Ask Pastor Mike Live

Host (Male): John asks about the Bible verse, "By his stripes you are healed," which by the way comes from Isaiah 53. He says, "I've heard preachers use this in general conversation to mean that we will never get sick and by his stripes on the cross we were healed from illness." We're talking about that interpretation of the verse, basically.

Pastor Mike Fabarez: Yes. Here's my interpretation of the verse: just like poverty and slavery and prisoners being freed, these are all analogous to the ultimate concern, which is the fact that I'm spiritually sick—so sick that I'm called dead in Ephesians Chapter 2. And I'm so impoverished in terms of righteousness, as it would say in the Sermon on the Mount, that I need righteousness imputed to me. And I'm so enslaved, as Romans 6 says, that I need freedom as a prisoner.

The literal concern of poverty or being sick or being imprisoned is not the point of Isaiah 53. Isaiah 53 is all about the fact that there needs to be an atoning sacrifice for my sin and that there is going to be a suffering servant that's going to come—the Messiah—who's going to suffer in my place so I wouldn't be spiritually impoverished and I wouldn't be spiritually enslaved and I wouldn't be spiritually ill.

Those are the kinds of things, as Jeremiah says, that relate to a deeper problem: the sickness of my soul, the sickness of my heart. This heart of mine is desperately evil. The evil morality of my fallenness is illustrated in Isaiah 53 and many other passages in some illustrative way. The illustrative way is talking about enslavement, poverty, and sickness. But we're not talking about literal sickness or literal poverty or literal enslavement.

You can never have been enslaved, like the people said to Jesus in the Gospel of John, "We've not been slaves to anybody." Well, they forget part of their history: the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Egyptians. Nevertheless, the point is they're saying, "We're not prisoners." And Jesus says, "Whoever commits sin is a slave to sin." The rich young ruler might have thought, "I'm not spiritually impoverished," and yet, of course, he was.

So we're not talking about the fact that your bank account or your health—your annual physical—or whether or not you're free has anything to do with the deeper truths that those things are trying to illustrate. So yes, it's a bad interpretation to say by the crucifixion I'm healed from physical ailments. Now, God can heal who he wants, but I can't claim the promise of Isaiah 53.

Once you do that, you are obviously stuck with what the faith healers say, and that is, "Well, if it didn't happen, it's your fault." Well, the point of the text is the sacrifice of Christ has fixed the problem for me if I trust in him. And if that's the case, don't blame this on my defective faith. Just like Lazarus had no faith to be raised from the dead because he was dead, Jesus does this work in his own decisive, providential way.

So I'm saying in a text regarding what looks like it's healing or freedom or riches, we're not talking about real health and wealth. We're talking about spiritual health and wealth. There are plenty of poor people that are rich in Christ, as it says in Luke 2 and 3. A lot of people that are very spiritually healthy are laying in a sickbed right now. And there are plenty of people even alive in Christ—I hear from them all the time because of the Focal Point broadcast—who are incarcerated in prison.

Let's just be clear about this: when Christ died on a cross, he didn't give you a ticket to good health. If so, we'd have 2,000-year-old Christians right now. And of course, we don't. When does the healing promise stop? When does the coupon to not be sick stop? Does it stop when I'm 90? Well, if it does, then there should be an asterisk and some small print on all this, but of course, there isn't. That's not what we're talking about.

So I hope that helps, John. That's a really great question. I appreciate that, John, when it comes to reading your Bible carefully and having the discernment to hear someone misquote it and say that's not what the text is actually saying.