“In one of the villages, Jesus met a man with an advanced case of leprosy. When the man saw Jesus, he bowed with his face to the ground, begging to be healed. “Lord,” he said, “if you are willing, you can heal me and make me clean.”Jesus reached out and touched him. “I am willing,” he said. And instantly the leprosy disappeared.
– Luke 5:12-13 (NLT)
Jesus is willing to heal.
God’s will is not the reason people are not healed. In the entire New Testament, there is not one instance in which the obstacle to healing was that it was not God’s will to heal.*
God named himself “the Lord who heals you.” (See Exodus 15:26.)
Jesus was willing to heal everyone who came to him seeking healing. (See Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.)
And God hasn’t changed. (See Hebrews 13:8, James 1:17, Numbers 23:19, Isaiah 40:8, Psalm 102:27, Malachi 3:6.)
*Update 12/2/2020:
The original version of this blog post contained the following:
Someone will say, “What about Paul?” I have made the case in my books Faith with Wings and Faith with Grit that a careful reading of the Scripture does not support God’s unwillingness to heal even Paul’s thorn.
Don’t let Paul’s thorn keep you from receiving the healing God wants to give.
Since this post was originally written, my understanding of Paul’s thorn has changed. I now believe that Paul’s thorn in the flesh was some tormenting person in Paul’s life. The biblical basis for this understanding is explained concisely and convincingly by Randy Clark in his book The Healing Breakthrough: Creating an Atmosphere of Faith for Healing (Chosen Books, 2016), which I’ve written more about in this blog post.
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