Where does healing come from?
This question is different from “Who does the healing?” I’ll talk about that in the 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 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 sequalae, 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, that God doesn’t respond. God 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. 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. There is no healing that I can do that God cannot do better, but still God seems to prefer to encourage me to try my own hand. Always with God’s power, God’s authority, but God seems to prefer for me to try and not to push it off on Them. So a part of the answer to “Who does the healing?” will always be, “We do,” as terrifying as that may seem.
Healing and Medicine
Somewhere in here we need to ask the question, “How does this all fit with doctors and regular medicine?” Far too often (even once would be too often) people associated with healing ministries have been heard to say that going to the doctor indicates a lack of faith, and means that you’ve closed yourself to healing. This is cruel and unbiblical.
Let’s begin with the Bible. In chapter five of Mark we read:
And a great crowd followed him and thronged about him. And there was a woman who had had a discharge of blood for twelve years, and who had suffered much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had, and was no better but rather grew worse. She had heard the reports about Jesus and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his garment. For she said, “If I touch even his garments, I will be made well.” And immediately the flow of blood dried up, and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease. And Jesus, perceiving in himself that power had gone out from him, immediately turned about in the crowd and said, “Who touched my garments?” And his disciples said to him, “You see the crowd pressing around you, and yet you say, ‘Who touched me?’” And he looked around to see who had done it. But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling and fell down before him and told him the whole truth. And he said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.” (Mark 5:24–34, ESV)
Here we have the story of a woman who had been to a multitude of doctors, who still receives healing. What’s more, no one prays for her, she is made well by her own faith. You can go to doctors and still have faith.
In the next chapter I write about the role of faith in the healing process, and one thing I try really hard to make clear is that neither the faith of the person for whom we’re praying, nor even our own (or the lack of either) is an impediment to God’s working through us or them to bring healing. Going to the doctor doesn’t mean a person lacks faith. It just means they also have faith in the intelligence and skill that God has given to physicians. There is no competition between healing by faith and healing through medicine. We aren’t there to use healing as a litmus test for the faith of the one standing before us. We bring what we have to bring. The doctors bring what they have to bring. Setting them against one another does harm to both, but most to the people who need healing.
Go on to Chapter Four – Things That Help and Things That Hinder
Or, go to other chapters:
Introduction
Chapter One – What Happened to Healing
Chapter Two – Why Do We Do Healing?
Chapter Three – Some Introductory Questions
Chapter Four – Things That Help and Things That Hinder
Chapter Five – The Five Step Method
Chapter Six – What Do We Do With Failure?
Chapter Seven – Staying On the Rails.
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