Today's reading: Isaiah 38-39; Revelation 4-5
I don't have much to say about today's reading other than to say that we need to be careful not to take an example of how something happened one time in the Scriptures as indicative of how it should happen every time.
Specifically I am talking, this morning, about Hezekiah's prayer for healing in Isaiah 38. When Isaiah tells Hezekiah that his sickness is going to end in his death, he prays to God, appealing to his faithfulness and righteousness, and God heals him, adding 15 years to his life.
The reason I bring this up is that it is not uncommon, especially in certain corners of Christianity, to consider a lack of healing as being due to a lack of faith, a lack of assurance, or maybe due to hidden sin. Some would even go so far as to point to the sickness or issue itself as judgement from God and indicative of these things. But we should never take something that happens one time and try to generalize it into a broader theology of healing, prayer, righteousness, or anything else.
For example, while faithfulness and righteousness do, evidently, have a role in the likelihood that our prayers will be answered (as we've talked about in a handful of relatively recent New Testament posts), if that is why God answered Hezekiah's prayer, then we can say for certain that the original sickness was not the judgment of God for his unfaithfulness and unrighteousness. It could be one or the other, but it can't be both. So if it is his righteous life or his faithful prayer that "earned" him his healing, we necessarily have to conclude that even good, righteous, faithful people may get sick, even deathly sick, and that is not a statement against them on God's part.
On the flip side, while Hezekiah appealed to his faithfulness and righteousness as the basis for his plea for healing, there are others, more righteous and faithful than him, whose prayers were not answered. The first example that comes to mind for me on this is Moses. Moses was not allowed to enter the promised land because he struck the rock God told him to speak to, failing to uphold the Lord as holy before the people. Despite that breach though, you would be hard pressed to find anyone so faithful and intimate with the Lord throughout the rest of the Old Testament. And yet, when he appealed to God to be allowed to enter the promised land, God shut him down completely, telling him not to ask again. Or, similarly, Paul tells us that he appealed to the Lord three times that He might remove the thorn in his flesh, and he was told no. Was it because the author of 1/3 of the New Testament was too unrighteous or too unfaithful to get a positive answer to his prayer? Of course not!
So yes, Hezekiah prays to the Lord, appealing to his faithfulness and righteousness, asking to be healed, and the Lord grants him his request, but that does not mean that someone who the Lord does not heal was too unfaithful or too unrighteous for God to answer their prayer. Based on what we have talked about recently in the writings of James, Peter, and John, it is certainly possible that God, at times, withholds healing or answered prayers for these reasons, but we can never make the conclusion, when a prayer goes unanswered, or a sickness goes unhealed, that it was the result of sin or faithlessness.
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