be seen as God’s will.  In other words, God’s will is all over the map, and there is no discernable pattern, except that somehow, in some way, He intends it for good.

In the Old Testament, we see that many times the people did not experience what God wanted them to have.  And it wasn’t His will.  He actually got upset about it.  But He seemed well content to let them live the lives that they chose, waiting perhaps for the next generation to rise up and do what had to be done.

The current thinking today is that we don’t know what God’s will is in most cases, particularly when it comes to healing.  We may ask for healing, but we have no idea ahead of time what He wants or what He will do.  In some cases, we don’t know what He will do until we die or finally regain our health.  At other times, we may just conclude much earlier that healing was not meant to be. 

This last option sees sickness as another of the giants that the Israelites were told to face and defeat.  It took courage and strength.  The New Testament calls it faith.  You remember from the story of David and Goliath that David was the only person who believed he could kill Goliath.  Later on, other Israelites came to believe that they could kill giants too, but they had to see someone else do it first. 

The problem is that most Christians don’t give healing a thought until they are confronted with some serious problem, much like the one that Goliath presented to Israel.  None of the soldiers believed that God would kill Goliath at their hand.  David showed them that it wasn’t that God was unwilling to deliver them through their hand, but they didn’t believe He would.  And this belief was not something that they could have turned on like a light bulb.  David had killed a bear and a lion prior to this, and Goliath was just one more of the same kind of problem. 

            Somewhere we have lost the sense of God as our Deliverer.  He is a God that we worship, because He is worthy, but we no longer expect that He bring us out of our troubles.  He is just as likely to just sit there with us and feel our pain, but not do anything to relieve it. 

            I think the story of Paul’s thorn in the flesh has done much to rob us of the idea of God working on our behalf.  We forget that this same Paul would later shake off a poisonous snake into a fire and neither fear nor suffer any repercussions (Acts 28).  Whatever Paul’s thorn was, I don’t see it as sickness.  His reaction with the snake is not the reaction of a person who was chronically sick, especially when Luke the physician was with him at the time.

            In the Bible, healing was the norm.  If a person was not healed, it was a rare exception.  Today it is reversed, where healing is the rare exception.  If we say that God’s program has changed, we are left with the questions about what else has changed and how do we know what it is.  The same David who wrote that God heals all his diseases (Psalm 103) also wrote that the Lord is his Shepherd (Psalm 23). 

            It would take a book to answer all the questions, but the Church today has stopped asking many of the questions.  Until some serious illness stares someone in the face.  I am suggesting that the Bible paints a very different picture of our responsibility when it comes to matters like healing, and I am suggesting that we talk about this and learn about this before Goliath comes to challenge us.  And believe me, He will.