Why does the world need healing?
If you’re like me and you’re reading this, then I suspect you’d like to get down to the nitty-gritty. “How do we do this?” If you’re that impatient there’s no harm in jumping ahead to chapter (I don’t know what that chapter number will be yet.) and reading about the five step method I learned at Global Awakening’s school. However, I think that this chapter, in its several parts, and the other chapters that follow will help that method make a lot more sense, and allowing this theology to speak to your heart will enable you to pray with so much more faith. For this reason I hope that you’ll take your time and read these things as I think I’m called to present them.
I’d like to begin by explaining how I’ve come to understand why we need healing at all, why things are so broken around us, why there is so much disease and suffering.
In this explanation I’m going to rely heavily on the book of Genesis. It doesn’t matter whether we read it literally or not (though I hope you don’t). What it has to say about the situation in which we find ourselves still speaks truth. While I don’t read the book literally myself, I still speak of Adam and Eve as persons and the Garden as a place. It just makes better narrative sense.
In the Garden (that is, in Creation as God envisioned it) there was no disease, no death. Even the animals didn’t die. The only food we were given to eat were the plants and vegetables.
And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food. (Genesis 1:29, ESV)
This persisted even through the early generations of humankind. We were not given permission to eat meat until after the Flood.
“And God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth and upon every bird of the heavens, upon everything that creeps on the ground and all the fish of the sea. Into your hand they are delivered. Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. And as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything.” (Genesis 9:1–3, ESV)
As a result of humanity’s decision to try to “be like God” (The fruit of the tree was only the vehicle for the sin, not the sin itself.) we fell from our given place in God’s order, as God’s regent in creation, and our dominion became distorted. Adam, who had given all the animals their names, thereby conferring their natures on them (for to the Hebrew mind, name and nature are inextricably linked) had lost that authority and now even the ground he worked was cursed.
The Bible says that it is our God-given nature to exercise God’s dominion over creation, but when we subvert that nature to our desire to take God’s place our influence is twisted, and Creation is twisted with it. As a result, death, disease and suffering enter into the created order.
The consequence of human sin doesn’t always land on the sinner, though. Sometimes it’s sheer randomness, but part of the consequence of being put out of the Garden is the horror of dominance. This begins with Adam’s domination of Eve. In Genesis 3 we read,
“To the woman he said, “I will greatly multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.” (Gen 3:14, RSV)
This is God’s description of the way that human order is twisted by our sin, not His intention that women should be subject to their husbands. The domination of some people by others means that those with access to the most and best resources can often shield themselves from the ruin of Creation. This inequality was never God’s intention and it only adds to the severity of the consequences we see around us. As they are displaced from others, these effects land even more disproportionately on the poor and powerless.
Of course this doesn’t mean that the wealthy and powerful don’t get sick, but it does mean that they will usually have greater access to the best care, and their outcomes will almost always be better. Conversely, the poor will have the least access and suffer even worse outcomes than they might have if there were no system of dominance. We can confidently say then, that the Biblical understanding of the reason we have a need for healing is sin.
“…sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin…” (Romans 5:12)
Before I move on to the next part, I’d like to conclude this gloomy assessment with a dollop of hope. I skip from the first book of the Bible to the last, where we read of “the Lamb slain from the foundation.” Here at the climactic end of the story of God’s redemption of all Creation we discover that God had made provision for our sin “from the foundation of the world.” It was always going to end well, and the forgiveness of the Cross hovers over every page of Scripture. Now, some of you are reading translations that change the word order from the Greek so that it tells of those whose names are written from the foundation of the world in the book of the Lamb who was slain. I don’t agree with those translational choices, but even if I did it would change nothing. The Book still existed from before the moment the first atom was called into being, and even then it was the “book of the Lamb who was slain.” So the figure of the Crucified Christ still inhabits every moment of created time, and our sin was apparently no surprise. I’ll close this dark discussion of sin with a favorite saying of Graham Cooke’s about God’s foreknowledge of our fall. “If I’d been creating a world and I’d known it was going to go that pear shaped, I think I’d have just made another Jupiter!”
Where does healing come from?
This question is different from “Who does the healing?” I’ll talk about that in next section. But before we discuss that topic, I’d like to deal with the origins of healing. That is, where does the Bible understand it to originate? In the Garden, there was/is no need for healing, but here in a world corrupted by human sin, where is the door through which healing enters? The short answer is, “Through the Atonement.”
We live in a world that lives daily with the consequences of human sin. Illness, pain, death, all these flow from humanity’s rebellion, our desire, our attempt to “be like God.” As a result of these decisions (which continue into the present and will likely continue well into our future) there are sequellae, outcomes that follow. Healing breaks off these outcomes, these consequences, sets them aside in mercy. But how?
I have been taught and I accept that the ability to sever sin from consequence lies in Jesus’ sacrifice on the Cross, the Atonement. Isaiah puts it quite simply, “In His wounds we are healed.” Isaiah speaks in the Hebrew’s perfect tense, which functions both as a past perfect and a future tense. My point here is that when Isaiah sings of the Suffering Servant and of the wounds by which we are healed, he sees it as a fait accompli. Through Jesus’ wounds our health is already ours. Healing ministry is not about bringing into being that which is not yet, but calling Creation to conform to that which was already purchased for us on the Cross. I will talk more about that when I try to discuss the mind-set that I believe we are to carry into any healing encounter.
Jesus has undone the curse of human sin by taking all our illness, all our disease and finally all our death upon Himself. It is from this well of forgiveness that our healing flows.
Who does the healing?
While God and Jesus continue to heal in this day and age, the answer to this question isn’t as obvious as it may initially seem. We can say with some certainty that God is the source of all healing, but that doesn’t mean that God and Jesus are the doers of all healing. This certainly isn’t the Biblical view.
In the Bible, God endows humanity with the ability to heal. Adam and Eve are given authority over Creation to “subdue it.” While that authority became twisted through human sin, it was restored through the Cross. For this reason, when Jesus sent out the Twelve, or the seventy-two, He commanded them to “heal the sick.” He did not send them out with words like, “When you encounter the sick, pray for the Father to heal them.” He sent them out to do the healing.
In like manner, you and I are commissioned to heal. Yes, we do it in Jesus’ Name. That is, we do it for His sake, for His glory. We do it with authority that we have been given by Him, but we do it. I will write more in a bit on the role of authority in healing, but I wanted to be clear about who it is that heals (we do, as well as God) from the start because it affects how we pray.
Most of the prayer for healing that I have encountered in mainline churches has taken the form of requests. “God, please heal Jennifer,” or “God, please restore Frank.” Our corporate prayers of intercession are filled with petitions followed by the cry, “God, hear our prayer.” Nowhere in the Gospels do I find Jesus praying this way. Not once does He ask the Father to do anything. Rather, the Son sees what the Father is already doing and does the same. He hears what the Father is already saying and says the same.
We are similarly empowered. When we encounter someone who is sick or broken by the world, we can look with eyes of faith and see that the Father is already lifting them up. Then we do what the Father is already doing and take them by the hand, literally or figuratively, and lift them up, too. When we see the Father declaring His healing power over a person, we do the same, declare His power over them. When He is commanding their bodies to be healed, to align themselves with His good will for the individual, we do the same.
We don’t ask God to do what He is already doing. One of my mentors, Randy Clark, said something to our class once that has stuck with me. He said, “When we ask God to heal someone, we’re acting as though we care more about that person than He does, as though He doesn’t already want to heal them.” He didn’t go on to say out loud how arrogant that is, but his raised eyebrows said it for him. It is amazing to me that we actually try to shift God’s will for a person through prayer, as though our will for them might even for an instant be better than God’s.
This doesn’t mean that when we pray, “God, please heal Aunt Carol,” God doesn’t hear, God doesn’t respond. He does. But that petition is more akin to “Lord, I believe, help Thou mine unbelief,” than the prayer of faith into which you and I are invited. When I get to the five step prayer model, there is a step in which we discern which prayer to pray, how to pray it. Personally, I tend to reserve the “God, please heal this person,” prayer for those times when I’m stumped and can’t figure out what to pray, or I’ve tried everything else to no effect.
As a father, I think I can imagine a little bit of God’s pleasure in seeing us take up the mantle of healing that is our inheritance in Him. There is no healing that I can do that He cannot do better, but still He seems to prefer to encourage me to try my own hand. Always with His power, His authority, but He seems to prefer for me to try and not to push it off on Him. So a part of the answer to “Who does the healing?” will always be, “We do.”