The Lord Who Heals YouSample

GOD’S PROVISION FOR HEALING

Isaiah 53:4,5 Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows…. But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement for our peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed. 

God wants us to be well and has made provision for healing through the Atonement of Jesus. In Isaiah 53, the prophet has a vision of the Messiah, Jesus, and His suffering for us, seeing Him bearing sickness, weakness and pain in addition to our sin and judgement. 

The Hebrew word for ‘griefs’ is correctly translated ‘sicknesses’ or ‘weaknesses’ and the word ‘sorrows’ is literally ‘pains’. These will usually appear as a footnote in your Bible.

The Amplified version of verse 4 reads ‘Surely He has borne our griefs (sicknesses, weaknesses and distresses) and verse 5 reads ‘With the stripes (that wounded) Him we are healed and made whole’.

The words used to describe Jesus bearing of our sins (verses 11 and 12) are the same as the ‘borne’ and ‘carried’ in verse 4 that mean to completely remove the load from one person and place it upon another as their substitute. Jesus took upon Himself our sickness in the same way that He took our sin! 

In Matthew 8:16,17 this passage from the Hebrew is correctly quoted as meaning sickness, and not grief and sorrow, and in context with Jesus healing all the sick. Jesus healed all in the fulfilment of the prophecy that He would bear the sickness of all. 

In 1 Peter 2:24, Peter also drawing from Isaiah 53 declares ‘by whose stripes you were healed’. It is now past tense, ‘were healed’ and not ‘are healed’, because it was accomplished at the Cross. Healing is not something God may or may not want to do for you but it is His will and something He has already made provision for. 

We are all on a journey of learning to appropriate what Jesus provided for us; we don’t have all the answers and our experience doesn’t always reflect perfectly what has been given to us in Christ. There can be the challenge of the wrestle between what has been promised and what is currently being experienced but as we continue to feed on God’s truth, its’ resident power brings healing and change.