God’ Promise of Healing!
The subject of divine healing is a greatly neglected part of most people’s Christianity. It is rarely even discussed in “mainstream” churches. The primary reason for this neglect is that a very real Satan the Devil has blinded the vast majority of humanity—including most professing Christians! Unfortunately, today, many churchgoers do not really study the Bible. They do not look to it as the real “authority” in their lives. They are content to follow the teachings and traditions of men—which are all too often diametrically opposed to the Bible. We can prove the matter of divine healing clearly from the inspired word of God. And the biblical proofs are more plain and pervasive than you have probably ever imagined.
However, people have been told to claim God’s promise of healing (Mark 1:40–42), and have been told that their not being healed is due to a lack of faith; it is not true. God used the Apostle Paul to heal others. Yet when Paul on three occasions asked God to heal him (2 Corinthians 12:8–9), God revealed that it was not His will to heal Paul; that Paul could “make it” without being healed. Paul’s infirmity was due to God’s will—not to Paul’s lack of faith.
I am blind in one eye and God has been used to heal others since the beginning of my ministry. As it happened to Paul, after been asking God to heal me for years, I finally accept the fact that it is not His will to heal me, so I live well with only one very good eye.Sometimes people ask me how do I take it, and my anwer is only one: I am happy with God’s will for me, because I know that He has a purpose for everything in my life.
The Bible offers several perspectives on healing. Healing is a prerogative of God. It is described as one of the benefits that God makes available to human beings (Psalm 103:1–5). It is also described as a gift from God (1 Corinthians 12:7–11). Healing is the forgiveness of sin (Mark 2:1–12). Medicines and surgeries do not heal; they merely treat symptoms—sometimes successfully, sometimes not. Divine healing is not the same as working with natural means of repairing the body. God heals in His time and according to His purpose, not according to our demands and wishes.
Healing played a dramatic role in the first-century Church to attract attention to the message being preached. Yet even the historian Edward Gibbon indicates that this dramatic manifestation of power seems to have been withdrawn at some point in time (Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chap. 15). Yet Scripture indicates that God may yet again pour out this power more frequently and dramatically as we come closer to the end of the age—and closer to God.
In the broader scope, God is not only concerned with healing our bodies. He also wants us to learn how to live a way of life. If our physical problems are healed every time we make a mistake, we may not learn the vital lesson that we must learn to manage our bodies wisely and live in harmony with physical laws. When we are sick, we are not only instructed to be anointed and look to God, but to examine our lives and behaviours to see what we might have done wrong and repent of those actions (James 5:14–16).
Healing is not simply a mechanism for bailing us out of problems we may have brought upon ourselves—it is important we also learn lessons so we can teach others. While prayer and deliverance has a vital place in restoring health, we are also told that “whatever we ask we receive of Him, because we keep His commandments, and do those things that are pleasing in His sight” (1 John 3:22).