The God we have discussed and logically examined throughout
this journal is one of love, patience, forgiveness, and not the least of which
healing. In fact the act of salvation
itself could be described as a spiritual healing of our souls; breaking the
bonds of pain and replacing them with the freedom to be happy. So knowing that the very nature of God is one
of healing, does it not seem reasonable that His servants would also want to
heal others? Christ Himself gave His
followers this ability well before He departed planet earth. His followers (70 of them at one point) went
out through the towns and villages healing people of all manner of diseases.
But it would be ‘unfair’ to tag the current crew of folks
‘performing’ healing as mere healers – they are ‘faith’ healers. The difference is subtle. A healer would heal whatever the disease no
matter the condition or thinking of the patient. In this way, Christ was a healer. He offered healing to anyone; to everyone;
they had merely to accept his offer and they were healed. Today’s crew call themselves ‘faith’ healers
because now you need to have enough ‘faith’ in order to be healed. A lack of faith on your part, and the disease
or infirmity might well stay with you, or ‘re-occur’. In this way, the concept of real faith is
poisoned, and made an excuse for suffering.
Natural human weakness defeats ‘good intentions’ and no real healing
could ever be achieved under these terms.
So whose idea is this one; give you one guess.
When Christ was here, healing was different. When He had pity on the lame man, He told him
simply, “arise, take up your bed and walk”.
Think about this for just a minute.
He did not ask the man’s religious convictions or doctrines of belief
(keep in mind there were 2 competing philosophies within Judaism of the day –
Sadducees who did not believe in life after this one, and Pharisees who
did). He did not ask the man for an
offering to support his ministry. He did
not ask the man to accept Him as his personal savior FIRST. He did not ask the man if his condition was
real or if he was just faking it (as his creator, He already knew the answer to
that).
Christ loved this man, and hated the suffering he was
under. Christ longed to give him the
relief this man so desperately needed.
And at their encounter he offered it, “arise, take up your bed and
walk”. The paralytic obeyed. Forget the fact that he could not obey, as up
till now this was a physical impossibility.
He got up anyway. He picked up
the mats and carpets he had been laying on just a minute ago (the chains he was
previously bound to), and he went away – praising God.
If there was faith in that encounter anywhere, it is the
same kind of faith we have on a daily basis; the faith that comes as yet
another gift of God.; the faith that requires us to merely do what we were
asked. This man did not know Christ
before this. I imagine he had heard
about him, and hoped against hope something could be different. I imagine he had sought out every prior
‘faith’ healer that had ever come along.
I imagine he had tried every ‘home’ remedy up to that point.
Suffering as he did, he would have been a social outcast as
well. Jews believed you got was coming
to you in this world. If he was
suffering, he must have been quite the sinner.
So his condition was blamed squarely on his own shoulders. Even Christ’s own disciples echoed this
sentiment in His day. This man was no
more or less a sinner than you or I, but he carried a physical disability he
was taught to regard as his ‘punishment’ from an angry God. Awe the insidious nature of evil; to not only
cause him to physically suffer, but to tell him the suffering comes from God,
along with the condemnation.
Christ disproved all of that in one simple, loving
command. “Arise” or get up. I am ending this condition you are in. Your time of suffering is over. No long dialog or sermon before the
healing. No requests to pledge eternal
allegiance prior to being healed. This
was an example of the kind of gifts God gives to His children; pure, no
preconditions, no after-action requests or demands for payment. Christ wanted to heal His hurting child and
He did it. Christ ached to put an end to
both the physical pain this man was in, but also to the self-inflicted
condemnation he had adopted as truth.
The character of God was in question for this man. Was God truly angry? Was God truly vindictive and responsible for
this pain and suffering as a punishment for this man’s sins? No. and No.
God and Christ loved this man and wanted ONLY to SAVE him from his pain,
both physical and spiritual. And in a
single encounter, He did it.
Imagine the chagrin of the local ‘religious’ types when this
obviously former sinner, was now seen leaping for joy and praising God in the
streets of the city. He would not have
been clean or well dressed. He would
have smelled badly from lack of a bath (or the ability to bathe himself). His clothes would have been tattered and worn
as in his condition he was a beggar of barely enough means to feed
himself. He had no job. He had nothing. He had a mat and some carpets to lay on. And in this condition, he was healed. And in this condition, he was shouting
praises to God in the streets of the city.
How could one so poor, seem so happy?
Because the chains that bound him to the ground had been completely
broken. The condemnation that had
oppressed him his entire life was lifted.
He was free. He was healed. He was saved by grace.
This was the nature of the healing that Christ offered. His stories were all consistent. He fed people, more than 5,000 of them
because they were hungry and He loved them.
Demoniacs attacked Him and his disciples on the shores of a lake. His disciples did the logical thing and ran
like the wind. He did not. He cast out the demons of these poor
afflicted souls. He did not ask them for
‘faith’ first. He took action that
resulted in establishing their faith in the first place. He healed people who were powerless to ask
for his healing. He released prisoners
of evil even before they could utter the words.
His healing was complete and unconditional; just like His love. His healing on this earth is much like His
salvation on this earth, a complete gift.
His healing broke the perceptions of current religious crowd’s thinking.
It was NOT God who caused all this suffering. It was God who relieved it. It was NOT God who punished man. It was man and the evil one, who makes man to
suffer. God was not sent here to this
world to pronounce a right sentence of condemnation that would be just what we
deserve (as the Jews thought). He was
sent here to save a sick and diseased people from the agony of sin, from the
pain of sin, from the addiction of sin, from the self-destructive desire of
sin, and from the consequences of sin.
Christ offered complete healing which reaffirmed all these teachings,
and restored a better image of the character of God.
But in our day, evil distorts the picture once again. The gift of healing that Christ entrusted to
His servants has morphed into a very select few who claim to be able to do it. And of those, almost all base their own
abilities on the faith of the individual being healed, rather than on the
source of all healing power. A true
healer could heal the atheist, the agnostic, or like Christ – he could heal the
true servant of Satan – the possessed. A
true healer would know the will of God is not to see His children suffer. A true healer would not ask before or after a
healing for money, offerings, or gratitude in any way to support his
‘ministry’. A true healer would seek
anonymity as they would not want the ‘glory’ of the recognition for this
work. The gift of a true healer is not
his own, it is merely to reflect the will of God our Father.
Faith comes from being healed. Faith comes from being loved. Faith comes because of what God DOES for us,
not just what He talks about. Faith
itself then, is a complete gift of the Father.
It is our antidote to the sickness of this world. It is affirmed by our healing, both
spiritually and physically, not required to gain either. Salvation, much like healing, is a gift. You do not have to have faith before you are
saved, or before you are healed; your faith is born of these experiences. It comes because of these experiences, not as
a prerequisite to them. How could you
have faith in a God before you even know who He is? The one comes from the other. Faith is made in your life by your experience
with God. So knowing that Healing is a
gift, why do we see so little of it? We
will discuss that further in our next entry …
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