Is God really a healer?

You can credit anyone you wish, I guess, and there are lots of religious folks who credit god -- for healing.

Valerie at spiritledwoman.com, a blog, wrote a post titled "God is a Healer." She describes a day spent in the "surgical waiting room of a local hospital praying for my daughter. She was undergoing an operation to have her spleen removed and honestly, I was afraid."

That fear is certainly understandable. Most of us have felt it: the fear that grips our throat and rips so hard at our insides we can barely breathe.

Valerie noticed that "Every time a doctor would come to the waiting room, he would pull the patient's family member, spouse or adult child to the side to tell him something only the two of them could hear.

"The response was always the same.

"The person would either clutch his chest and nearly shake the doctor's hand off as a sign of gratitude, erupt in joyful laughter, whip out a cell phone and text the news to other loved ones or simply say thank you.

"The same scene played out over and over again for hours and then it hit me: God is a healer."


Then Valerie does something very strange. She quotes Isaiah 53:5, from the New King James Version: "But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; The chastisement for our peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed."

That's it. She offers no comment on the verse. It is supposed to speak for itself. Fundamentalist Christians almost always think of this verse as a prophecy of Jesus on the cross; as a reference to the crucifixion; as an explanation of the atonement -- the notion that Jesus' death was a sacrifice for the sins of the world. The words, "by His stripes we are healed" mean, to these fundamentalists, that he was punished for our sins and thus by believing in him we are saved and will go to heaven when we die.

It has absolutely nothing to do with any of that, of course.

But I've never seen it used in reference to physical healing before.

Another strange thing. It seems very unusual that over the course of the time she waited in the hospital, Valerie never saw a doctor come out with "bad" news. She does say that "Not everyone who checks into a hospital will leave there healed." But then qualifies that by a confession of faith: "...after watching God work in the hospital that day, my confidence in Him is refreshed."


This kind of blind religious faith is always most interesting. Maybe Valerie is right. But there is no reason to believe so. She simply chooses to believe God was involved in healing people. Lacking any evidence, however, she might just as well as believe that Zeus, or Buddha, or Allah was doing the healing.

The question, however, and this is the age-old question that has never been answered satisfactorily, is why God heals some and not others?

Maybe it has nothing to do with a god. Maybe it's just the way life is. Maybe some doctors are more successful than others in a surgical situation. Or maybe there is nothing the doctors can do to heal a patient.

Every single piece of available evidence indicates that it was the medical personnel responsible for the healing that took place in the hospital that day. Why would she think a god was involved?

And don't tell me god simply "used" the doctors to accomplish his purposes. That, too, is wishful thinking, as it cannot be confirmed by any evidence whatsoever.