Supernatural Healing

By V L Eapen

Part One

God’s Healing Covenant with His people is set forth in Ex. 15:26 as follows: “If you will diligently hearken to the voice of the Lord your God, and do that which is right in His eyes, and give heed to His commandments and keep all His statutes, I will put none of the diseases upon you which I put upon the Egyptians; for I am the Lord, your Healer.”  The reassuring words, ‘I am the Lord, your Healer,’ stand for the compound name JEHOVAH-RAPHA.  As Jehovah-Rapha, He healed Abimelech at Abraham’s prayer of intercession (Gen. 20:17); He cured Miriam of her leprosy in answer to Moses’ prayer (Num. 12:13-15); and He restored Naaman the leper (2 Kings 5:14).  Even TODAY, He is Jehovah-Rapha, ‘THE LORD, OUR HEALING PHYSICIAN’, for He affirms in Mal. 3:6, “I the Lord do not change.”  In Ps. 103:3 David describes Jehovah-Rapha as the One “Who forgives all your iniquity, Who heals all your diseases.”

Jehovah-Rapha of the Old Testament is revealed in the Healing Delivering Christ of the New Testament. He too does not change.  Heb: 13:8 affirms it.  “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and for ever.”  He is our Great Physician, Provider, Good Shepherd, Banner, Righteousness and Peace.  He is always with us unto “the close of the age” (Mt. 28:20) while incessantly interceding with the Father on our behalf, as our “High Priest” (Heb: 8:1) of the New Covenant.

“The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil.” (1 Jn. 3:8).  Temptation, sin and death are obviously the works of the devil.  As will be explained later in Part (2), sickness too is of Satanic origin.  Satan does not himself afflict people, but deploys his spirits of infirmities to afflict them.  Satan’s sinister forces are seen summarized in Eph. 6:12.  But the Lion of Judah routed them through His death and resurrection.  Col. 2:15 attests to it as follows: “He disarmed the principalities and powers and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in Him.”  That is, the Father disarmed them in His Son.  It is as much the Lord’s personal as His vicarious victory on our behalf so that we too are empowered to have victory over and deliverance from “the works of the devil”, including sickness.  The Lord’s bloody atonement at Calvary is our blessed assurance for spontaneous supernatural healing.

The divine promise of supernatural healing is contained in the verse, “… with His stripes we are healed.” (Isaiah 53:5).  The question is, do we rely on this promise and wait upon the Lord to heal us, or do we rush to a hospital seeking medical help?  Often we do the latter ignoring the fact that Jesus Christ is the Greatest Physician the world has ever known, and He is very much alive today and His help readily accessible and available.  “Behold, the Lord’s hand is not shortened, that it cannot save, or His ear dull that it cannot hear; but your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God, and your sins have hid His face from you so that He does not hear.” (Is. 59: 1&2). Even so, regardless of denomination, it is the duty of every true believer to invoke the divine promise in fervent prayer, and claim in unwavering faith the promised healing so that it comes to pass in our day-to-day lives.

Part Two

Supernatural healing is through divine intervention, and therefore, beyond rational explanation.  None the less, it is too real to be dismissed as lacking in credibility.  As a daily occurrence among countless believers around the globe, it merits closer examination.  Supernatural healing is available to all.  But self-righteous believers, skeptics and those lagging in their prayer life cannot hope to avail themselves of this celestial free gift of divine healing.  To be healed in prayer supernaturally, (i) we have to be righteous in the sight of God Who “watches” our paths and “weighs” our hearts (Prov. 5:21 & 21:2);  (ii) we have to have child-like blind faith in the divine promise, “With His stripes we are healed;” and (iii) one-seventh of our time belongs to God.  Much less, is one-tenth.  So we need to consider setting aside 2.4 hours or 2 hours and 24minutes for prayer DAILY so that we won’t miss out on miraculous healing – physical, mental, emotional and spiritual.

The text in Mt. 8:17 reads, “This was to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet Isaiah, ‘He took our infirmities and bore our diseases.'”  The reference in the above is to the text in Is. 53:4 which states, “Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.”  According to the faultily translated English version in Isaiah, Christ the Lord bore our ‘griefs’ and ‘sorrows’ while, as per the right version in Matthew, He bore our ‘infirmities’ and ‘diseases’. Hebrew scholars generally agree that the correct meanings of the Hebrew words originally used by Isaiah are “sicknesses” instead of ‘griefs’, and “pains” in place of ‘sorrows’, as have been consistently translated throughout the rest of the Old Testament.  It is significant to note that the Hebrew word Isaiah used for “borne” in 53:4 is the same word as he used in 53:12 which reads, “Yet He BORE the sin of many.”  Again, the Hebrew word for “carried” in 53:4 is the same word used in 53:11, except for the grammatical tense, and it states, “He shall BEAR their iniquities.”  It is, thus, obvious that Christ the Lord vicariously bore as a substitute our ‘sicknesses’ and our ‘pains’ in the same way as he bore our ‘sins’.  HEALING and FORGIVENESS are, therefore, guaranteed in the atonement of Christ to ALL who will accept them by faith.

Acts 10:38 reads: “… how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power; how He went about doing good and HEALING ALL THAT WERE OPPRESSED BY THE DEVIL, for God was with Him.”  The deliberate capitalization in the above excerpt is to emphasize that sickness is, in fact, devil’s oppression.  Again, in the Biblical perspective, an ailment is the affliction by a spirit of infirmity, resulting often from our sinful ways of life. Psalm 107:17 corroborates it.  “Some were sick through their sinful ways, and because of their iniquities suffered affliction.”  We also read in Lk. Ch. 13 of a woman who had had a spirit of infirmity for eighteen years, and was bent over unable to straighten herself.  While healing her Jesus asks, “Ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan bound for eighteen years, be loosed from this bond on the Sabbath Day?”  From the Lord’s words, we understand that supernatural healing means ‘being DIVINELY released or set free from the iron-clad grip of a spirit of infirmity’. The healing of Simon’s mother-in-law in Lk. Ch. 4 is yet another example.  The Lord rebuked the fever – i.e. the spirit of infirmity called ‘the spirit of fever’ – and it left her.

The inescapable inference we can draw from the above is that ‘praying for healing’ is the same as ‘waging spiritual warfare’ against a determined defiant spirit of infirmity. Victory in this spiritual warfare entails the following four successive steps.

1. Mending one’s ways and habits in line with God’s ordained standards of righteousness;
2. Using the ‘Sword of the Spirit’, which is the Word of God, habitually in one’s prayer besides thanking the Lord, again and again, in acknowledgment of the healing being received in faith through His stripes.  Believers walk ‘by faith’ and NOT ‘by sight’.  Our Lord overpowered Satan and his temptations by quoting from the Scripture.  Scriptural passages are intimidating to the spirit(s) of infirmity or infirmities which will flee in due course, paving the way for complete permanent healing.  In fact, the process of recovery will be greatly accelerated if one humbles oneself to seek simultaneously the intercession of St. Mary, the Mother of God, and/or that of any other saint of one’s personal preference and adoration.
3. Claiming the promised healing in ‘faith’ and with ‘expectancy’, which are best summed up in Ps. 27:13&14; and
4. Actualizing or receiving, the healing prayed for, with praise and thanksgiving.

Before concluding, let me make a passing reference to the subtle distinction between the Healing Ministry within the Traditional Church and the Evangelistic Ministry of Healing.  The Church Ministry of Healing is, for believers who are members of the Church, through

1. the Sacrament of the Holy Communion primarily and
2. the Tripartite New Testament Divine Healing Covenant among the sick person, the ordained ministers of the Church (elders) and the Triune God as outlined in James 5:14-16.

There is no need for believers to take their sins or their sickness(es) past the Lord’s Table.  In practice, however, that does frequently happen on account of

1. their proneness to clinging to the sins they have once confessed, and
2. their being in spiritual adultery – i.e. their love for the Eternal Bridegroom being much less passionate than their insatiable love for the world, and its possessions and positions.

The healing miracles that occur at evangelistic crusades (conventions), conducted under the direction of the Holy Church are heaven-sent to confirm the preaching of the gospel with signs and wonders, and to draw the unbelievers as promised in the Lord’s Great Commission.  ‘Babes in Christ’ are often miraculously delivered while mature Christians attending the same gatherings may not be affected at all.
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