Why Healing Requires More Than Self Help
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God’s Answer to Humanity’s Problem
Our original parents’ perfect dependence upon God rendered them less consciously aware of that dependence, perhaps, than we might be able to appreciate. But that perfect dependence was perfectly met by an all-sufficient Creator. Just as we are (relatively) unaware of the need for food and clothing when we have an adequate and uninterrupted supply of both, so must Adam and Eve have had no need to question the provision of their Creator. Yet they did, and they put that question in the form of a grasping demand which ushered in need, sorrow, and sickness and separated them from the Supplier of their needs in a manner which they found powerless to reverse.
God immediately promised an eventual and full reversal of the effects of that “aboriginal catastrophe,” a provision summarily rejected by Cain even while Adam, Eve, and Abel embraced it. Cain, though provided with very personalized guidance, refused that counsel also, even though it was delivered by God himself. Cain’s idea of self-help was to kill his brother.
The provision for and the terms of our healing—spiritual and physical—are dictated by God himself, and we find ourselves to be by nature at odds with those terms and often resentful of them. It turns out that our efforts to obtain healing of any sort tend toward various kinds of “self-help.” In the religious sense, it may explain various rituals both within and outside of a Christian context which are intended to force nature (and nature’s God) to conform to our demands and expectations. That is one definition of magic. It is not that magic in its various forms represents mere self-sufficiency so much as it attempts to compel nature against itself to do our bidding. In a Christian context, the health emphasis in the “Prosperity Gospel” demands that God do our bidding, and yet blames the sick person if healing is not forthcoming. Spiritual versions of this have also been advocated in overcoming sin, and in ways equally ill-informed from a biblical perspective.
God does not ask us to heal ourselves, and the terms under which he grants healing are often quite other than what we might wish or imagine. My favorite example of healing offered under terms despised by the recipient is that of Naaman, the Syrian. When he was sent to Israel to obtain healing, and eventually directed to Elisha, he was disappointed. Naaman expected the prophet to perform a religious ritual, something that conformed to the supplicant’s expectations. When Elisha didn’t even bother to show himself, the general went off in great fury, and nearly missed out on what God was clearly willing to provide. Counseled by his own subordinates, he reconsidered and did as advised, and was in fact healed. But his healing came on God’s terms, terms that were initially rejected by Naaman. Of note, it is recorded by Luke, and on the authority of Jesus, that Naaman was the only leper healed during that time.