To Heal or Not To Heal?

It’s all so simple to some folks: pray and you will be healed. To others it’s not simple: they prayed, they searched into the depths of the heart and pleaded from those depths to God for healing, and nothing happened. What then?

For some it’s so simple; pray and you will be healed. But by most accounts healing is much less present today than it was, say, in New Testament times — Jesus healed and healed and healed, and Paul raised sleeping Eutychus from the dead — and though some charismatics and Vineyard folks tell stories of healing and miracles, many of us have our doubts.

So, many of us are driven to ask all over again what the Bible says and what it doesn’t say. A brand new book by Frederick Gaiser, with a wonderful attentiveness to both detail and to the Story of the Bible as healing emerges, is highly recommended: Healing in the Bible: Theological Insight for Christian Ministry.

This is not a how-to or a simplistic approach. It is discursive, interactive, and developmental — but not building toward a singular thesis but instead to a full sketch of the complexity of the biblical evidence. Gaiser provides a close reading of major texts — Psalm 6, Exodus 15:22-27, Numbers 21:4-9, etc — and interacts with the text from a theological and pastoral perspective. The last chp is a summary, which includes big themes (biblical world, God of healing, illness in the Bible, biblical healing, healing in worship and community), as well 30 — count ’em — summary conclusions. This is a good book.