Day 6

Hope for Healing

from the reading plan

Open Your Bible

Isaiah 52:13-15, Isaiah 53:1-12, Matthew 15:29-30, Mark 5:25-34, Revelation 21:3-4

By Collin Ross

Scripture Reading: Isaiah 52:13-15, Isaiah 53:1-12, Matthew 15:29-30, Mark 5:25-34, Revelation 21:3-4

A few days ago, a good friend of mine asked me to pray for his six year old nephew. This little boy’s appendix had burst, and the emergency surgery had unintentionally caused some worrisome complications. As I listened to my friend explain what was going on, the thought and feeling kept running through my head was, “This is so wrong.” Six-year old boys should be running around the neighborhood, fighting imaginary foes with friends, and catching fire-flies at dusk. They should not be lying in hospital beds. This is not the way things should be.

We all feel that way at some point. We encounter illness or injury, and it just strikes us as unnatural and out of place. The reason that sickness and injury feel so unnatural is because they are not a part of God’s good creation, but rather, they are the result of sin infiltrating and corrupting what God has made.

But praise the Lord, for He will restore the world and everything in it! “Death will be no more; grief, crying, and pain will be no more, because the previous things have passed away” (Revelation 21:4). The great promise that flows from Christ’s resurrection is that just like His body was reborn and will never be defiled or decay ever again, so too will God renew our world.

And yet, how is that possible? How is it possible that our pain will be healed—be it physical, mental, emotional, relational, etc.? Upon what is this hope founded?

Our hope for healing is founded upon the suffering of our Lord: “We are healed by his wounds” (Isaiah 53:5). The work is finished, for Christ has taken upon himself the ultimate source of our afflictions, and He has put it to death on the cross once and for all. So now we do not need to chase after a fleeting hope for healing. Rather, the promise of healing has come to us.

Some of us, like those that Jesus encountered in Galilee (Matthew 15:30), will experience healing in this life as a foretaste of the coming kingdom. But not all of us will experience healing in the way we expect. Yet we all share the same hope: because Jesus bore away our sin, we will be freed forever from all of its wretched effects in eternity with Him.

Written by Collin Ross