Do We Have it Wrong?

Is Divine Physical Healing Really Promised to All?

Oh, there is so much here that I’d like to address! Many good Bible believing churches teach the promise of divine healing for the Christian today – even listing it as one of their articles of faith. It is a more prevalent teaching among churches which would consider themselves “Spirit Filled”.

I am…or maybe was one of these. This post is a challenge to that convention. I am not the first of us to do so and will not be the last. I’m just looking at it and it is not adding up. So, I want to look to the Scriptures to be tested by them.

However, before we look at what I found, I would like to look at the proof of the present that seems to unravel the idea of the divine healing that we embrace.

I can walk into virtually any “Spirit filled” church on a Sunday morning and, as the congregation worships and sings songs of longing for home, I can spot them. Look, over there – a quadriplegic in a wheelchair. Over on the other side of the sanctuary there is a family with a boy that is physically 23 years old but mentally and emotionally he is 5 or 6. One more family has a down syndrome girl. I am not even going into all the maladies that have fallen upon the healthy folks of the church.

What about them? Good people all, they love God and serve Him faithfully. Why are they not healed?

I’ll have to confess, this is hitting close to home and is probably influencing this writing. Does a Christian today have an unequivocal promise to be healed? If so, please show me where in scripture we find this promise. I have done some study on the subject and have found it lacking merit – but that’s part two of the discussion.

• I am a man that has survived cancer. This was not by divine healing as I had an operation and 25 weeks of radiation therapy. I thank the Lord for the strength, health, support and advances in medical technology that made my restoration possible, but this was not divine healing in the sense in which we are speaking here.

• Many of my friends don’t know and may find out now, but I am also suffering from Parkinson’s Disease, a degenerative condition that effects the motor systems of the body. There is no cure – I am taking medication to manage the symptoms. Think, Michael J Fox.

• I am also being treated for spondylolysis, a condition where one or more of the vertebra in the spine (the L5 in my case) slips forward and begins rubbing on the bone beneath it and pinches the sciatic nerve. I have experience the most excruciating pain I have ever felt when in anything but the prone position. I can walk, maybe, 50 feet or stand for 10 minutes before I need to lay down to relieve the pain. This has been going on, at this writing, for nearly seven weeks.

I have never asked, “Why me?” The Lord just might ask me, “Why not you?” That question I would never be able to answer. I love my God with all my heart, which is tender toward the moving of His Spirit right now.

• I’ve heard brothers in Christ ask in anguish where they lack faith or where they have sinned that God would withhold the healing they want so bad.

• Christians have gotten angry with God, lost hope and abandoned the faith.

• The afflicted have been told that they must endure because God is trying to teach them something.

• I have thought that we in the Western World have too much to be healed – that what we possess blocks faith.

Why am I writing this? I’m not sure, but this post may take it’s place among posts that challenge what has been taken for granted a long time.

What are your thoughts?