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The subject of healing is one over which there has been much controversy. There exist today at least three schools of thought among Christians concerning healing. One group teaches that healing is not for us today. They base this upon the teaching that healing is a miracle and that miracles do not belong to the present day, that it belonged only to the apostolic age.
Another group teaches that God heals today in answer to special prayer, or a special act of faith, and that according to God’s will in the matter.
The third group teaches that healing for the body is the legal right of every child of God, and that he receives healing for his physical body upon the same grounds that he receives remission of sin.
Let us now examine these three teachings in the light of the Word. The first attitude can easily be shown to be erroneous by a definition of a miracle. A miracle, according to Webster, is an act or a happening in the natural or physical sphere that apparently departs from the laws of nature, or goes beyond what is known concerning these laws. It is really an intervention of God into the realm of natural laws, or the realm of human activity. It is God coming upon the scene. Whenever God comes into immediate contact with a man, a miracle is performed. Every answer to prayer, regardless of its smallness, every New Birth, is a miracle.
An act of healing hereby God comes into immediate contact with man’s physical body is no more a miracle than the New Birth, in which God comes into immediate contact with the spirit of man, imparting to him His own nature.
Man asks God to perform a greater miracle than healing, when he asks Him to save his soul, and as great a miracle as healing when he asks Him to answer a request, regardless how slight it might be.
To say that miracles belong to the apostolic age would be to say that God must take the place of a mere spectator or cipher in the world He had created, from the apostolic age to this day.
We easily can see the utter fallacy of this teaching. Let us now seek to find what God’s word declares about the issue of the other two beliefs. If the second attitude is the correct teaching, then the third is not.
If God heals only in answer to a special act of faith, and that only when He wills to, then healing does not legally belong to the child of God, and was not included in Redemption. On the other hand, if healing were a part of man’s Redemption in Christ, healing belongs to every child of God, and no special act of faith is required to obtain it. There need be no question as to whether it is God’s will to heal. We will consider what God’s Word says about this.
Before we are able to understand healing, we must understand the origin of sickness, disease, and death. We have seen that as a result of Adam’s crime of High Treason, that spiritual death gained an entrance (Genesis 2:15-17 cp. Genesis 3:1-5; also, Ephesians 2:1-5). Spiritual death through disobedience, and the fall of Adam and Eve, became a reality in the life and spirit of humanity. This spiritual death, in its universal sway, has reigned over the human family. It has been the soil out of which has grown the reign of disease and death and sin in the life of man. Sickness, disease, and death in man’s physical body are but the manifestations of spiritual death within our spirits. If man had never died spiritually, disease and death would never have entered man’s physical being. When Satan became the god of this world (Luke 4:5-6 with 2 Corinthians 4:3-4), one of the results of his reign was the peopling of the air with disease germs. So that from then to the present time, disease microbes too small to be seen with the naked eye have been one of the greatest enemies of man.
The fact cannot be hidden that in this world there exist great, terrible, and varied evils. The existence of evil has caused many earnest people to reject belief in a God of love; they have not understood that evil was the result of Satan’s reign over humanity as the prince and god of this world.
Tennyson, the poet of trust, declared the "nature red in tooth and claw with ravine shrieks against the creed that God is love." There are philosophers who have been so impressed with the reign of evil that they arrived at the conclusion that the central principle of the universe is evil. WE NEED TO REMEMBER THAT NOT THE CREATOR, BUT THE USURPER, SATAN, IS THE SOURCE OF THE REIGN OF EVIL OVER HUMANITY.
The two divisions of evil are pain and sin. Pain may have several subdivisions, but the major body of pain known and experienced by humanity, is the pain caused by disease. We therefore conclude, sin and disease are twins, born of spiritual death. They are both the works of Satan. Sin is a disease of the spirit; sickness is a disease of the physical body.
God looks upon disease as He looks upon sin - as the works of Satan in the life of His creation, man. Christ came to reveal God as a Father, to make known His attitude toward men. By carefully following the life of Christ, we may learn the attitude of God toward sickness and disease.
Christ’s ministry from the beginning to the close was a two-fold ministry. He brought peace to the souls of men and healing to their bodies. If disease did not come from Satan, it must have had a place in God’s original plan for man.
Read Matthew 8:16-17 and Mark 1:32-34.
If this were the case, then Jesus’ ministry would have been contrary to the Father’s will. He was the Father’s will revealed to man, and He revealed that it was the Father’s will to break the power of disease over man’s body and set him free from pain and suffering. Christ’s ministry proclaimed healing and blessing tot he physical part of man’s nature as well as the spiritual one.
There are several instances where the attitude of Christ toward disease is clearly shown. One is in Luke 13:10-17. After loosing a woman on the Sabbath from an infirmity that she had had for eighteen years, Christ was criticized by the ruler of the Synagogue. His answer was, "Ought not this woman whom Satan hath bound these eighteen years be loosed from he infirmity?" Note: Jesus clearly stated that Satan was the cause of the infirmity that had bound her physical body.
Another incident is found in Matthew 9:2. A man with palsy is brought to Jesus, to whom Jesus said: "Son, thy sins are forgiven the." When the scribes questioned the statement Jesus had made, He answered them with this: "Which is easier to say to the sick of the palsy, thy sins are forgiven thee, or to say arise, take up thy bed and walk?"
In reality Christ is saying this: "Which is easier? Wherein is the difference - to forgive sins which are the results of spiritual death in man’s spirit, or to heal the disease of his physical body, which is the result also of the same spiritual death." In either case, Jesus was dealing with the bondage of man to Satan. To see more fully the attitude of Jesus toward disease and the place healing played in His ministry, read the following.
1 John 3:8 tells us that Jesus was manifested to destroy the works of the devil. He came to destroy what Satan had wrought in humanity when he became the spiritual Father of man (John 8:44), as a result of Adam’s High Treason (Romans 6:16). Christ came to bring Satan to naught in his relationship and power over man (Hebrews 2:14). Christ came to completely redeem man from the effects of Adam’s sin by identifying himself with fallen humanity. Study carefully Romans 5:12-21.
If man’s redemption from spiritual death is to be a complete redemption, it must be a redemption from disease as well as sin. God realized this, and He has clearly shown us in His Word that He has made provision for healing of man’s body.
In Isaiah 53, the Holy Spirit has given us a glimpse of what took place within the spirit of Christ while He was on the Cross. The disciples at the time of the crucifixion of Christ, because they were limited to sense knowledge, could only see the physical sufferings of Christ. That is why a revelation is needed to reveal what took place within His spirit for here was the work of Redemption wrought.
A direct translation of Isaiah 53:4-6 is as follows: "Surely He hath borne our disease and carried our pains: yet we did esteem Him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement of our peace was upon Him, and by His bruises we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way and Jehovah hath laid upon Him the iniquity of us all." The direct translation from the Hebrew into the English reads as the above, word for word.
He reveals to us that when God made Jesus sin, all that spiritual death had made man, was laid upon Christ. He made Him to bear our diseases and our pains, which were the outgrowth of spiritual death. Christ is smitten of God and afflicted, because He is made one with us. Christ took our place, and God lays upon Him the iniquity of us all (verse 6) and He is wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities. At the same time He bears our diseases and pains by His death in substitute for us, we are healed from the power of disease as a finished work, just as our sin was taken away by His death on the cross. He was delivered for our offenses and raised for our justification (Romans 4:25).
When He arose from the dead, the body of sin, of spiritual death, was destroyed (Romans 6:6). Sin had lost its power, and so had disease. Isaiah 53:10 reads as follows in a paraphrased translation (A.V.): "Yet it pleased (delighted) the Lord to bruise Him, He hath made Him sick (hath put Him to grief)." Christ taking our place, made sin for our sin (2 Corinthians 5:21), and made Him sick for our sickness (with His stripes we are healed - verse 5). God the Father delighted to do this because it would result in our healing.
Christ bore our sins and the penalty that we might be free from sin, its power, and its judgement. Upon the same grounds He bore our diseases and pains. He carried them that we might be set free from them. God made Christ to be our sin bearer and our sickness bearer. Him who knew no sin was made sin, and Him who knew no sickness was made to bear our sicknesses and our diseases.
In the ministry of Christ our heavenly Father revealed that it was His will to heal man physically. Now in redemption He breaks the power of disease over man, and set him free by laying stripes upon Christ. Satan who had the authority in the realm of spiritual death has been brought to naught (Hebrews 2:14). In that victory, disease, sickness, and sin, all the works of the devil were brought to naught also. By His bruising, we are healed from the law of disease.
Christ’s ministry upon earth was two-fold, constantly affecting the spirits and bodies of men. His death was two-fold, bearing our sins and our diseases. He is the same today and the two-fold ministry of blessing for soul and body has continued from His earthly ministry to the present time. He bore man’s spiritual death that he might have life, and in His Word He made provision for his healing.
In Mark chapter sixteen, He gave to His disciples the great commission. He is going to depart to be with the Father, to take up His work at His right hand. His disciples are going to take His place. His body as His representative are to continue His ministry, doing what He would do if He were here. So in their commission in a world for whom He died, He reveals that the two-fold ministry that was His is to continue in His body, the disciples, the Church.
First, the commission is to meet the spiritual need of man. Mark 16:15 "He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved." Every child of God applies this portion of the Commission to himself, teaching that faith in Christ is essential to salvation, and that unbelief excludes one from it.
Then comes the second part of the commission. Mark 16:17 "And these signs shall accompany them that believe." The Greek word for "believe" is the same as verse 15, except for the fact that this one is singular, whereas the other is plural. What right has anyone have to separate these words of Christ, which immediately follow His first part of the Commission? Where in His Word has He ever implied that the first words had reference to all men, and that the last had reference only to the Christians of the apostolic age? Both promises hang upon the single stem of "believing." The act of believing brings one into the family of God. The rich cluster of miraculous promises, following the spreading of the Word, belongs to them that believe, or to the "believing ones."
Man has held fast to the first promise, because he knew how to use it, and He has flung back the other because he did not know how to use it. He bore man’s diseases in order that man might not bear them, and the provision for man’s healing is this: "In my Name shall they lay hands on the sick and they shall recover."
The ministry of the disciples under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, had the same two-fold blessing as had Christ’s ministry. A complete redemption was preached by them, the New Birth for the spirit, and healing for the body. The two streams of blessing that began from the personal ministry of Christ, a stream of regeneration and healing have continued from then through the apostolic age, and to the present, wherever Christians have dared to act upon the Word of God.
Our right to healing, given to us through Redemption is Christ, has been invested in the authority of His Name. Today He is watching over His Word to confirm it, as He confirmed it in the days of the Apostles (Mark 16:20).