God Heals
All healing is, in some way, divine healing. We can speak of 'natural' processes for healing, but who created nature? Who set its rules, gave it its direction? God, of course. So when body tissue repairs itself and the immune system works, it is doing what God intended it to do. We can also speak of 'medical' healing. But medicine is rooted in the understanding of how nature works. It gives a boost to the systems for healing that we already have within us, clearing away roadblocks to restoring health, and does some things that nature does not have the ability to do on its own. Medicine itself has no ultimate healing power. All medicine can do at its very best is to delay death's inevitable arrival. Even medicine's ability to delay death is a great gift from God. The Holy Spirit is, according to the Nicene Creed, the Giver of life. The Spirit is also the sustainer of life, the breath which we keep taking in as long as we are alive. Just as the Spirit can heal our souls, the Spirit can work within us to heal our bodies.


The kind of healing that the Bible talks about also takes place today in our day and time. It is real. It's in the toolbox that the Spirit has given Christ's followers. As we do with many of those tools, we try to be in control, to manipulate using healing (like Simon Magus may have done), or to fake it in order to become famous. The real gift may be hard to find because so many are claiming to do it.

In today's world, many people turn to healing ministries and faith healers for many of the same reasons they use for turning to alternative medicine, unusual therapies, and New Age healing:

spiritual hunger;
meaning in life;
direction for life.
It's best to address these needs without letting them overwhelm the healing task at hand. A congregational healing ministry is not a shrink's couch or a medical practice or a weekend with a guru. It has a different task. It must not try to imitate them.

Faith healing is not there to replace medicine or the body's healing processes. But Western civilization has gotten even most Christians to look to medical science as their only source of healing. When the Bible speaks of healing, it is speaking of God's stepping in to bring about healing by divine power rather than mere medicine. The natural processes obey God's command rather than operate as they normally do. Miracles show who's really in charge. Thus, the Christian's prayer is not just that the ill be comforted, but that they may be healed. When healing occurs, we are not to ask what we did right, but to ask what God is up to.
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