All Jesus did in His earthly ministry was honor the Abrahamic Covenant. He lived by it, preached it, taught it, performed it—and God backed it with signs following.
Man's Need For Healing
When God first created man, there was no provision for healing because there was no sickness. God's first man, Adam, lived and walked in divine health.
Then Adam committed high treason against God (Gen. 3:1-6), and Satan became the illegitimate stepfather of mankind.
The moment Satan took the reins, everything about the earth became cursed because Satan came to steal, to kill, and to destroy (John 10:10). Adam's nature was perverted. Sickness, disease, doom and destruction spread.
God's Will To Heal
Some people say that God puts sickness and disease on us to teach us, but that's not in the Word of God.
Did Jesus of Nazareth go about breaking the will of God by healing people? No.
When a man cried out for mercy, did Jesus ever say, "I'd sure like to help you, brother, but God told me He is trying to teach you something." No.
Some say that God gets glory out of our being sick; but God is glorified when people are healed or delivered or raised from the dead.
Did Jesus say Lazarus was sick for the glory of God? No. He said, "This is not a sickness unto death, but for the glory of God" (John 11:4). Then He said, "My friend Lazarus is asleep, but I go to awaken him" (v. 11).
Jesus wasn't giving Satan any place. He wasn't going to confess death. God got glory, not by Lazarus dying, but by Jesus raising him up.
When a man begged Jesus to have mercy and heal him, Jesus never said, "I'd like to heal you, but God is getting glory. He even told me to pray cancer on you, so He would get more glory."
In Christ the Healer, one of the best books written on the subject of divine healing, F.F. Bosworth suggests that if sickness is God's will, we owe it to ourselves as believers to stop medical science right now.
If Christians are to do the works of God, perhaps hospitals should be closed and doctors put in jail for breaking the will of God by trying to get people well. Of course, that's foolishness!
Some people think God is the author of sickness and disease because of all the Old Testament scriptures describing the diseases that came as a result of the curse. Here are two examples:
The Lord shall send upon thee cursing, vexation, and rebuke, in all that thou settest thine hand unto for to do, until thou be destroyed, and until thou perish quickly; because of the wickedness of thy doings, whereby thou hast forsaken me.The verbs used here in The King James Version are causative verbs, making it sound as though God were causing the sickness and disease. The original Hebrew reads an entirely different way because the verbs are permissive, which means that the action was simply allowed to happen.
The Lord shall make the pestilence cleave unto thee, until he have consumed thee from off the land, whither thou goest to possess it.
The Lord shall smite thee with a consumption, and with a fever, and with an inflammation, and with an extreme burning, and with the sword, and with blasting, and with mildew; and they shall pursue thee until thou perish.
(Duet. 28:20-22)
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.
(Ex. 15:26)
For example, Deuteronomy 28:22 in The King James Version reads, "The Lord shall smite thee...." In the original Hebrew, that phrase says, "The Lord shall allow you to be smitten...."
In The King James Version, Exodus 15:26 says, "I will put none of these diseases upon thee, which I have brought upon the Egyptians." The Hebrew text says, "I will not allow any of the diseases to come upon you that I allowed to come upon Egypt."
You see, the diseases were already there because of the curse. God allowed them to overtake Egypt because the Egyptians didn't have a covenant with Him. God did not cause the sickness and disease; He simply allowed what was already there to take place. The King James version distorts the true meaning of these verses.
God gets no glory from our sickness or disease (except our being healed!). He takes no pleasure in harming us, and He never will.
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Dr. Jerry Savelle was an average, blue-collar man who was struggling and needed God's help. While he considered himself a "nobody," when he became a believer God told him not to worry about it because He was a master at making champions out of nobodies. God has since taken Dr. Savelle from being a constant quitter to a man who knows how to stand on the Word of God until victory is experienced. Because of the life-changing combination of God's faithfulness and Dr. Savelle's "no quit" attitude, his life is totally different than it was thirty-eight years ago.
