Are there any good Biblical reasons to believe God still heals today?
There is no valid Scriptural reason to suppose that Christ ever withdrew his healing gifts from the church, or that the Biblical promises concerning physical healing have been abrograted by God. This means that all the promises and instructions relating to divine healing are for today, since the Scripture is the final authority in matters of faith and practice (2 Timothy 3:16).
However, there is every reason to suppose that, just as in Bible times, unbelief limits the hand of God. "Now He [Jesus] could do no mighty work there, except that He laid His hands on a few sick people and healed them. And He marvelled because of their unbelief." (Mark 6:5,6).
Some try to invoke 1 Corinthians 13:8-10 or Matthew 7:21-23 to deny the validity of the ministry of divine healing today. The first passage refers to the second coming of Christ and says nothing about healing miracles. Here are more details on the subject. The second merely demonstrates that the existence of sign gifts in a person's life does not guarantee them a status of being right with God. It was lawless activity and not the casting out of demons which Christ condemned. After all, the early church leaders cast out demons and healed the sick in Jesus' name. And this was not just limited to the apostles (see Acts 8:5-8).
Besides the testimonial evidence, there are a number of very powerful Biblical reasons to believe that Jesus Christ still heals today. Taken together, they provide a formidable case for the validity of this kind of ministry.
Reason Number One: The Unchanging Nature of Jesus Christ
The Bible declares that, "Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today and forever" (Hebrews 13:8). Our God is a living God - full of power, full of love and ready to hear the cry of the afflicted. Jesus loves people today as much as He did then. He regards sickness as a work of the devil now just as He did then (see Luke 13:16; Acts 10:38). He is full of the same compassion and mercy NOW (Hebrews 2:17) which moved Him to heal all who came to Him THEN (Mark 1:41). In fact, He is referred to as our Compassionate High Priest. If Jesus healed his enemies THEN (Luke 22:51), will He not heal His worshipers NOW?
If Jesus Christ is truly the same, we can expect Him to respond to faith now in the same way as He did as in the first century. Therefore, divine healing is available to those who come to God through faith in Christ.
Reason Number Two: The Bible reveals sickness to be a work of the devil
"how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power, who went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with Him" (Acts 10:38)
This Scriptures plainly reveals that sickness is a work of the devil. When Jesus cast out demons and healed the sick, it was a manifestation of the Kingdom of God. The coming of that Kingdom, even in part, meant a defeat for the powers of darkness. When God effectively rules, and His will is done, things are in order. In the physical realm, this means good health.
Many times the Scripture declares that an evil spirit was behind the sickness or infirmity that Jesus cured. The story of the hunchbacked woman in Luke 13 was one such example. It is the desire of the devil to humiliate and crush humankind - and sickness is one of his tools to do this. Jesus wanted us to know that He has come with a greater power than the power of Satan in order to set us free from such oppression. The demonstration that Jesus can do this in the physical realm is a powerful incentive to believe that He can do it in the spiritual and psychological realms as well.
In Luke 9:42 Jesus rebuked the unclean spirit and healed a boy of epilepsy. Epilepsy is generally caused by an unclean spirit. This in itself says nothing about the moral character of epilepsy sufferers. Demons attack us in different realms, but Jesus in us is more than enough to overcome them, if we remain in Him.
Another example is found in Matthew 9:32-34. "And as they were going out, behold, a dumb man, demon-possessed, was brought to Him.And after the demon was cast out, the dumb man spoke; and the multitudes marveled, saying, "Nothing like this was ever seen in Israel." But the Pharisees were saying, "He casts out the demons by the ruler of the demons."
The translation "demon-possessed" from the Greek is unjustified. All it means is that the man had a demon which affected him. The degree of demonisation in people varies from none at all (rare) to total possession by the powers of darkness. The word 'possessed' is misleading because it leads us to think that Scriptures like this are not generally applicable to the cases we find in life, when in fact, they are.
Jesus healed "to destroy the works of the devil" (1 John 3:8; Acts 10:38). Demons are still active in defiling mankind today. Their attacks are directed not only against the spirit and soul of mankind, but also against his body. Armed with this knowledge, we have powerful motives to understand God's opposition to sickness and disease and to have faith that He really does want to heal. By entering into the conflict with this conviction, we enter into conflict with demons, which we must overcome by means of the spiritual weapons which God gave us.
Reason number 3 - The Generosity and Goodness of God
He [God] who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things? (Romans 8:32).
God is a good father. No good father ever wilfully made his child sick. If they did they would be a child abuser. God wants to give us all good things. Healing and health is a good thing - it is a blessing of the covenant. Therefore God is willing to freely give us healing. Any difficulty in receiving is not due to God's unwillingness, but rather due to satanic opposition OR a lack of faith. These are bold statements which fly in the face of many outworn traditional excuses of theologians for the lack of power in the church, but they are true none the less. See the answer to the later question "But what about Paul's thorn?"
The whole thrust of New Testament teaching is to encourage us to believe that we will get answers to prayer from God. "Ask and you shall receive" (Matthew 7:7). "Whatever things you desire when you pray, believe that you receive them, and you will have them" (Mark 11:24). "Ask and you shall receive, that your joy may be full" (John 16:24). These statements of Jesus are bulit upon the foundation of the knowledge of God's goodness. "If you, being evil, know how to give good things to your children, how much more will your father in heaven give good things to those who ask Him." (Matthew 7:11).
Reason Number Four - The Scope of the Atonement of Christ
The apostle Peter knew something about divine healing. In his first letter to Christians, he said concerning the sacrifice of Jesus, "who Himself bore our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, having died to sins, might live for righteousness - by whose stripes you were healed." (1 Peter 2:24). Here the Scripture explicitly states that we were healed through the stripes of Jesus. That this Scripture refers to physical healing and not just spiritual healing or healing of the soul can be seen from the context in which it is quoted in Matthew 8:17, where it refers to the healing ministry of Christ.
"And He cast out the spirits with a word, and healed all who were sick, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Isaiah the prophet, saying: 'He Himself took our infirmities and bore our sicknesses' " (Matthew 8:16,17).These two verses from 1 Peter and Matthew respectively, quote Isaiah 53:4,5, which reads as follows:
Surely He has borne our sicknesses [Heb. choli] and carried our pains [Heb. makob]. Yet we esteemed Him stricken, smitten by God and afflicted. But He was wounded f
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