Word of Salvation – Vol. 25 No. 34 – June 1979

 

When God Doesn’t Heal

 

Sermon by Rev. Keith Vethaak on 2Cor.12:7 – 10

The second of two Sermons on HEALING – PART 2

Readings: 2Cor.4:7 – 5:10

 

Brothers and sisters in our Lord Jesus Christ,

In 1Corinthians Paul states that the gospel is easiest understood by those who the world considers dumb, not with it, fools.

“Consider your call,” says Paul to the Corinthians. “Not many of you were wise according to human standards…!”

As we read what Paul is saying here we wonder why he seems to have such a grudge against the smart, clever people in the world.

But let us assure you, the Word of God has good reason to attack the so-called wise of the world, for the wise were the philosophers, especially the Greek philosophers.

And Greek philosophy, Greek ideas, happened to be one of the greatest hindrances to the Christians gospel.

And even today the thinking of the Western world has been heavily influenced by Greek ways of thinking, which today too, hinders the gospel.

For instance let me mention the Greek idea of God.

The Greeks thought of God as a computer in the skies, someone cold and distant and not really interested in man – he was just the great cause behind all things.

Many modern people see God in exactly this way – the force that started everything off in the first place.

But to people who think about God in this Greek way it is very difficult to accept that God is so personally interested in us that He sent Jesus into this world to die on a cross for you and for me. For them this is just plain stupid.

And then the Greeks also taught that we can know the truth about things just by thinking about them. We don’t need a Bible or anything like that – truth is built in.

And remember Greek logic, which was worked out by a fellow called Aristotle. He taught that when two things contradict each other then they cannot both be true. So you must choose one or the other.

And throughout the centuries we have been schooled to think in just this way, we have been schooled with the wisdom of the Greeks, which is why we have so many problems with what the Bible teaches.

For instance the Bible tells us that God is in control at all times, but at the same time it teaches that we are responsible.

Now old Harry would have said: “You gotta pick one or the other – they can’t both be right.”

And so we have great problems with this.

‘How can God be in control and man be responsible? It’s not logical!’

And so the end result is that you get some who teach nothing but the fact that God is in control; and others who teach nothing but the fact that man is responsible.

You get some who say that our salvation is God’s work and man is completely passive – no use even evangelising, because God will elect those to be saved and what we do makes no difference.

And you get others who say that Jesus had done His bit and now it is completely up to you to decide whether or not you will accept or reject Jesus.

But such people are preaching the gospel according to Aristotle, and not the gospel according to the Bible which says that God is both 100% sovereign and responsible for our salvation, and at the same time man is 100% responsible.

Now we’re bringing all this to your attention not because we want to put you all to sleep with a long lecture on philosophy, but because this same Greek way of thinking influences our whole approach to the Bible, and to subjects such as healing, and prayer.

The Bible says, ‘Ask anything in the name of Jesus and you will get it.”

Now if you apply Greek logic to this – and that’s not very hard because that is the way that we are trained to think – then you’ll say: ‘Umm ..ask anything hey… Well then, I think that I’ll ask God for a million dollars, a mansion in Blackman’s Bay, à Rolls Royce, a harem of beautiful girls to look after me…!”

But you can ask God for these sort of things until you are blue in the face but you won’t get them.

Now is the Bible wrong when it says that we will get what we ask for, or is our understanding of the Bible wrong?

You see, when we start applying our Western Greek way of thinking to texts of the Bible and start drawing our conclusions, then we go wrong. That’s why we must look beyond one text at the whole message of the Bible.

In our sermon on James 5 we saw that James lays down a very clear procedure to be followed in case of sickness.

If you have any sickness at all, whether physical, mental or spiritual, you must call the elders to pray over you; use the best medical care available; confess your sins; and pray for one another.

It’s all very simple, very straightforward and James says that the prayer of faith will heal the sick man.

James makes no mention of any possibility that you may not be healed.

Now once again, if we apply our logical way of thinking to what James is saying then we come to some very strange conclusions.

In fact we can come to only one conclusion.

God must always heal.

There is no room for failure.

If you are not healed it must be because you haven’t prayed enough or because you just haven’t got enough faith.

‘Look, it says it there in black and white. “The prayer of faith will heal the sick man”. There can be no doubt.

A simple logical conclusion. If you are sick and don’t get healed it must be because you are missing out somewhere.

But is this conclusion supported by the Bible? Or is it faulty because the logic of a pagan Greek thinker has been used to arrive at this conclusion?

There is only one way to find out and that is to see what the rest of the Word of God has to say.

And I would like to first of all spend a few moments looking at Job, because the book of Job teaches us that we should not draw conclusions about sickness too quickly.

Very briefly now, you all know what happened to Job? Every nasty thing under the sun including physical disease.

And in the book, Job and his friends spend a lot of time discussing Job’s sorry state.

In Chapter 4 Eliphaz makes a very learned comment which really summarizes everything that they had to say about Jobs case.

Ummm…! Yes, it seems to me that an innocent man wouldn’t be suffering like you are, Job.

Yes, there can only be one reason why God is not listening to your prayers and healing you. You must be a sinner. You must have offended t Him in some way.

You see, Job and his friends had a very cut and dried idea about things. If you are good, God will bless you, if you are bad, then God will curse you.

And so there must have been something wrong with Job.

But God gave a different diagnosis of the problem. And He didn’t agree with Job’s friends.

What God more or less said to Job’s buddies was this: OK, what you have said may sometimes be true, but in this particular case you are talking through your hats. You are completely and utterly wrong.

Job’s mates had it all worked out very neatly and tidily, but God objected to being told what He must always do. God got quite angry with Job’s friends because they tried to tell Him how to act: “But God, you’ve got to bless the good and punish the evil.”

And it wasn’t until the end of the book that Job understood what God was trying to tell him, and Job’s awestruck confession of faith is wonderful to hear:

“God, You are way beyond us. Your ways are far too deep and wonderful for me to understand. Lord, I was wrong in saying that You must work this way or that way. You know what You are doing.”

When a believer is sick, and when he has prayed for healing but God has not healed, then the Book of Job teaches us that we cannot blame that Christian. We can only point such a person to our wonderful God who knows what He is doing.

Let’s now move on from Job and have a look at the Apostle Paul – the sick apostle.

You may not be aware of it, but dozens of times Paul talks of himself as being weak, being sick.

Let us give you a few examples.

In Gal.4:14 Paul tells us about a bodily ailment which afflicted him and caused him to stop among the Galatians.

And it must have been a pretty nasty sort of illness because he was very thankful that the Galatians weren’t turned off.

In 1Corinthians 2:3: “I was with you in weakness….!”

2Cor.10:10 – His letters are weighty but his personal appearance is sickly. And then there is 2Cor.4 – a whole chapter about weakness and sickness.

There is no doubt that right through his writings Paul is talking about a physical sickness which afflicted him.

Now some of you might question this, and say, “How do you know that Paul is not talking about a Spiritual weakness?”

Let me answer this by saying that the Greek word which is translated in many of these passages as ‘weakness’ is the word ‘asthenes’ which literally means bodily sickness.

And then if you look up the way in which this word is used in the rest of the New Testament you find a very clear picture emerging.

In Matt.8:17 ‘asthenes’ is translated as ‘infirmities’. In Acts 28:9 as diseases.

In Gal.4:14 as ‘bodily ailment’.

There is no doubt that Paul is talking about some sort of physical sickness or disease, though what was wrong with him no one knows.

Paul himself speaks about his problem in 2Cor.12 where he tells us about the thorn in the flesh, although ‘thorn’ is not a good translation because the word which Paul uses means ‘stake’, or sharpened stick.

When we start putting everything together it becomes clear that Paul didn’t just have some little prickle bothering him, there was something seriously wrong, it was as though a sharpened stake had been driven through his flesh. It wasn’t a spiritual problem for that Paul would hardly later have thanked God, it was a bodily, physical, fleshly thing.

And this physical sickness that Paul had was something that came back time and time again – it harassed him as he puts it.

And Paul begged God three times to heal him but God said ‘no’.

And God had a reason for saying no, because he wanted Paul to be weak physically so that people would not be tempted to look at him instead of looking at the Jesus he was preaching.

God wanted Paul to be sick because in this way Paul could serve Him better.

But one thing God did promise Paul, and that was that His grace would be sufficient.

God promised Paul that he would be able to bear his sickness, because God would give him the power to do so. As a matter of fact God’s power would become perfect in Paul’s sickness. That’s what God told Paul (v9).

And when Paul realised that this was God’s will, do you know what he did? He began to rejoice and to be glad because of his sickness. Because he realised that his weakness would only help to focus all the attention upon Jesus.

And that is really the central thing. That Jesus is glorified.

Paul was quite willing to be an absolute physical wreck providing that Jesus was glorified. Paul understood that God was telling him that even though he was physically sick, in reality he was strong, for the power of Christ dwelt in him.

Isn’t all this fantastic comfort for those among us who have asked for healing but to whom God has said ‘no’ ? “My grace is sufficient for you, my power is made perfect in sickness and weakness.”

If you know that you are right with the Lord then don’t look down upon yourself as though your faith is not great enough or your prayers haven’t been heard. Rejoice in your weakness because maybe God has chosen you to focus all the attention upon Jesus.

Maybe God has set you aside to show others that the greatest thing in life is not physical health and strength but a right relationship with God.

Maybe God is calling you to count everything that you have, including your physical health, as dung, as nothing, compared to the treasure you have in Jesus (Phil 3:8).

And finally, remember this, that when we suffer, and when we call to God for healing and God allows us to continue suffering, we are not walking alone, we are not walking a path that no one has ever walked before, but we are on a road that Jesus knows well.

In Hebrews 5:7 we read that when Jesus was on earth he offered up prayer and supplication with loud crying and tears to God who He knew was able to save Him from death.

But even though He was a son, God said no, and He learned obedience from what He suffered, and that obedience led Him to a death on the cross, where He died as God’s sacrificial Lamb, taking all our sins upon Himself.

Brothers and sisters, God does heal, and God wants us to pray for healing, but sometimes God, who always knows what He is doing, does not heal. When God does heal that is fantastic, that’s great, but when God does not heal that too is fantastic and great. When God does heal, God is showing us some of the results of Jesus’ great victory over sin, but when God does not heal then He is allowing us to walk in the footsteps of Jesus. And can we ask for more?

Hallelujah! Amen.