Is healing for today?

Something that I’ve been trying to figure out is the sensitive issue of healing. I know that I can never completely understand it and its intricacies, but it’s more my approach to healing that I’m not so sure about.

For many years I have attended churches that believe in healing – but as a seemingly sporadic event. It’s great for people who have a healing ministry, or for those people gifted with the gift of faith, or for the people who it is obviously God’s will to heal.  But what about genetic disorders? How about accidental injuries? Psychosomatic causes? Is anything too hard, too deserved, too small for God to worry about? Does God pick and choose people to be healed based on some sort of invisible tick list? Is it all about faith? Is it all about God’s timing? If the person doesn’t get healed does that mean that it’s not God’s will to heal them?

These are all questions I have floating around in my head, and they usually surface when I feel led to pray for someone. I think the only thing we can do is look at the scriptures and how Jesus and his disciples conducted healings.

It seems to me, that everything that Jesus did and said was to point us to the Father. Prior to, and during Jesus’ life on earth, the Jews had been following the Law – the Ten Commandments plus! The Israelites had so many laws and restrictions that made them clean and acceptable and kept them out of prison and it was the Pharisees that policed all these laws. They were accustomed to a God who could not stand sin and was often displayed as the angry God who very few people could get close to. It was Jesus’ mission to come to earth and demonstrate the love of God, rather than the wrath. All the healings, the teachings, the deliverances were all designed to bring the people into an understanding of the Father’s love.

John 11:4 tells us that Lazarus’ resurrection was for God’s glory. So too, in John 9:3 Jesus says that the man was born blind not because of his [the man’s] sins or his parents’ sins, but that the works of God might be displayed in him. Jesus said that he only does what he sees the Father doing – and Jesus is a shepherd, who cares for and leads his sheep. Jesus wipes out the ‘Law’ (what the Pharisees were upholding) and replaces it with these two commandments: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it, “Love your neighbour as yourself.” (Mat 22:37-39)

In my previous blog entry I paralleled the love of God as an adoptive parent with that of an earthly adoptive parent. Let’s extend this next thought to anyone who is a parent or carer. Let’s take a wayward child, someone who has made some poor choices and has run away from home. I imagine this would devastate loving parents. All they would want is to have relationship restored with their child. I don’t know if any parent with the best interests of their child would wish calamity upon them [the child]. Now, don’t get me wrong – oftentimes calamity will often accompany poor choices, I’m not saying that the parents are not aware of the impending strife. But surely, there is no parent who wishes their child would contract AIDS to stop them being promiscuous? Or is it reasonable to expect that paralysis is a befitting state for a child prone to drink driving? What about developing a cancer as a result of bitterness? These claims sound outrageous, yet we often claim that God is fathering us just like this. I just can’t agree with this frame of mind.

I am thinking now of the prodigal son and how the father ran to him and showered him with gifts. The older son had access to these gifts and didn’t need to run away to get them. Now this is not how the story goes, but I would hazard a guess that what the father was hinting at when he said, “My son, you were always with me, and everything I have is yours.” He said everything I have is yours – you always had access to these, you just didn’t take me up on it, you didn’t ask me. When Jesus ascended he told his disciples that all authority in Heaven and on Earth was his (Mat 28:18) and then sent them out in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This means that Jesus gave the disciples, and us, access to his authority. I don’t want to be the daughter who sits at home doing nothing because I’m not aware of what I have access to. I don’t want to be the person who when Jesus asks what have I done with the talents (gifts/tools/access) he gave me I tell him I buried them in a field because I didn’t know what to do with them.

Now let’s look at God’s will on healing. There are no reported cases in the New Testament where Jesus didn’t heal people who approached him. There was one time with the Syrophoenician woman where Jesus told her she had to wait until the Jews had eaten their fill (Mark 7). But when she refutes him he is amazed and heals her. Do I think she stole her healing? No. Do I think she changed Jesus’ mind? Maybe. What I do know is that we can’t use this as an example for God not healing because Jesus had not yet died for our sins and released our healing. Therefore, it was completely up to what God was doing in Heaven. Maybe Jesus had this interaction for our benefit, so that we too might grasp at everything God has given us. Maybe it was because she had no pre-conceived ideas about the Messiah (because she wasn’t Jewish) and therefore approached Jesus as one who could heal, not through a distorted lens.  At the end of the day, we won’t really know the reason behind this, but what we do know is that all the people Jesus prayed for were healed, delivered, cleansed, forgiven or raised from the dead. When Jesus was questioned about his ability to heal the demon possessed boy he answered, “If you can? Everything is possible for the one who believes.” This is such an absolute statement that I can’t help but play it out in my mind and find out what God has for us.

Let’s look for a bit at Mark 6. This is where Jesus could not do any miracles in his home town because they couldn’t believe that their Jesus, the carpenter, could have such wisdom and authority. All he could do was lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them. Ok. So it doesn’t say that he laid hands on them and they weren’t made well. It said he couldn’t do miracles. But if Jesus only did what he saw his father doing, then why couldn’t he perform miracles? Jesus was amazed at their lack of faith. Yet he also said that all you need is faith as small as a mustard seed to move mountains. So the Nazarenes must have had no faith in Jesus at all.

When the disciples couldn’t cast out the demons in the boy in Mark 9 and Matthew 17, they asked Jesus why and there are two recorded answers. The answer in Matthew 17 was that they had so little faith and that all they needed was faith the size of a mustard seed to move mountains. The answer in Mark said that this type can only come out by prayer and fasting. I am going to say what I feel the Holy Spirit is revealing to me. I imagine that the disciples were accustomed to having a pretty good track record by this time. I am thinking that people were delivered and healed quite instantaneously. Maybe in this instance the demon didn’t come out straight away and they just gave up. Maybe their lack of faith was not seeking the Spirit again on how to approach this deliverance. Now, that’s not a fair assessment because the Holy Spirit had not yet been given to them, but maybe it’s just that they didn’t try again. They gave up. Now that’s only Aimee’s interpretation – I’m just sharing what I feel in regards to this and my healing journey.

In the New Testament the word splagchnizomai [Greek for compassion] is used only in Matthew, Mark and Luke 12 times. Out of those 12 times, ten times are referring to Jesus having compassion on a person or people, and the other two times are once for the father of the prodigal son and once for the Good Samaritan. I think this is key, as these are two of the main parables used to describe amazing love. Jesus showed amazing love and compassion when he died for our sins – releasing our healing from that moment on. By his stripes we were healed. Jesus wanted the apostles to continue his legacy healing, delivering, resurrecting, cleansing etc. That is why he sent us the Holy Spirit. Some people believe that miracles were only for the apostles in growing the early church. Then why is the Holy Spirit still with us?

Jesus said to the disciples in Acts 1:8 “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the Earth.” There is no way that the apostles could have covered ‘to the ends of the earth’ so that responsibility has been passed down to us. It’s our job. And I can’t believe it’s God’s will to heal some and not others. I think it’s become a convenient excuse for us not to press in to God and access all he has given us for our fear of disappointment. We have lost our trust in the goodness of God to protect our egos. We have lost sight of the father-heart of God as we make excuses for prayers that seem to affect nothing. I don’t have all the answers, and I never will. But I do know that the more I press in to God, the more I will hear him and the more people will be healed. I don’t know why some people don’t get immediately healed – I don’t need to know why either. But I do know that it’s not God’s will for them to be sick. So, until I get to Heaven and meet my saviour face to face, I want to pursue a lifestyle he will be proud of, one that emulates him, one that sets me apart as a follower of Christ.