"By His Stripes We Are Healed" | Does Faith = Healing? (Part 1)

Part one of a three part series by Mark McAndrew.

Over the past few months the Prosperity Gospel keeps coming up. I've been talking about it over coffee, on the phone, online, and in my classroom. So, here's my take:

I disagree with the statement: "If you try your hardest to be healed, believe in God fully, and pray to be healed, he will heal you."

I think God can heal anyone at any time. And I believe God sometimes (perhaps even often) does heal people today. But I do not believe he always heals people...even if they are sincerely praying and asking for healing.

I think the verse from Isaiah is true - "by his stripes we are healed." However, I think it will only fully be applied in the resurrection, when we have perfectly healthy bodies given to us. Until then, I do not think that there is a guarantee of healing.

Let me give an example. The most humble and godly person I've ever met is Jerry Ediger, who was my Bible teacher in high school. He was paralyzed during a football game at age 17 and has been in a wheel chair for the last 28 years. Is the reason he hasn't been healed in all this time really because he doesn't have enough faith?

Also, and I'm not trying to sound dramatic by saying this, but I had a friend from college die this past year. His name was Jonathan. He was 23, 6 months younger than I am, and he died from cancer. A year earlier (December 2009), he had some back pain and went to get an MRI. They discovered five tumors in his body (one near each kidney, one near his lungs, one near his heart, one in his lower back). He was diagnosed with stage four cancer and immediately started chemo.

Our whole college began praying for him in January, 2010. I saw him and prayed for his healing in person, along with many others. I have little doubt that many of those prayers were prayed sincerely and with faith that God could heal him. Well, the chemo ended and he was feeling much better. The tumors had shrunk and he was preparing to come back to school for Fall semester. That summer, and I tear up thinking about it, the cancer returned with a vengeance.

He had lost his hair, was horribly skinny and almost unrecognizable the last time I saw him. We talked in the coffee shop on campus. He said the doctors were guessing he'd have maybe two or three months to live. I hugged him. He loved Jesus. In fact, when I met him three years earlier we became close friends and once even drove, just he and I, to an out-of-state Christian conference for a week. He knew the Word really well, and would get emotional talking about Jesus' death on the cross for him. Anyways, all that to say he was a believer, he loved Jesus, and he was prayed for by literally hundreds of Christians to be healed, and yet he passed away last February.

Now, this is the point where I get really upset at prosperity teaching. Prosperity teachers would tell me friend, Jonathan, that the primary reason he wasn't getting better was because he didn't have enough faith in promises like "By his stripes we are healed" - and that if he just believed more in that promise, the cancer would go away.

The problem is...that's not true. We did believe and we did pray, and the cancer didn't go away. Now, Jonathan didn't believe the prosperity 'word of faith' message, but if he had, what would that have done to him as he was dying? He would have thought one of two things: either I don't have enough faith or God doesn't keep his promises. Both of those are not true and would have left him in more despair than he was already in.

In the next two posts, I'd like to look at a few passages that relate to this whole issue.