Faith Healing Isn’t Always Instant or Direct

I’ve been pretty ill recently.  Throughout the whole illness I’ve continually asked Jesus for instant healing and asked others to pray for the same.  It hasn’t come.  I’ve been frustrated by that.  Especially when I’ve been in extreme pain.  But throughout the whole process I’ve had to rely on medical science to cure me.  Now medical science is a gift from God.  He has enabled us to learn the many secrets of the human body and how it works, and how to fix it when it doesn’t.  You can trust in all that without specifically trusting in God, but He is the One who made it possible.  So I was trusting in God as I trusted in the medical interventions. 

But all this has made me think of Hezekiah, the King of Judah during one of Israel’s greatest crises, the threat of Assyrian invasion.  Hezekiah got some kind of internal infection that caused him to break out in boils.  The infection bubbles to the surface, you might say.  The medical intervention of the time was to utilize poultices.  A poultice was cloth soaked in ingredients that when applied to the open boil were designed to draw out the poison or infection.  His physicians applied poultices, but he was not getting better.  Through the prophet Isaiah, God told Hezekiah he was going to die and to get his house in order.

Hezekiah did not accept this and begged, cried and pleaded with God to spare his life.  God sent Isaiah to Hezekiah and told him He would give him 15 more years.  Then he told him to go get a poultice, he did, and he was healed (2 Kings 20:1-7).  Why didn’t God just heal him directly and instantly?  I don’t know.  God chose to this time use the poultice, the common intervention, and God made it work.  This tells me that God may not choose at times to make the common interventions work, and at times to make them work.  So praying and trusting in God and seeking medical help is still an important aspect of “faith healing.”

I won’t stop asking Jesus for instant healings.  But if they don’t come instantly, I am going to take His avenue of conventional medical therapies and trust Him to use those to get me the help I need.