Discovering The Jewish Jesus

Rabbi K.A. Schneider: Where does sickness come from? Does it always come from the devil, or does God himself sometimes cause sickness?

The nature of the subject we are going to cover today is deeply personal. Most of us at some time in our lives are going to face a health challenge. Some of these health challenges, you will go to a physician to find healing and to find a cure for a remedy, and the physicians are not able to do anything or even to tell you what the source of the illness is.

The questions we are going to be looking at today are these: Does God still heal physical sickness? And if he does, why is everybody not healed? If God does heal today supernaturally, should we still use doctors, and should we take medicines? Where does sickness come from? Does it always come from the devil, or does God himself sometimes cause sickness?

We are going to be answering those questions from the Word of God. God by nature is a healer. Healing flows from God because he is a healer; it is part of his essential nature. We see this, for example, in creation. When creation suffers some type of massive forest fire, the forest that was burned begins to repopulate itself and begins to bring forth new vegetation. Nature itself heals itself, and we see this perhaps most astutely in the human body.

Think about the fact that we have been made in God's image and think about the healing capacity in our own bodies. When we break a bone, the body naturally begins to heal itself and fuse the bone back together. Certain organs like the liver will regenerate. In other words, if there is a portion of the liver that dies, the liver literally can regenerate itself and heal itself.

Think of wounds. I just recently was doing some work for my wife, and as I was doing some work for her, I had a big gash on my arm with lines of bleeding blood. Five days later, it was scarred over, and within a week, it was completely healed. This demonstrates the healing nature and capacity of the human body.

Perhaps most mysterious is the creation of antibodies. When our body gets intruded upon by a foreign virus or a bacteria, if we get an infection or a virus, our body creates antibodies that immediately attack the alien intruder and keep us strong and healthy. Our immune system has a built-in divine intelligence from the creator, who is a healer, so that the body has within it the capacity to heal itself.

God is by nature a healer, which should help us to be able to look to him to receive from him health and healing and the sustaining of our health in our bodies because the God that we are receiving from is healing by nature. Think about Jesus. Think about Yeshua himself. The Bible tells us in the book of Colossians, chapter 1, verse 15: "He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation."

Yeshua is God in the flesh. He is the visible image of the invisible God. This is why Yeshua said to Philip, "If you've seen me, you've seen the Father." Yeshua is God clothed in human nature. We are talking about the fact that God is by nature a healer. We looked at the healing properties of creation, and now we are looking at Yeshua, who is God incarnate.

What do we see in the life and ministry of Yeshua? Everywhere he went, he healed the sick. Yeshua, who is God in the flesh, demonstrated that God is a healer because every place that he went, he healed the sick. I love the Gospel of Luke. Luke was a historian and a physician, and Luke chronicled all the events surrounding the life and ministry of King Yeshua.

Luke writes in his gospel in the fourth chapter, the 40th verse: "While the sun was setting, all those who had any who were sick with various diseases brought them to him, to Yeshua. And laying his hands on each one of them, he, Jesus, was healing them." Yeshua is demonstrating here that God is a healer and that healing flows from God to you and me because it is part of his essential and eternal nature.

Yeshua demonstrated this by healing a paralyzed man. He brought back to life a dead man. He cleansed a leper. He healed a crippled man. He told the man with the withered hand to stretch forth his hand, and as he did, it was healed. He healed the blind man. He healed the mute. Everywhere Yeshua went, he did three things: he preached the Gospel of the kingdom of God, he healed the sick, and he cleansed people of demons and defiled spirits.

He is by nature a healing God. That means that we should be connecting to him, bringing him into our soul so that we can live in supernatural power and in the power of healing, both that is being evident from our own bodies so that we are healthy, as well as being able to minister healing to other people. The healing creator lives in his people, and he has empowered us to release healing to others. He sent out his disciples to heal the sick and to preach the Gospel.

God by nature is a healer. He is the same yesterday, today, and forever. He has not changed. To add to this foundation: not only is he a healer, but he is compassionate towards us. He is compassionate towards those of us that he has made in his own likeness. We read in scripture that healing flowed because Yeshua felt compassion for the people he was ministering to.

For example, we read this in Mark 1. A leper came to Yeshua and was asking Yeshua to heal him. The account says: "Moved with compassion, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him and said to him, 'I am willing. Be cleansed.' Immediately the leprosy left him and he was cleansed." Yeshua's healing flows to us because of the way he feels about us. He is touched by our pain.

He is touched when we are sick. He is touched when we are ill. He is touched when we are in situations that are causing us sadness and sorrow. He is moved with compassion and extends himself towards us through his Son to release healing into our body and into our lives. We read this same foundational truth: "When Jesus went ashore, he saw a large crowd and felt compassion for them and healed their sick."

I want to encourage the children of God today to look to him to be your healer. We are going to see in a little bit that God uses medicine and doctors. Luke himself was a physician. God uses doctors and medicine. The challenge is that for many of us, especially in the Western world where doctors and medicine are so available, we have taken our eyes off the main healer. We have taken our eyes off the Lord.

We are not looking to him to heal us. Instead, we are looking to the doctors and to the medicine. This is a message to restore the church, away from looking to the world for our answer, to look instead to him for the answer. He may heal us directly, or he may use an agent. If you are looking to the agent rather than to the Lord, you are short-circuiting your ability to receive from God all that he wants to be to you.

Healing flows through the sacrificial death that was given to us through God's Son. By his stripes, we are healed. God is able to release healing to us because Jesus offered himself up as a sacrifice, taking our sickness and our sin in his own body on the tree, paying the penalty that we should have paid. By dying in our place, God is able to release his healing to us despite our sin.

While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Receiving your healing is not just a matter of believing enough for your healing, but rather it is an understanding that healing comes to you out of God's compassion and love for you. It flows to you through the blood of Jesus and because of his sacrificial life that was given on your behalf.

In the Gospel of Matthew, chapters 7 and 8, Jesus is finishing up his most important sermon recorded for us in the New Testament. It is called the Sermon on the Mount. The Beatitudes and all that is within the Sermon on the Mount is Jesus's longest sermon. Jesus concludes his sermon from on top of the mountain. As he begins to walk down the mountain, immediately people are coming to him wanting to be healed.

We have the record: on his way down from the mountain, as soon as the sermon is over, he is healing people. He ends up cleansing a leper and healing a paralyzed man. Then he healed Peter's mother-in-law: healing, healing, healing. We read the climactic account of all these healings in Matthew chapter 8, verses 16 and 17: "The grass withers and the flowers fade. Hear the word of God."

"When evening came, they brought to him many who were demon-possessed, and he cast out the spirits with a word and healed all who were ill. This was to fulfill what was spoken through Isaiah the prophet." Matthew quotes a portion from the book of Isaiah, which he claims is the reason that Jesus is healing all these people. Jesus is healing them en masse.

They brought to him people that were suffering from every kind of sickness and disease. Jesus healed them all. Matthew says this was in accordance with the fulfillment of Isaiah's prophecy. Matthew quotes Isaiah chapter 53: "Surely our choli, our grief, he himself bore, and our sorrows he carried." That Hebrew word in Isaiah 53 for grief literally means sickness.

Matthew is saying Jesus is healing all these people as a fulfillment of Isaiah chapter 53, verse 5: "But he was pierced through for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. The chastening for our well-being fell upon him, and by his scourging we are healed." Why are we healed? Because Jesus took our sickness in his own body on the tree, released his blood, and healed us all.

If we are all healed by the blood of Jesus, why are we sometimes still struggling with physical challenges? I am going to get to this crucial question today. Let me just continue laying the foundation. If Jesus's sacrificial death purchased healing for everybody, then why are many sincere believers struggling with sickness still even though they are looking for healing? We are going to get into that.

The atonement is the foundation. Remember Isaiah 53. Isaiah is teaching that when Yeshua died on the cross, the atonement was a sacrificial substitutionary atonement; the innocent one died in the place of the guilty. The innocent one took our sin and sickness in his own body on the tree, and by his scourging, we are healed. This is an incredible demonstration in the New Testament of the concept I just shared with you.

In Luke chapter 5, Yeshua was in a building and he was teaching. The crowds had so flocked to hear him teach that there was no way to get in. It was a packed house. There was somebody that was sick, and what the friends of this sick one did is they lowered him through the tiles on the roof. They could not get to Jesus because the crowd was so thick. They went onto the roof, moved away the tile, and they lowered this sick one through the roof right in front of Yeshua.

Yeshua said to the sick one, "Your sins are forgiven." All the people that were around, the Pharisees, were aghast. They wondered who he was to think he could forgive sin. Yeshua, knowing what they were thinking, said to them, "So that you might know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins," and he said to the sick one, "Take up your pallet. Go home." Immediately the sick one was healed.

Jesus was demonstrating that the same one that died to forgive sins is the one that releases healing to his people today. Sometimes God causes sickness. Let me take you to the book of Revelation, chapter 2, verse 22, where we read about the false prophetess Jezebel who was seducing people into immorality. The Lord had already warned her to repent and stop, but she did not respond to his warning.

Yeshua, speaking about Jezebel, said: "Behold, I will throw her on a bed of sickness and those who commit adultery with her into great tribulation unless they repent." There are many examples, especially in the Hebrew Bible, where God is using sickness as an administrative tool to accomplish his purpose. In the book of Second Kings, chapter 15, God caused a king to be struck with a skin disease.

In God's deliverance of Israel out of Egypt, the sixth plague is when he covered the bodies of Egypt with sores. When the Lord revealed himself as our healer in Exodus 15, he said to the children of Israel: "If you will obey me, I will put none of the diseases and sicknesses upon you which I put upon the Egyptians." The Lord is taking responsibility here for the sicknesses he put on the Egyptians.

God is God. He is God in heaven above and God on the earth beneath. There is no God behind him. We do not have to protect God. God takes responsibility in his Word for causing sickness at times. In the book of First Samuel, chapter 5, God caused the Philistines to be struck with tumors. The list goes on and on.

Satan seeks to torment and destroy, and he attacks God's people with sickness, but sometimes the Lord will use sickness as a temporary administrative tool in the lives of God's people to bring them into alignment with him so that he can bless them and they can walk in his healing. Ultimately, God's purpose for all his children is that we would walk in perfect health.

Sometimes the Lord, in his mercy, grace, and compassion, because he has a bigger picture in mind, will temporarily cause sickness in the life of the believer in order to bring that believer to their knees and bring them into alignment with himself. Then he releases them of their sickness. When we stand before Jesus face-to-face, there will no longer be any sickness or any disease.

Every believer will be perfectly healed. On this side of glory, there is an element of mystery and balance to everything. In the Gospel of John, chapter 6, we read the story of how the 5,000 that had followed Jesus were hungry and needed something to eat. One of the disciples said: "Well, one young lad here has five loaves and two fish." Jesus blessed the five loaves and the two fish. Supernaturally all 5,000 were fed, and there was even food left over.

I believe that when you and I give to Jesus what we have, he supernaturally multiplies it. Let us be faithful to him with our finances. He has promised that what we give to him would come back to us, pressed down, good measure, and running over into our lives. If the Lord is feeding you through Discovering The Jewish Jesus, I would encourage you to present a financial offering to him through this ministry. I am confident that you are going to be blessed as a result of obedience to him. This is Rabbi Schneider. God bless you. I love you, and shalom.

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Rabbi K.A. Schneider: The Aaronic blessing in the book of Numbers, chapter 6, is not a blessing that comes from an impersonal being out there somewhere in the heavens. This special blessing comes from a person: Yahweh, God Almighty, our creator and maker. Receive God's blessing into your life right now.

Yevarekhekha Yahweh veyishmerekha. Ya'er Yahweh panav eleykha vikhunekka. Yissa Yahweh panav eleykha veyasem lekha shalom.

The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you. The Lord lift you up with his countenance and the Lord give you his peace. God bless you and shalom.

Dustin Roberts: I am your host, Dustin Roberts, and this program is produced and sponsored by Discovering The Jewish Jesus. Join us again next time when Rabbi Schneider shares his own struggle when faced with illness and faith. That is coming up Tuesday on Discovering The Jewish Jesus.