Sermonette: God Heals Today
Faith in Healing
#1754s
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Given 30-Mar-24; 21 minutes
description: After the death of Herbert W. Armstrong in 1986, the antinomian Tkach administration began to move the doctrines of our previous fellowship back to mainstream Protestantism, beginning a subtle change of detaching physical healing from Christ's sacrifice. The doctrine of physical healing has always had a paramount position in both the Old and New Testaments (Exodus 15:26, Psalm 103:1, Isaiah 53:4-6, I Peter 2:24), declaring that through the stripes of Jesus Christ, our sins are forgiven and our bodies our healed. Healing is conditional, based upon complete faith and surrender to Almighty God, with the understanding that sometimes immediate healing is not His will. Faith and healing go hand in hand; we must believe that God can heal us, but our ultimate trust must be in God Himself. God alone heals, not vaccines, not diets, not food supplements, not anything but Almighty God, who alone deserves our undivided trust.
transcript:
After Herbert Armstrong died in 1986 and Joseph Tkach became Worldwide Church of God's Pastor General, the Tkach regime immediately began to change the doctrines of the church. Many people are under the illusion that the doctrinal changes came later, maybe in the early 1990s, but they actually began in 1986. They got going right away. It was during the time that Mr. Tkach was going on his grand "We Are Family" tour. And you know, this idea that was floating through the church that we have had a very smooth transition and things are going to go on and we are just all going to accompany Joe Tkach to the Kingdom of God.
Well, I was in Pasadena at the time. I was working at Church Administration, right in the heart of everything, and I saw and heard and read the PGR [Pastor General's Report] before it actually went out to the ministry and I knew what they were up to. It was very evident (just after the first few months) that there were going to be changes. Now, among the first moves was a very subtle change that undermined faith in healing.
Before the Passover of 1987 they began preaching that healing was not tied to Christ's sacrifice. The larger issue at the time was Mr. Armstrong's distinction that he made between spiritual sin and physical sin. And they were saying that sin is sin, which I agree with. I do not think we need to separate them out. But in doing so, they made the leap that faith in healing was not necessary. Actually, faith healing was not something that we should expect. They equated faith in healing with the Charismatic movement and primitive, unlearned religion. And it was certainly not mainstream and that was the direction they were trying to take the church. They wanted to turn the church into essentially a mainstream Protestant denomination, which Grace Communion is today.
They also hinted that miraculous healings happen only when God needs to make a splash and attract attention to the Gospel. Now, I know that He does that. I mean, Jesus' ministry is full of miracles of healing. The apostles did great miracles of healing and that did attract attention to the church. But that is not the only time that He does miraculous healings. There were plenty of healings in the church, in our history that showed that that is not the case. God heals. He is a healer. So by saying some of these things, they were indeed undermining people's faith in God to heal. But that idea is definitely in Scripture.
So today, in this short amount of time that I have, we will look at faith in healing to see that God heals according to our faith. However, it is not a simple matter. We will barely scratch the surface of this doctrine in the few minutes that I have. But I want to hit the high notes just as a reminder to us to help us see that the idea is definitely in Scripture and that we can continue to believe that faith in God is what we need to be healed.
Let us go to Exodus 15, verse 26. I am going to be trying to go through these scriptures at a quick pace so if you do not catch up, you could always get the transcript. But I want to make sure I get all this in.
Exodus 15:26 [God said] "If you diligently heed the voice of the Lord your God and do what is right in His sight, give ear to His commandments and keep all His statutes, I will put none of the diseases on you which I have brought on the Egyptians. For I am the Lord who heals you."
This is said right after they have crossed the Red Sea. They have been baptized, if you will, in the sea and so God gives them this foundational statement that He is a God who heals and He will heal His people.
Now notice that in the way that He put it. He put it in a way that all of us can understand: that healing is conditional. Notice all these things: if you will diligently heed the voice of the Lord and do what is right in His sight, give ear to His commandments and keep all His statutes, I will put none of the diseases on you. So He does link living a good life, a godly life, keeping the commandments, having a relationship with God as part of the promise of healing.
If I can put it in maybe more modern terms: having an active relationship with Him and doing what He says, trying to live the life of God in this world, then healing is open to you. He wants to provide healing. He wants to provide a full life for His people. And so He says, I am a God who heals, ask Me for it.
Let us go to Psalm 103, another foundational scripture, where David lists the benefits. I will just start in verse 1.
Psalm 103:1-5 Bless the Lord, O my soul; and all that is within me, bless His holy name! Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all His benefits: Who forgives all your iniquities, who heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from destruction, who crowns you with lovingkindness and tender mercies, who satisfies your mouth with good things, so that your youth is renewed like the eagle's.
David here very clearly proclaims that God both forgives sin and heals diseases. He says it in the same breath here. He sets them in parallel, in a couplet, for this specific verse and frankly, all five of these benefits that he lists here between verses 3 and verse 5 are all said in confident parallel. They are all part of the same package, if you will. Forgives all our iniquities, heals all your diseases, redeems your life from destruction, crowns you with lovingkindness and tender mercies, and satisfies your mouth with good things. They are all part of the same package of benefits that He wants to give to His people. David himself in his long life of service to God had seen all of these things happen to himself.
And that is an important thing in this particular passage here, because it is very poorly translated, if you will, it is translated literally. But what he is saying is this is what we have to pray. This is part of our prayer to God and the "yours" here means me or my. So when we think of them, it really means who forgives all my iniquities, who heals all my diseases, and then so forth and so on. This is supposed to be a thing that we reflect on; that God is so great and He gave us these benefits.
So God wants to give them to us. He lays them out there. I will do this, I will do it fully. But He also wants to give us these things because we trust in Him and because we are part of the covenant that He has made and we want to conform to the covenant in everything that we do.
Now, forgiveness, David says, comes first. That is the first in line. Forgiveness of sin starts the ball rolling, the dominos falling, if you will. If we receive God's forgiveness, it implies our acceptance into the covenant. So we are in that relationship with Him. We are part of the Family. We are spiritual Israel. We are the church. And with forgiveness—that justification that we are given and the ongoing forgiveness of God, the grace that He gives us—then God's healing, His deliverance, His care, His providence, all of those things are open to us because now we are in a special relationship with Him and He wants to give good things to His Family, to His sons and daughters.
Let us go to Isaiah 53 now. I do not want to get bogged down any one place or we will be here for a long time. Isaiah 53, verses 4 through 6. This is the famous Suffering Servant chapter in which the Messiah is prophesied doing one of His greatest acts. And that is, covering for our sin with His blood, redeeming us. But notice what is said here between verses 4 through 6.
Isaiah 53:4-6 Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed Him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement for our peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned, every one to his own way; and the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.
We will quickly go to I Peter 2. I want to read just verse 24.
I Peter 2:24 [Peter writes] who Himself [meaning Christ], bore our sins in His own body on the tree, that we, having died to sins, might live for righteousness—by whose stripes you were healed.
And then he goes on in verse 25 to parallel Isaiah 53:6 about sheep going astray.
What we have here is that both Peter and Isaiah, inspired by God of course, link Christ bearing our sins and healing by His stripes. They are mentioned again in the same breath. Peter, however, changes "we are healed" and makes it both personal and past tense by saying "you were healed." From this, the Worldwide Church of God tried to say that this was just spiritual healing. It includes spiritual healing, but it does not exclude physical healing. Both are covered under the same umbrella, if you will.
The way Peter puts it here indicates that Christ's sacrificial death in the past—it was already in the past for him, it had happened years before—made these things possible, made both the forgiveness of our sins and the healing of our bodies possible. It has been accomplished; that part of His work is done and it is effective. Why? Well, obviously, there is the power of God, but also it is effective because the faithful trust God. They believe in Jesus Christ, they have accepted His sacrifice, and they trust Him to do what is good and right.
So yes, spiritual healing, forgiveness of sin, is by far the most important and eternal point in all of this. But physical healing is an incredible and wonderful benefit that He also supplies gladly, willingly. But it comes by the same means: faith or belief in Christ. And we could say the same things for those other benefits that David mentioned in the Psalm 103. Those also come by faith in Christ. And it is forgiveness of sin, as I said, that starts the ball rolling.
Now, just for kicks, let us go to Matthew the ninth chapter. Ted was here a few weeks back or he was in the parallel, I am not sure, Mark or Luke. But this is the same parallel.
Matthew 9:20-22 And suddenly, a woman who had a flow of blood for twelve years came from behind and touched the hem of His garment. For she said to herself, "If only I may touch His garment, I shall be made well." But Jesus turned around, and when He saw her, He said, "Be of good cheer, daughter; your faith has made you well." And the woman was made well from that hour.
Let us drop down to verse 27.
Matthew 9:27-29 When Jesus departed from there, two blind men followed Him, crying out and saying, "Son of David, have mercy on us!" And when He had come into the house, the blind men came to Him. And Jesus said to them, "Do you believe that I am able to do this?" And they said to Him, "Yes, Lord." Then He touched their eyes, saying, "According to your faith let it be to you."
Should we go back to the first part of this chapter, we see in the incident where He healed the paralytic that He put the forgiveness of sins and the healing of his body almost equal. He equated them. He makes them parallel acts of God that both require faith. At the very least, it shows a correspondence between the two, spiritual healing and physical healing, and both require faith.
James 5:15 (we will not go there), but it says the "prayer of faith will save the sick and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven." This goes on and on through the Bible, that the healing of a person is the physical parallel to the spiritual healing of the person from his sins. It is a consistent thing in the Bible.
Finally, let us go to Psalm 146. There is an important distinction that needs to be made here though, in terms of our faith. We will just read the whole psalm.
Psalm 146:1-10 Praise the Lord! [Hallelujah in Hebrew.] Praise the Lord, O my soul! While I live I will praise the Lord; I will sing praises to my God while I have my being. Do not put your trust in princes, nor in a son of man [any human], in whom there is no help. His spirit departs, he returns to his earth; in that very day his plans perish. [He is going to die. What kind of power does he have?] Happy is he [though] who has the God of Jacob for his help, whose hope is in the Lord his God, who made heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them; who keeps truth forever, who executes justice for the oppressed, who gives food to the hungry. The Lord gives freedom to the prisoners. The Lord opens the eyes of the blind [that is healing]; the Lord raises those who are bowed down [that is healing]; the Lord loves the righteous. The Lord watches over the strangers; He relieves the fatherless and widow; but the way of the wicked He turns upside down. The Lord shall reign forever—your God, O Zion, to all generations. Praise the Lord!
We see faith and healing go hand-in-hand here. Just as we believe that Christ is our Savior, that He has redeemed us with His blood and our sins have been forgiven, so we must believe that He can heal us.
Now, notice there, I did not say He will heal us. I said He can heal us. We can trust in that. That determination of healing is according to God's will. But whatever He decides—and He is all-wise—we must trust that He has our best interests at heart. And we must say with Jesus, "Not my will, but Yours be done."
Our faith, our belief, our trust must be in God, in God Himself, not in our hope of healing. We have to trust the One who can heal—and His decision. So just remember, God heals. Not a doctor, not a naturopath, not a surgeon, not some vaccine, not some medicine, not some diet. God and God alone heals. We must make sure for our part that our faith is in Him, the Creator God and our Deliverer.
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