IN the last study we talked about one of the first definitional 'mainstays' of Healing: being made 'whole', and the idea of wholeness and perfection in a state of 'equilibrium' which is 'as God created it to be'. The fragmenting or dissolution of that 'right' state necessitates healing, and the dunamos power of God, brings back the compromised person or thing to its 'right state'. While that sounds a little 'jargon-laden', the previous study shows it to be Biblically correct.
The second 'mainstay' of healing is Healing as deliverance, or deliverance as healing.
When we are delivered from something we are
1) Made safe
2) Turned from distress to peace
3) returned from instability to stability
4) Turned from fear to a lack of fear
5) Turned from a captive state to a free state
Safety we understand, most of us covet it: we seek to be free from danger and trouble and save for a few we like to be apart from feelings of insecurity and distress. Distress characterizes a need for deliverance, we do not like to feel apart from a sense of well-being. When we enter in to states of "dis-ease", whether they are physical or emotional, we immediately look for ways to return to an equilibrium. Likewise, when we are in need of 'deliverance' we are in a state which is 'unstable'-
our course is not certain, our path not clear. Our condition is unsettled and could go more than one way. Fearfulness characterizes the undelivered: we feel in danger---in real life circumstances there are often real objects of fear, in cognitive and emotional states wanting deliverance, the anxiety which is often experienced is an undefined fear as well. When we are delivered of these states, virtual or what the world calls 'psychological', or even spiritual, we cease from fear. Further, when we are need of deliverance, we are not free, whether it be a 'real-world' experience or an internal one. A great hallmark of deliverance is the sensation and state of being free, for when we are bound by a lack of it, we feel anything but free: we also, simultaneously feel unable to make decisions and plans so beset by whatever is before us causing the harm.
Healing and Deliverance
As we talked about a return to wholeness characterizing the Healing of the LORD, we turn not to a totally separate aspect of healing, but a concomitant one. Deliverance as healing can take the form of:
1. Deliverance from disease and malfunction, spiritual, mental or physical
2. Deliverance from Others and danger
3. Deliverance from sin, death and Hell
DELIVERANCE [HEALING] from DISEASE AND MALFUNCTION
When we get sick, we want to get well, when we face a life-threatening illness, we want to go back to the way things were before: we wish to be safe, content, and the same as we have always been.
Our most familiar repeated prayer, the "Our Father" contains a reference to the deliverance from a spiritual adversary: 'temptation' or trial, :
Deliver us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil
That famous passage points to a setting free, and hence, making whole and right the person from the danger which confronts them. In this case, it is the danger of righteousness falling to 'sedition'--of coming undone and being shattered with wrong choices. Deliver us from trials and temptations we pray, that we might continue in a whole state. Most of the time it is good to seek back the state at rest, but occasionally, God confronts us with trials and temptations, even evil, for many reasons, e.g. to try our faith, or to lead us to a higher state of being and relationship with Him. This is at the heart of modern discussions of 'why bad things happen to good people' or why bad things happen at all---one of the reasons is the re-forming of the person into something better by what scriptures call the 'furnace of affliction'. It is like a physical breaking a bone to reset it, so that it can heal properly, for if he allowed the natural growth in the condition it was in, it could cause the limb not to work properly later.
to be continued....
