About Healing

We’re not going to live forever. Well, not in these present forms anyway. As you know, we’re currently in a 3 part teaching series on healing. We’re looking at the healing ministry of Jesus, our own experiences with healing (or lack of same) and the role our community of faith plays in healing. Even with this, we’re only scratching the surface of such an important subject.

In order to understand healing you really have to begin with a theology of suffering. From God’s perspective, wholeness, health and vitality are normal. Robust mental, emotional, physical and spiritual health is what God intended from the beginning. In fact, at the very start of things human beings actually were intended to live forever!

But when sin entered the human story all of that changed. Faced with the choice of taking matters into our own hands rather than completely trusting in God for all things, the Maker warned us, “Don’t eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, because when you do you will surely die” (Genesis 2:17). And God didn’t mean here, “touch it and I’ll strike you dead!” He meant that, on the day humanity chose to follow its own wisdom, the process of death began its unrelenting and all-encompassing sweep through history. All suffering, disease, accidents, disabilities, sorrow, waste and loss found root and began to grow within the human story.

So because of human sin, suffering and death are normal. That’s the ordinary consequence of sin (Romans 6:23). The real wonder is not that there is so much suffering in the world, but that there isn’t more. It is God’s love and grace alone that holds it at bay (Psalm 103:10).

Healing is when the power of God breaks the natural cycle of sin and death, interrupting it with wholeness and life. And the good news is that God’s power has been released in the world to do that more and more, because of Jesus Christ. He became sin’s curse for all of us, and took it to its penultimate fulfillment on the cross (Galatians 3:12-13). So now, through Him, life is reborn. The age of new creation has begun (2 Corinthians 5:17). It’s a new epoch, and new time in human history. Jesus demonstrated this through his own remarkable ministry of healing and he empowered his followers to continue that work of announcing, and demonstrating, the healing power of the Kingdom of God (Mark 16:15-18).

So the question then is this – if Jesus did all of this for us, why is there still so much sickness, suffering and death in our experiences?

That’s a good question. One which many still ask today!

There’s a short answer, and a long one. I’ll offer the short one here. Sickness, suffering and death still exist in our world because sin still exists. Human beings continue to perpetuate a world polluted by sin. As such, the wages of sin – destruction and death – continue to stalk humanity. But everywhere the effects of sin show their ugly faces they can be countered by the Gospel, and the power of God. Every place that is dark can be enlightened by the good news of what God has done, and is doing, in the world today. This counter attack of God’s goodness is meant to prevail over the shroud of darkness, redeeming, reconciling, forgiving, restoring.

As Christ-followers you and I are the ones who are empowered with both this message, and the demonstration of its truth, as we encounter folks day after day. With the power of the Holy Spirit who is within us, we are entrusted by God with the work of bringing the salvation and healing accomplished on the cross into present reality, through our words and actions as the people of God.

It’s a glorious, yet heavy, responsibility if you think about it.