Does God heal?

One day this past week, I was taking a super walk in one of my favorite parks on a day that was extremely warm for a December day in Colorado.  Walking along a forest path, I suddenly saw a small group of runners coming toward me.  I quickly deduced they were the cross country team from the nearby high school.  They were all students except for one adult who was probably the coach.  I only watched as they ran by, but what I had the urge to do was talk with them.  Deep down I even wanted to yell out, "How's my friend?!"  That is because in my former church where I did youth ministry work, one of the students who worships in that church has two brain tumors.  And she use to run cross country for that high school.  I continued walking and thinking about my former church until I got to a point where I was ready to turn around and start walking back to my car.  Before continuing on, I got my water bottle out of my daypack and was guzzling water.  Then I saw the runners and the coach again on a distant parallel path as they ran back the other way back towards the high school.  Yet a detail I noticed was that there was one student missing from the group, and I figured it was the same one who was tailing a bit behind when they had passed me earlier.  I waited to see if she would come along.  A little while later, I saw her in the distance.  She was running at a steady pace, but she had really slowed down.  I wondered if she felt alone, being so far behind her coach and teammates.  I prayed for her.
Then I again thought of my friend with the two brain tumors.  I realized there was only one thing I could do for her, and that was to pray.  Yet does praying really help anything?  I have known people who sincerely prayed for an individual who was extremely ill, and yet they died anyway.  First, when you pray for yourself, you are truly submitting yourself to God so that He can do spiritual work in you, and that spiritual benefit will even benefit you physically, yet that does not mean you will have some grand physical healing.  And if there is something you pray for where the answer is "no," then you can be more at peace about that knowing that you asked.  (This is easier said than done!  Sometimes it takes me quite awhile to get peace when God says "no.")  Now there have been times when I know that I got some physically healing from God.  Yet I usually still needed to go to the doctor as well!  And first and foremost, in my heart I get healing all of the time from Jesus!
Now praying for someone else is a bit different, because God is not going to force Himself on them if they are unwilling.  Yet my friend is willing to have God heal her.  Is God willing?  I would claim that God does desire to heal, yet His plan is a long term plan, and the core is Jesus.  In this world at this time, God's core action always starts with the heart.  For instance, when Jesus was physically in this world, He healed a blind man.  Yet someone may be blind now, and not receive sight.  When I was a young Christian, I had two friends at my large church who were blind.  Both were devoted to Jesus; neither had miraculous restoration of eyesight.  Yet the Bible teaches that one day they will be able to see.  In heaven, all children of God are given a new body.  There will be no blind people in heaven.  A person may have to be blind for many years in this world.  But one day their body is going to be restored.  Here and now, the first and foremost concern of God is that people have their heart made anew, because the heart is the core of a person, and all humans need our heart changed by Jesus to be truly loving, and to be united with God.
  Standing there in that beautiful place on a gorgeous day, feeling helpless to help my friend who is suffering from such a horrible thing, I realized that praying was all I needed to do.  Prayer helped me right then and there!  First, I had a realization that my friend's life is in God's hands.  I can see her running down that path soon.  Yet young people do die.  I have a friend from when I worked at the National Rehabilitation Association in Alexandria, Virginia, who died of cancer.  She was an incredible woman of faith, yet she physically died.  But that leads to a second reminder from my prayer, which is that God loves everyone.  And anyone who submits herself or himself to Jesus has life eternal in the Kingdom of Heaven, and can have a certain peace here on earth in this world that God created which is good.  When Jesus told the man who was being executed for stealing, who had put his faith in Jesus, that he would be with Him in Paradise, Jesus meant it.  Jesus was not using the term flippantly, rather it was a promise to a physically dying man (see Luke 23:43).  The Kingdom of Heaven is Paradise, because the King there is Jesus, along with the Father and the Holy Spirit.  And any human being can become a citizen in the Kingdom of God!  Can you believe that?  As Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones stated, "The Christian message is that the Son of God, the Lord Jesus Christ, came out of heaven into this world in order to save us." (1)  He goes on to say how Jesus accomplished this: "...He has borne my sins in His own body..." (2).  The consequences of sin is spiritual death.  Yet Jesus took the consequences!  Because of the forgiveness He made available, any person can be united with God, which starts by having the heart indwelled by the Holy Spirit, which is having the King in your heart!  We people are not simply material particles.  We people have a soul, something not empirically detectable by us limited humans, because God made us in His image, and God is Spirit (John 4:24).  And our souls can be bonded to God here and now, and then one day Jesus is going to come a second time into this world.  He will judge the unrighteous and deem their punishment, which is spiritual death, and He will establish His Kingdom anew in heaven and on earth.  Love will abound in the Kingdom of God!  And His citizens, who are even His adopted children, and who will have new bodies, are going to be able to be with Him in full forever!  To God be the glory!

Hunter Irvine
(1) Martyn Lloyd-Jones, The Kingdom of God (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 1992), 151.
(2) Martyn Lloyd-Jones, The Kingdom of God (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 1992), 151.