A brother whose small child has cerebral palsy writes in tears. He believes that God is able to heal but he hesitates to expect that God will heal his little son, lest such confidence, if unfulfilled, might diminish his faith.
* * *
I can promise you, dear brother, that God will perfectly heal your son one day, when we see Jesus face to face. That will not be a dislocated event unrelated to anything else, but rather the fulfillment of God’s creation purpose, a purpose thwarted temporarily by human sin since Adam, but a purpose set back on track by the victorious life, death and resurrection of his son, Jesus Christ.
The final resurrection will be the consummation of the accomplishment of Christ’s atonement. God will be victorious over sin and all its effects — in a tangible, cosmic, universal, visible manner. Even now, however, in the Father’s kindness and sovereignty, from time to time he bestows healings, both partial and complete, both instantaneous and gradual, through prayer alone and through prayer with medicine or surgery or therapy. All healing is from God.
We do not understand how God heals (even through medicine, which can only speed up or slow down normal bodily processes), or why he heals some but not others, or why partially and not completely. But we can hope with confidence in his love — certain that he will heal completely at the End, and that the same Jesus who touched and healed the sick when walking in Palestine 2,000 years ago has the same power today.
So we ask, and keep on asking. No one who reaches out to God in faith is rebuffed by him. Wherever love is, in God’s power and in Jesus’ name, there is “healing” — whether spiritual, emotional or physical. The wounded God, who in Christ was beaten to a bloody pulp and nailed to a tree and left until he died, shares our pain. He weeps with us and holds us close as we wait for the final day of consummate victory — over every ill that has ever befallen our broken and groaning world.