I was recently asked to pray for God’s healing over someone, who had been diagnosed with cancer. I’m sure that many of us have been in similar situations because we all know people who are unwell. Sometimes we see people healed, and sometimes we don’t. And this makes things complicated.

In the Old Testament, God declares, “I am the LORD who heals you” (Exodus 15.26) in the context of the Israelites leaving Egypt and God promising to meet all of their physical needs. Healing seems like the natural response of a loving God to His people.

In the New Testament, healing is one of the signs of the kingdom of God that Jesus preached and ushered in, exemplified in Matthew 12.15, “Many crowds followed him, and he cured all of them”. The Gospels contain twenty-four accounts of miraculous healing. These aren’t healings from minor ailments, but rather blindness, epilepsy, severe curvature of the spine, paralysis, deafness, and leprosy that were cured immediately, completely and permanently. Even death was reversed. The healing God of Exodus certainly appears to be the same God incarnate in the person of Jesus in the New Testament. Furthermore, the direction to pray for the sick in James 5.14-15 and naming the “gifts of healing” for the church in 1 Corinthians 12 demonstrates that the healing God is not only still relevant, but is also still active in the church.

But if God can heal, then why do we sometimes see people who aren’t healed? There were occasions such as the Syrophoenician woman in Mark 7.27 where healing was not immediately forthcoming. And while Jesus’ life, death and resurrection certainly demonstrated God’s power to heal, Lazarus presumably still eventually died, as did all those others that Jesus healed. God is a god of healing and Jesus healed people, but not everyone, and everything is held in the ultimate context of eventual death.

We know that there is no illness in God’s kingdom in heaven; all things are made perfect (Romans 8.18-23), including physical health. In the Lord’s Prayer, we petition for God’s kingdom to come on earth. When the kingdom of God invades our present reality, we should expect heavenly realities here and now, but it is not a complete process. A friend of mine once told me, “I pray for them and they get better or they die. Either way they get healed.” What we understand as healing now is only a foretaste of the ultimate healing to come.

But if death is inevitable any healing is merely a foretaste of what is to come, and some people might not even be healed now, then why bother praying at all? John Wimber famously retorted, "If 100 people are prayed for and only one is healed, that is better than no one being prayed for and no one healed."

The lesson that we learn in the story of the crippled beggar healed in Acts 3.1-16 is that “It is Jesus’ name and the faith that comes through him that has completely healed him” (Acts 3.16). Yes, God can heal, and God does heal but our responsibility is the focus on faith in Jesus as we pray. I’m not sure that it’s possible to neatly box up a theology of healing, just as we can’t (and shouldn’t!) try to box God. However, what we must do is continue to pray for healing to our God who heals.

I’ve found the following resources really helpful for wrestling with this subject.

Power Healing, by John Wimber

The Devil, Disease, and Deliverance: Origins of Illness in New Testament Thought, by John Christopher Thomas

The Essential Guide to Healing, by Bill Johnson and Randy Clark