. . . for I am the LORD, your healer.
— Exodus 15:26b (ESV)
The Hebrew word for healer is Jehovah Raphah which means to mend properly, to cure, to make whole. God is telling us here that He is our Healer!
I grew up believing that God could heal but maybe it wasn’t always His will to do so. The scripture that was used to justify this way of thinking was Isaiah 55:7-8 which says we don’t think like God and His ways are not like our ways; they are much higher. So I would tell myself that God had a greater and higher purpose and may use sickness to accomplish that purpose.
But does this thinking line up with who God says He is and who Jesus showed Him to be? As I looked further, I saw that in Isaiah 55, God is not talking about healing, but about having mercy and pardoning people that we would not pardon because His thoughts and ways are higher.
James1:17 says that every good and perfect gift comes from God and that He never changes. Sickness and disease are not good gifts and therefore can not be from God. Deuteronomy 7:15 says that God puts no sickness on us. Matthew 8:17 says Jesus carried all my sicknesses, pains, and infirmities; therefore I don’t have to carry them.
Galatians 3:13 says Jesus has freed me from the curse and sickness is part of the curse.
Jesus went about doing good and healing all as it says in Acts 10:38.
There is not one example in the Bible where Jesus made anybody sick. We see him healing a leper, a blind man, a man with a deformed arm, a woman sick with a fever, a deaf man and on and on it goes.
Jesus tells Phillip in John 14:9 that if you have seen me, you have seen the Father. In other words, the Father and I are one – the same.
Isaiah 53:4 says Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; . . . In the Hebrew the word “griefs” is translated as sickness or disease and the word “sorrows” as affliction or pain. On the cross, Jesus took upon himself every disease, sickness, affliction, pain etc that mankind has every experienced. He took it so we don’t have to have it or keep it.
The Bible says, God is the Healer, the One who always wants people to be healed which tells me I don’t have to beg Him. My part is to believe. Then I will receive.
I am still learning how to implement this in my life. However, from what I see in the Word, my heart is settled that God wants you and me well.
“Some trust in chariots, some trust in horses; but we will remember the name of the Lord our God.”
Know God By Knowing His Name