Healing

Reading these passages

The clearest promise of healing on this page is the answer to a request that was refused.

Paul asked three times for something to be taken away. He never says what it was — the phrase elsewhere is a thorn in the flesh — and guesses have run from eye disease to malaria to chronic pain to a persistent opponent. What he records is the answer: My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness.

The thorn stayed. This is a man with a documented healing ministry, in a letter defending that ministry, reporting that he himself was not healed and that the refusal was the point.

Any honest reading of this page has to hold that alongside everything else here, because the page is otherwise full of promises and the promises are real. Both things are in the book. Neither cancels the other, and scripture does not explain the difference.

Two verses that are usually quoted short

The most repeated line about healing in the Old Testament is the last clause of a long conditional sentence, and the sentence is almost never quoted whole.

If thou wilt diligently hearken to the voice of the LORD thy God, and wilt do that which is right in his sight, and wilt give ear to his commandments, and keep all his statutes, I will put none of these diseases upon thee, which I have brought upon the Egyptians: for I am the LORD that healeth thee.

Four conditions, a specific comparison to a specific set of plagues, and a covenant addressed to a nation at a particular moment in its history. The name at the end is true. The sentence around it is longer than the fragment, and what it promises is the absence of certain diseases rather than the cure of all of them.

Jeremiah's is shorter and gets misread in a different way: Heal me, O LORD, and I shall be healed; save me, and I shall be saved.

That is a petition, not a rule. Jeremiah is not stating how God operates; he is asking, and the conditional shape of the sentence — heal me, and I shall be — puts the outcome entirely in somebody else's hands. Prayers are not promises, and reading them as promises is the commonest way this subject goes wrong.

How wide the word is

The Hebrew rapha and the Greek iaomai both cover far more than bodies. They are used of relationships, of nations, of water, of land — anything that has gone wrong and can be put right.

Which is why Psalm 103 can put two things in the same line without a seam: Who forgiveth all thine iniquities; who healeth all thy diseases. Forgiveness and healing are parallel clauses, given the same grammatical weight, treated as the same kind of act.

And Psalm 147 uses the medical vocabulary for something that is not medical at all: He healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds. Bindeth up is what you do with a bandage. The injury being bandaged is a heart.

Read with that in mind, the page stops being a list of promises about illness and becomes something broader and harder to test — which is either the honest reading or an evasion, depending on what you came here wanting.

Confession and healing in the same sentence

James gives the most practical instruction and joins two things most people would keep separate: Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed.

The healing is attached to both halves. Whatever James means precisely, he is not describing a private transaction between an individual and God. It involves other people knowing what is actually going on with you, which is a considerably higher cost than the praying and is the part usually dropped when the verse is used.

He also stops short of guaranteeing outcomes. The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much is a strong claim about effect. It is not a claim about results in every case, and the difference matters to anyone who has prayed and been disappointed.

The verse about stripes

Isaiah 53:5 is the most contested sentence on this page: But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.

Christians have read that final clause in at least three ways, and the disagreement is old and unresolved.

Some take it as entirely spiritual — the healing is from sin, which is what the first three clauses of the verse are about, and reading physical healing into the fourth breaks the parallel. Some take it as physical and available now, pointing out that Matthew quotes this passage while describing Jesus healing bodies. Some take it as physical but future, part of what is promised in a restored creation rather than claimable today.

The verse itself does not settle it, and every reading has to account for something the others explain more easily. It is worth knowing that the argument exists before anyone quotes the verse at you as though it did not.

What Jesus actually did

The summary line in Matthew is worth reading for its proportions: And Jesus went about all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing all manner of sickness and all manner of disease among the people.

Three activities, listed together and given equal weight. Teaching, preaching, healing. The gospels do not treat the healings as demonstrations attached to the message; they are reported as part of the work itself, in the same clause and the same tense.

And John's greeting, which is the gentlest thing on the page, keeps the same proportion in reverse: Beloved, I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth.

That is a letter opening, the ancient equivalent of hoping this finds you well, and it has been made to carry a great deal of freight it was never built for. What it does contain is the measure John uses — physical health wished for in proportion to something else already assumed to be in good order. Whatever else it is, it is not a formula.