Jesus died for your healing – but not mere physical healing. His death secured a healing for you much deeper than the skin. The Bible says in Isaiah 53:5, “And by His stripes we are healed.” I've so often heard this verse applied to physical healing, as though the point of the death of Jesus was to purchase for us a temporal, physical healing alone. I’m afraid this interpretation strips the verse of its intense depth.
I’ll be on record as believing in divine healing (is there any other kind?). But I want to elevate the essence of the atonement – the deep, soul-cleansing, healing of sin, sin’s effects, and sin’s penalty as the higher and more vital need of our souls. W. A. Criswell spoke of this verse this way:
There is no more beautiful passage descriptive of the sufferings of the Lord for us than this one in the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah. It was the stripes that we should have received for our sins with which He was beat. It was for the peace that comes to us that He bore all of the judgment of God, the chastisement of our iniquity. And the wounds that should have been afflicted upon us because of our unrighteousness He bore in His own body on the tree. And in an infinite mystery that we cannot understand, Isaiah says, “the LORD hath laid on Him the iniquity of the whole world;” a vicarious atonement, suffering not for His sins but suffering for ours.
This rich theology of atonement doesn't sit well in our modern culture, which tends to see it as cruel and unfair. But I, as a sinner, know just how fair it is that I receive the just penalty of my sin – death and hell. So I am absolutely awe-struck by the magnitude of the grace offered from the cross where Jesus stepped into my place, absorbing God’s wrath toward my sin, so that I might be healed with a healing much deeper than the skin.
Have you had this healing? It’s freely available to all who will ask in faith, trusting Jesus completely as Redeemer and King.
