"That it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Esaias the prophet, saying, Himself took our infirmities, and bare our sicknesses" (Matt. 8:17).

"Surely he hat borne our griefs [*diseases], and carried our sorrows [*pains]" (Isa. 53:4).

"Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live onto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed" (1 Peter 2:24).

*Literal Hebrew

I have a twofold purpose in this lesson:
1. To establish the scriptural fact that divine healing for our physical body belongs to us, and to help those who need healing get healed.
2. To help those who have been healed stay healed, because it is one thing to receive something from God and another thing to maintain it.

In our first text, Matthew says he's quoting Isaiah in saying, "Himself took our infirmities, and bare our sicknesses." Our second text says, "Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows." These translations are from the King James Version.

As marginal notes in many study Bibles point out, a more accurate translation of the original Hebrew words would have been "diseases" and "pains." After I read in my Bible that Himself took my infirmities and bore my sicknesses, I decided there wasn't any need for both Him and me to bear them, and I've been free ever since!

Thank God He took our infirmities and bore our sicknesses.

One preacher said, "Well, He did it all right, but we don't have healing now in this life. We'll enjoy that blessing in the Millennium." When I heard that fellow say it, I thought to myself, "Oh my! Either he's wrong, or God's wrong, or Jesus is wrong."

Why? Because we won't need healing during the Millennium. We'll have a new body and we couldn't be sick anyway! No, we need healing for the body, and we need it now - in this world. This world is where sickness and disease are. Blessed be God, there is healing for us in this life.

In our third text, Peter is looking back to the sacrifice of Christ when he says, "by whose stripes ye WERE [past tense] healed."

I was reading after another supposedly outstanding Bible exponent (he must not have read the same Bible I'm reading), who said, "First Peter 2:24 doesn't mean physical healing; it refers to spiritual healing: 'By whose stripes you were healed spiritually.'"

Well, if he had ever read the Bible, he should know a sinner does not get healed spiritually. The human spirit of the lost man or woman is not healed - it's reborn. That person becomes a new creature in Christ Jesus. Old things are passed away. All things become new.

So First Peter 2:24 does not refer to spiritual healing. If you stop to think about it, friends, there is no such thing as spiritual healing mentioned in the Bible. The concept of spiritual healing came into being when some psychologists got saved and filled with the Spirit and tried to mix psychology in with the Word. They were born again, all right, and were really filled with the Holy Spirit, but they got confused.

You see, when your body got healed, you were just healed of a disease. You've still got the same body you had before you had the disease. If your spirit were healed, you would still have the same spirit, too, except it would just be healed.

But no, blessed be God, Second Corinthians 5:17 tells us, "Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new." Not half of them - all of them. Every bit of them.

In only one sense of the word could divine healing be called spiritual healing: Our body is healed by God, and He is a Spirit. So divine healing is the Spirit's healing us, or spiritual healing. (We are not talking here about the healing of the human spirit.)

To put it another way, divine healing is not being healed spiritually, but it is spiritual because it's being healed by the power of God. In ministering the healing power of God, I'll lay hands on people; the power of God will go into them - and often it will come right back out of them. Why?

They didn't take hold of it; usually because they are trying to receive with their mind. But divine healing is not mental. You cannot contact God with your mind. He is not a mind. He is a Spirit.

So healing - divine healing - God's kind of healing - is not mental, as Christian Science, Unity and other metaphysical teachers claim. Neither is it just physical, as the medical world teaches.

When God heals, He heals you PHYSICALLY, but it is through your HUMAN SPIRIT. The reason He does is because He heals you through FAITH, and faith is of the HEART [spirit], the Bible says.

I've seen it again and again: When people quit trying to contact God with their minds, and start believing in their hearts, they are healed instantly! "For with the heart man believeth onto righteousness…" (Rom.10:10).

So God contacts you through your spirit - not through your mind, and not through your body - because He is a Spirit. He's not a mind. He's not a man. The Bible says He isn't. Although He has a spirit-body over in the spirit world (angels do, too), God is not a physical being. He is a Spirit. He contacts us through our spirit, and we contact Him through our spirit.

When man heals (and man can heal, whether you realize it or not), he must do it either through the mind, or through the physical senses. But when God comes on the scene as the Healer, He heals through man's spirit.

If you want to see God work, look at Jesus. If you want to hear God talk, listen to Jesus.

Jesus told Philip, "Have I been so long time with you and yet hast thou not known me, Philip? He that hath seen me hath seen the Father" (John 14:9).

Then Jesus is God. I like to say it this way: Jesus in His ministry is the will of God in action. In the ninth chapter of Mark's Gospel, for example, a man came running up to Jesus, telling Him about his demon-possessed son.

Notice what Jesus replied: "If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth" (v. 23).

Jesus started working immediately on the man's believing, which had to do with his spirit. Jesus turned his plea for help around and said, "It's not a matter of what I can do; it's a matter of what you can believe."

"If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth."

Psalm 107:20 says, "He sent his word, and healed them." The Word He sent under the Old Covenant was spoken by the prophets, but the Word He sent under the New Covenant is the Lord Jesus Christ. He is the Word of God, the Living Word. He sent His Word and healed us.

Therefore, in the mind of God, we're already healed! He's already sent His Word and healed us! And He's given us the written Word so we'll know what the Living Word did for us.

Often God will let somebody believe for those who don't know, or those who are in the babyhood stage of Christianity. He'll meet them on a lower level of faith. But God expects mature Christians to walk in the light of what they know.

Because everybody's faith is not on the same level, God has provided seven methods by which physical healings can be obtained through the Word. (For a full explanation of these seven methods, see my book "Seven Things You Should Know About Divine Healing.")

One way is through laying on of hands. When I lay hands on people in obedience to the Law of Contact and Transmission, the contact of my hands transmits God's healing power into their bodies to undo that which Satan has wrought, and to effect a healing and a cure in them.

When I'm conscious that the healing power went into them, I say, "There it is." That's as far as I can take people. That's where my responsibility ends and yours begins.

Source: How To Keep Your Healing by Kenneth E. Hagin.
Excerpt permission granted by Faith Library Publications