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I've come across a few people recently who believe that healing is in the atonement. In other words they believe that healing is an automatic right, citing Is 53:5 ("by his stripes we are healed") and occasionally Ps 103:2-3 ("Bless the LORD, O my soul, And forget not all His benefits: Who forgives all your iniquities, Who heals all your diseases"). They appear to believe that any form of illness or imperfect health can be addressed by breaking off generational curses, written curses, spoken curses and so on.
The trouble is that Scripture just doesn't seem to support that theology if taken as a whole. David did what was right in the Lord's eyes, except in the matter of Uriah the Hittite (1Ki 15:5). After the issue with Bathsheba and Uriah the prophet Nathan told David that his son, the son Bathsheba bore, would die. And, sure enough, the child died. It seems reasonable to conclude that David wrote the psalm after the issue with Bathsheba because if he only deviated from God's will once in his life he would only have had the one specific iniquity to forgive, and yet having watched his son die he had seen God clearly not heal the child's diseases. So the psalm doesn't seem to support this particular interpretation, if read in context.
Looking at what Paul wrote in Rom 8:23 about how we are "eagerly waiting for the adoption, the redemption of our body", and what John wrote in Rev 21:4 about how in heaven there will be "no more death, no more sorrow, no more pain, no more crying" it seems likely that the only guarantee of healing comes when we receive our glorified bodies in heaven. That's not to say God doesn't heal today - I don't think you can pull that out of Scripture either without torturing the context - but to claim that it is always God's will to heal and the healing can be claimed as if it were a money-off coupon seems to be a very destructive theology.
If it is always God's will to heal, as these people claim, how do they explain the times God quite clearly chooses not to heal? Some blame the person who wasn't healed (which has a parallel to Job's "friends" and how God put them back in line towards the end of the book), while some seem to adopt what might be called a "fruit machine theology" where they put in enough prayers and then seize on the slightest improvement in a single person as "proof" that their proclamations were effective. If someone makes a bold declaration that another person is totally healed and that person then gets a little bit better while in hospital, you'd really have to stretch the definition of "miracle" to make it count.
Just for good measure, even within the New Testament we see illness. For example, Paul wrote of the "thorn in his flesh" (2Co 12:7), and told Timothy to drink a little wine for "his stomach's sake and his frequent infirmities" (1Ti 5:23). Presumably if healing is something that can just be claimed Paul would have known about it, so why didn't he just claim Timothy's healing?
Sadly if people have been promised that God will heal them (no doubt about it, God's will is always to heal) and then they are not healed it is hard to see it doing anything other than progressively weakening their faith. If they are then told that the reason they aren't healed is because they lack faith it is easy to see how they can come to conclude that God will only heal them if they achieve the impossible, which falls right back into a works-based theology. It's also easy to see how people would lose their faith completely if it becomes clear that God is going to ignore them until they achieve the impossible and truly believe something that they struggle to believe.
The trouble is that Scripture just doesn't seem to support that theology if taken as a whole. David did what was right in the Lord's eyes, except in the matter of Uriah the Hittite (1Ki 15:5). After the issue with Bathsheba and Uriah the prophet Nathan told David that his son, the son Bathsheba bore, would die. And, sure enough, the child died. It seems reasonable to conclude that David wrote the psalm after the issue with Bathsheba because if he only deviated from God's will once in his life he would only have had the one specific iniquity to forgive, and yet having watched his son die he had seen God clearly not heal the child's diseases. So the psalm doesn't seem to support this particular interpretation, if read in context.
Looking at what Paul wrote in Rom 8:23 about how we are "eagerly waiting for the adoption, the redemption of our body", and what John wrote in Rev 21:4 about how in heaven there will be "no more death, no more sorrow, no more pain, no more crying" it seems likely that the only guarantee of healing comes when we receive our glorified bodies in heaven. That's not to say God doesn't heal today - I don't think you can pull that out of Scripture either without torturing the context - but to claim that it is always God's will to heal and the healing can be claimed as if it were a money-off coupon seems to be a very destructive theology.
If it is always God's will to heal, as these people claim, how do they explain the times God quite clearly chooses not to heal? Some blame the person who wasn't healed (which has a parallel to Job's "friends" and how God put them back in line towards the end of the book), while some seem to adopt what might be called a "fruit machine theology" where they put in enough prayers and then seize on the slightest improvement in a single person as "proof" that their proclamations were effective. If someone makes a bold declaration that another person is totally healed and that person then gets a little bit better while in hospital, you'd really have to stretch the definition of "miracle" to make it count.
Just for good measure, even within the New Testament we see illness. For example, Paul wrote of the "thorn in his flesh" (2Co 12:7), and told Timothy to drink a little wine for "his stomach's sake and his frequent infirmities" (1Ti 5:23). Presumably if healing is something that can just be claimed Paul would have known about it, so why didn't he just claim Timothy's healing?
Sadly if people have been promised that God will heal them (no doubt about it, God's will is always to heal) and then they are not healed it is hard to see it doing anything other than progressively weakening their faith. If they are then told that the reason they aren't healed is because they lack faith it is easy to see how they can come to conclude that God will only heal them if they achieve the impossible, which falls right back into a works-based theology. It's also easy to see how people would lose their faith completely if it becomes clear that God is going to ignore them until they achieve the impossible and truly believe something that they struggle to believe.
