From: Ron or Susan <shokan517@home.com>

Date: Sat, 19 Feb 2000 02:46:32

To: WalterMartin@mail.serve.com

Subject: Re: WM: Historical Context of Our Healing God

List,

Greetings! For several days now, Dave has been discussing that ours is a God of healing, and Dave has patiently and untiringly evidenced many Scriptures from both the Old and New Testaments that attest to God's promise of healing to His believers. While I am all to anxious to acknowledge that ours truly is a God of healing, I suspect instead that much of the healing promised to us in the Bible pertains to our spiritual, rather than physical bodies. In surfacing this suggestion, Dave has charged me with "spiritualizing" Scripture, which ought not to be done. But for the life of me, I cannot seem to agree that God promises to heal us of injury and sickness in our mortal lifetimes, such that we should expect such a thing and suspect that our faith is amiss if healing is not rendered.

Please correct me if I am wrong, but as I read the Old Testament, I see a tragic love story between God and His Covenant people. I suspect much of the Old Testament has to do with God's courtship of the Israelites, the love between Him and His people, and the betrayal of that love. In Ezekiel, we read that the Glory of God had finally departed Israel, but before this, we read of a succession of generations that slowly damned themselves by alienating God from their culture and hearts with each succeeding generation.

Samuel had Saul. David had Nathan. We end up with Solomon who had no one. Solomon brought Israel into idolatry and bankruptcy, making straight the way for Manasseh and his ungodly clan. With this came the end of God's faithful promises to protect, empower and champion His people. Dave is correct in saying that the God of the Old Testament promised healing, and that God never changes. But God's people did change, and with that change came the Assyrian and Babylonian captivities and the end of God's promises to protect, prosper, heal and restore the nation of Israel.

Then came the New Covenant, and Christ and his Apostles healed left and right. But these healings were temporary. Lazarus was raised from the dead, only to die yet again. These healings were miracles, spontaneous and immediate, intended not to restore the person as much as they were to authorize the gospel and the Church of Christ. Once the gospel and Church were established, the miracles stopped. There may be miracles in the lives of people today, but these are not associated with a specific group or a specific leader as they were in times past. Even these, should they occur, are temporary. When healing does occur, it serves only as a promise of what is yet to come in our renewed lives in God's eternal Kingdom.

When we rush to look up Scriptures that support healing, are we perhaps forgetting to take those Scriptures in proper historical context? Is this not one of the most important and essential elements of hermeneutics? If we fail to review the historical setting of Scripture, we may very well find ourselves providing the correct answers to wrong

questions.

In Christ,

Ron