Faith and Healing

For several days now, I’ve been thinking about what might be considered a grey area of the Christian life. It started a couple weeks ago when, after talking with someone about my ongoing depression, he recommended a book for me to read. I’m still wading through that book, and while it has some good principles, the basic message seems to be “You need to repent!” At the same time, I downloaded a free eBook that looked like it could be interesting. Halfway through the book, the author writes about all kinds of illness including colds and flu, “Why is it that believers are not breaking this curse of sickness? …I’m convinced that there could be several reasons why we’re not healed. It could be because we lack spiritual understanding. It could also be that we are afraid and hope for a quick fix. We are often weak in our confession of faith.”

Now I’m not saying that repentance is unnecessary, or that we don’t need to have a good understanding of who we are in Christ and faith that He can do the impossible. But there are a lot of other factors that come into play as well, like bacteria and viruses! The health side of the “health and wealth gospel” is a lot more insidious than the wealth side. Most Christians can agree that God does not intend for all believers to have great wealth. But there seem to be quite a lot of Christians who believe that healing is more a matter of faith than of good medical care. I won’t argue that sin isn’t to blame for some illnesses. Poor stewardship of our bodies leads to all kinds of problems. And some doctors do tend to overprescribe, often at the insistence of their patients. Humanity can be blamed for many of our problems, both social and physical. But living in a fallen world has its own issues. I’m sure Adam and Eve never had to deal with sickness while they were living in the Garden of Eden.

So I was wondering what the Bible has to say about health and faith. Most of the references come in the Gospels as Jesus healed people wherever He went. He specifically tells one woman, “Your faith has made you well” (Luke 8:48). And He tells Jairus after his daughter’s death, “Do not fear; only believe, and she will be well” (Luke 8:50). The fact that great crowds gathered to be healed indicates that they had some degree of faith in His ability to heal. But how many of those people actually believed in Him as their Savior, Redeemer, and Messiah? It appears that very few of them were still following Jesus at the time of His crucifixion.

The passage that intrigues me is John 5 and the Pool of Bethesda. Verse 3 says there were “multitudes of invalids” waiting by the pool, and yet it appears that only one person was healed that day. There is no expression of faith by the man before Jesus heals him. So why was he healed when no one else was? Then in verse 14 Jesus meets him again and says, “See, you are well! Sin no more, that nothing worse may happen to you.” This seems to indicate that sin was somehow a cause of this man’s suffering, and yet there was no call for repentance before Jesus healed him. So there is no direct correlation between repentance, faith, and healing in this case.

“Is anyone among you suffering? Let him pray… And the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up… Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed” (James 5:13-16). These verses imply that prayer and healing do often go together. However, if this were always the case, how are we to interpret the following statements?

• “I left Trophimus, who was ill, at Miletus” (2 Timothy 4:20).
• “Indeed [Epaphroditus] was ill, near to death. But God had mercy on him, and not only on him but on me also, lest I should have sorrow upon sorrow” (Philippians 2:27).
• “No longer drink only water, but use a little wine for the sake of your stomach and your frequent ailments” (1 Timothy 5:23).

Was there no faithful person to pray for the healing of these men? That’s certainly unlikely, given that they were associates of the Apostle Paul. Some would claim that the dispensation of miracles had ended and there were no longer any people who had the gift of healing. More likely, these illnesses were from natural causes, and though God could have healed them, for whatever reason He chose not to. Paul’s “thorn in the flesh” in 2 Corinthians 12 may also have been some physical ailment that God did not relieve.

I come to the conclusion that 1) God can heal, 2) God sometimes does heal in response to prayer, faith, and repentance, 3) God does not always bring physical healing, and 4) God often uses doctors and medicine to bring some measure of healing. (This site has an interesting article on Luke the Physician: http://www.icr.org/article/doctor-luke/.) Who are we to judge or prescribe how God will or will not work in a particular situation?

“‘For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways,’ declares the Lord” (Isaiah 55:8).