Healing "Preliminaries"

We have spent several lessons looking at whether or not it is God's will for us to pray for the sick and expect them to be healed. Back in lesson six, I promised to discuss two things:

• confidence builders
• some common "Yeah, but what about ____?" questions.

The last two lessons looked at confidence builders -- those confidence building points that help us understand the will of God for us to pray for the sick. Let me summarize quickly what we have talked about: The Old Testament shows us God's will to heal the sick. The New Testament shows us that sickness and disease are works of the devil that Jesus came to destroy. When He died on Calvary, He did not only purchase our salvation, He also purchased our healing. And we learned that we are to pray for God's will in Heaven and His kingdom to manifest among us, and there is no sickness in Heaven. So when we pray for God's kingdom to come, we are also praying for God's healing to come.

Even in light of all of this, some of you may still have a few unanswered questions. And that is what I would like to address next. Let's take a look at some of those questions.

What About People In The Bible Who Were Sick?

Here's one of those questions -- what about the people in the Bible who were sick? This one used to really bother me. In the past, if a person would tell me that it was OK to pray for everyone to be healed, I would take these three sets of verses and throw them right in their faces.

The first passage is Phil 2:25-27, talking about one of Paul's co-workers who was so sick he almost died. Paul wrote, "Meanwhile, I thought I should send Epaphroditus back to you. He is a true brother, a faithful worker, and a courageous soldier. And he was your messenger to help me in my need. Now I am sending him home again, for he has been longing to see you, and he was very distressed that you heard he was ill. And he surely was ill; in fact, he almost died. But God had mercy on him--and also on me, so that I would not have such unbearable sorrow."

The second passage is 2 Tim 4:20, which says, "Erastus stayed at Corinth, and I left Trophimus sick at Miletus."

And the third passage is Gal 4:13-15, where Paul is speaking about himself, "Surely you remember that I was sick when I first brought you the Good News of Christ. But even though my sickness was revolting to you, you did not reject me and turn me away. No, you took me in and cared for me as though I were an angel from God or even Christ Jesus himself. Where is that joyful spirit we felt together then? In those days, I know you would gladly have taken out your own eyes and given them to me if it had been possible."

OK. We have Aphroditus, and we have Trophimus, and even Paul himself -- we have three of God's servants as sick in the bible. I looked at these passages and I thought, "If healing is for everybody, how about these people who travel with Paul the healer? Why couldn't He heal these guys? Apaphroditis, Trophemus, and even Paul himself struggled with sickness. And I found myself asking God, "What about these guys, Lord? They were sick. If it's the will of God for everybody to be healed, how come these guys got sick?"

As I pondered this one day, these thoughts began to come to my mind. Did they stay sick? Nothing suggests they stayed in this condition or even died in sickness. Then the Lord began to remind me that the expansion of the kingdom of God is not an easy task. It is not a piece of cake. There is a war. We have a struggle in advancing the kingdom of God. And just because somebody gets sick, doesn't mean that it is God's will for them to be sick. The sickness may just mean that we must press on to seek the fulfillment of God's kingdom. There is spiritual sickness in this world, and there is spiritual attacks in this world. A war is being waged. We can't just walk in perfect health without engaging the enemies of our bodies. The enemy's job description is to kill, to steal, and to destroy. Do you think that someone with that job description might attack you with sickness? (That was a rhetorical question. Of course he will attack you that way!)

Somebody came to me last week and said, "I am just now getting it. It's a war isn't it? It's a spiritual war."

We are fighting a spiritual war when it comes to sickness. Jesus came to destroy the works of the devil. Jesus healed those who were oppressed by the devil. This is a war. In the war the enemy will attack. And one of the things he attacks with is sickness and we need to understand that.

Paul's Thorn In the Flesh

On a similar note, what about Paul's thorn in the flesh? People ask me that all the time. 2 Cor 12:7b-9a says, "to keep me from getting puffed up, I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger from Satan to torment me and keep me from getting proud. Three different times I begged the Lord to take it away. Each time He said, 'My gracious favor is all you need. My power works best in your weakness.'"

Paul says that he asked God three times to get rid of the thorn, but all three times God did not do it. He allowed Paul to keep it so that God would be made strong in Paul's weakness.

The problem is that we don't know precisely what the thorn was. It is only speculation. Since Paul used the word "flesh," some people think that it was an ex-wife. There is enough validity to promote that as anything else. He could not have been in some of the things he was in the leadership had he not been married, but he was single at the end. Who knows? I don't know, because the Bible doesn't tell us what it is.

Some people think that the thorn was some type of eye problem, because of the passage in Gal 4:13-15, where Paul said that they loved him so much they would have given their own eyes to heal his repugnant sickness if it were possible.

But I don't think that is what the passage is referring to. Paul obviously got past that eye problem since the Gal 4 passage spoke in past tense about a past condition, not about a "current" one. That leads me to throw out the theory that the thorn is an eye disease. Since the Bible does not tell us what the thorn was, we cannot claim that it was a physical sickness. We won't know for sure what the actual thorn was until we are on the other side of eternity and can ask Paul directly. But I am going to throw out the eye disease theory because it is a weak theory.