Praise the Lord, my soul, and forget not all his benefits—who forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases. Psalm 103:2-3
God is holy and cannot lie. He is good for every promise that He has made. God can, and will, heal every infirmity. It is a certainty.
Yet, I haven’t seen Jehovah Rapha heal every time I’ve asked for it. Have you? Instead, I’ve discovered that sometimes He heals now, ahead of heaven, and that is glorious! But for the rest of our infirmities, healing awaits on the other side. Living in the ‘not yet’ doesn’t nullify any promise. As Wayne Watson sang so long ago …. “Home free, eventually. At the ultimate healing, we will be home free.”
There are other passages in the Psalms that can be confusing as well. In Psalm 91, God promises that ‘nothing will harm us, and no danger will come near our tent.’ Yet, eleven of Jesus’ disciples died as martyrs. Five missionaries were speared by the Auca Indians in 1957. The persecution of Christians, right now, is on the rise. How can we understand these verses amidst the disappointment our hearts feel when God withholds what we believe He has promised?
My father fought in WWII in the European theatre. Before leaving boot camp, he memorized all of Psalm 91. On the front lines in France, in a fox hole, he recited the passage all night long as the bullets whizzed by and mortars exploded in close proximity. He saw buddies next to him die and was shocked the following morning to discover that he was the only one in his company still alive. Did God honor Psalm 91? Yes. Yet I’m sure there were other soldiers, also believers, who clung to Psalm 23 and other promises. Some, like him, survived. Some did not.
We can know this about Jehovah Rapha.
- All promises will be fulfilled. Some now. All later.
- We should ask boldly for God to move now because we never know if His answer will be an immediate ‘yes’.
- If God has us in a time of waiting, He will give us the grace to be more than a conqueror, forging through the pain to glory.
Jesus came to suffer, to be crushed, and to show us the path to glorification. God’s promises were an umbrella over Jesus’ life. Some intersected His daily life with the miraculous. But everything else was perfectly fulfilled when He breathed His last and entered glory. We follow in His footsteps to ask for, and witness stunning, miraculous events. And we also follow in His footsteps to lean into His Father with childlike trust. He will give us the grace to endure with hope, no feelings of betrayal marring our countenance.
I trust You, even in the waiting. Amen
Daughters of promise 