Certainly, if God provided healing for the Israelites in the Old Testament, He’s provided it for those of us in the New Testament Church! After all, we’re His born-again sons and daughters. We’ve been redeemed by the blood of Jesus.
We not only qualify for the promises of healing in the Old Covenant, we have an even “better covenant…established upon better promises” (Hebrews 8:6). And in that covenant, God has made His will for us absolutely clear: “Beloved, I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth” (3 John 2).
Sickness doesn’t have any right at all to be in the midst of the Church today!
“Then why are so many Christians sick?” you might ask. “Why doesn’t God see to it that His will is done in their lives?”
Because seeing to it that His will is done in our lives isn’t His job. It’s ours. God has given us authority on earth, and He can only do for us what we allow Him to do. Therefore, if we want His will we have to believe for it. We have to find out what His will is and get in agreement with it.
Our Garden, Our Choice
Actually, as believers, we’re in much the same situation Adam and Eve were in the Garden of Eden. God’s will was for them to be blessed in every way. He wanted them to be full of life and health, and to experience only abundance. When He prepared the Garden for them to live in, He didn’t put bad things in it, like sickness and poverty, because those things weren’t His will. He wanted Adam and Eve to experience only good.
Even though that’s what God wanted, He didn’t force it on them. He gave them authority on earth and He gave them a choice. Either they could do things His way, and enjoy the God kind of life, or they could disregard His will, do things their own way, and experience sickness and death.
They made the wrong choice. When they were faced with a challenge, they disobeyed God. They sinned and surrendered their authority to the devil. They ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and opened the door for the curse to come on the earth.
As a result, God’s will wasn’t done in the Garden of Eden.
It wasn’t His will for the curse to be released on mankind! He didn’t want Adam and Eve, and their descendants, to die spiritually. He didn’t want sickness to corrupt their bodies. He didn’t want sin to wreak havoc on the earth. Yet, because He’d given Adam and Eve a free will, He allowed them to do what they wanted to do.
God still allows people to do what they want to do today. He lets them make their own choices. A lot of them make the wrong ones and then blame Him for the results. They say silly things like, “If God is running things in this world, He sure does have them in a mess.”
God isn’t running things in this world!
If He were running things, He would have dealt differently with Adam and Eve in the garden. He would have grabbed Eve by the ear and said, “Get away from that snake! I forbid you to talk to him!” He would have slapped the forbidden fruit out of Adam’s hand and said, “Stop it! I don’t care what you want to do, I’m not going to let you sin and bring the curse on My family. I’ve prepared this garden and filled it with good things and I’m not going to let you ruin it.”
But that’s not what God did.
Having created Adam and Eve in His likeness and given them a free will, He let them use it. He didn’t come barging in and run their garden for them. He let them make the decision about what they were going to do.
28 : BVOV
