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The Lord Is Your HEALER
There He made a statute and an ordinance for them, and there He tested them, and said "If you diligently heed the voice of the Lord your God and do what is right in His sight, give ear to His commandments and keep all His statutes, I will put none of the diseases on you which I have brought on the Egyptians. For I am the Lord Who Heals you." (Exodus 15:25-26)
Jehovah Rapha means to "make whole". But, according to this scripture, God not only is the healer of disease, but He is the preventer of disease as well. And that description is in line with the Old Covenant thinking regarding God.
To people living under that covenant, sickness and disease was viewed as God's punishment for sin. But, under the New Covenant, Jesus' life, death, and resurrection bridged the gap between God and us, and Jesus' self-sacrifice paid the penalty for our sin once-and-for-all, so sickness cannot be thought of that way.
Look at what Jesus had to say about Himself n Luke 4:18-19: The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He has anointed Me to preach the Gospel to the poor; He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind,to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord.
Jesus healed out of compassion. Encompassed in this verse are broad categories of healing that Jesus wants to do in our lives:
In "preaching the Gospel to the poor" His first healing would be spiritual; He wants to provide us a way back to God. In "healing the brokenhearted", Jesus is offering healing for the emotional pain we sometimes experience. "Deliverance to the captives" could be applied not only to prisoners, but also to those who struggle with any variety of addictions. "Recovering of sight to the blind" is Jesus telling us He can create a miracle, not just undo damage that has been done before. I've always wondered about the phrase "set at liberty them that are bruised", because the two parts of that phase don't seem to belong together. But, thinking only in the physical sense, remember how you feel when you have a big 'ole bruise on your body? Isn't hard to move around? And if the bruise is on your rib cage, it is even hard to breathe. So it would seem to me that this could be Jesus' way of telling us that He can give us back the freedom that being bruised and battered by sin may have taken away.
What about you? Are you struggling with something today that would fit those categories? Do you need to be healed? Do you know that Jesus came to do just that? The passage I quoted about ends with "...this day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears". Did you catch that? It is fulfilled today. Are you willing to believe that? Even when you can't see it?
Remember that faith is the evidence of "things not seen". You don't have to physically see your healing today in order to believe you are healed today.
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