Divine Healing In The Age Of Corona- Part 6

Review

• Last week, we continued to build a foundation for a belief in divine healing.
• This series has two objectives:

1. To demonstrate that developing faith for divine healing is biblical, practical and beneficial.
2. To foster reasonable expectations for divine intervention in the healing and recovery of your physical body.

• Receiving divine healing has everything to do with seeing Jesus .

The Word is the Lens through which we See Jesus

• Seeing Jesus clearly has everything to do with seeing the clearly.
• Let’s put this all together:

1. We look intently at the Word to see Jesus.
2. We look intently at Jesus to see who God is.
3. Among many other things, God is a healer.
4. Once we see God as a healer, we can have faith to be healed.

• We learned last week that Jesus is emphatic: we can cultivate faith in Him from the .
• To see Jesus in the Scripture, we must go beyond the surface.
• We can’t be content with the preacher going while we remain .
• The purpose of Scriptural depth is not to be scholarly.
• The purpose of Scriptural depth is to be Christ- and .

Old Testament Readers of Scripture Help New Testament Saints Become Better Readers

• This is a practice that began with Old Testament (I Peter 1:10-11)
• The Spirit of was working in Old Testament saints as they “searched and inquired carefully” for Christ in the Scripture.
• As they searched for Christ, they were modeling Christ (Hebrews 11).
  • Able
  • Enoch
  • Noah
  • Abraham
  • Sarah
  • Isaac
  • Jacob
  • Joseph
  • Moses
  • The Children of Israel
  • Joshua
  • Rahab
  • Gideon
  • Barak
  • Samson
  • Jephthah
  • David
  • Samuel
  • The prophets
  • Countless unnamed people

• As Old Testament saints modeled Christ, they were participating in .
• “Typology is a special kind of symbolism. . . .We can define a type as a “prophetic symbol” because all types are representations of something [pointing to the] future. More specifically, a type in Scripture is a person or thing in the Old Testament that foreshadows a person or thing in the New Testament. For example, the flood of Noah’s day (Genesis 6-7) is used as a type of baptism in 1 Peter 3:20–21. The word for ‘type’ that Peter uses is figure.

“When we say that someone is a type of Christ, we are saying that a person in the Old Testament behaves in a way that. . .[resembles the] character or actions [of Jesus] in the New Testament. When we say that something is “typical” of Christ, we are saying that an object or event in the Old Testament can be viewed as representative of some quality of Jesus.

“Scripture itself identifies several Old Testament events as types of Christ’s redemption, including the tabernacle, the sacrificial system, and the Passover.”

–“What is biblical typology?”

gotquestions.org

• As Old Testament saints modeled Christ, they were expanding the Scripture.
• As they expanded Scripture, they were also expanding our to search for Christ.
  • I Peter 1:10-12
  • Hebrews 11:39-40
• They were Scripture in the process of seeking the Christ they saw in Scripture.
• Their lives were literally turned into letters that we could read (2 Corinthians 3:2-3)
• In reading their lives in letters, we are linked to a glorious tradition: searching diligently for in the Scripture.
• The same spirit that was in the Old Testament believers enables us to see Christ in them as we meditate on the Word.
• Old Testament commands to on the Word, apply to us as much as it did to them.
  • Joshua 1:8
  • Psalm 1:1-3

The Power of the Shema (Shi-máh)

• There is a powerful Jewish tradition that begins in Deuteronomy that draws Old and New Testament saints together to focus on Jesus in Scripture.
• It’s called the Shema (Shi-máh)

“The Shema refers to a couple lines from the book of Deuteronomy (6:4-5), that became a daily prayer in Ancient Israelite tradition. It’s the equivalent of the Lord’s prayer (‘Our Father in heaven…’) in Christian tradition. The Shema gets its name from the first Hebrew word of the prayer in Deuteronomy 6:4”, ‘Listen, Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord alone.’”

–Timothy Mackie

(The Bible Project, ”What is Shema?,”)

In traditional Jewish prayer practice. . .lines from Deuteronomy 6:4-5 were combined with other passages from the Torah (Deuteronomy 11:13-21 and Numbers 15:37-41), and were prayed in the morning and the evening. This prayer has been one of the most influential traditions in Jewish history, and functioned both as the Jewish pledge of allegiance and a hymn of praise.”

–Timothy Mackie

(The Bible Project, ”What is Shema?,”)

“The declaration in this religious context has direct and far-reaching implications: what this meant to the person(s) coming under this claim is that no longer could there be different gods for different spheres of life, a god of the temple, another god of politics, a different god for fertility in the field, and yet another for the river, etc.” (p. 88)

–Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways

“Rather, Yahweh is the ONE God who rules over every aspect of life and the world. Yahweh is Lord of home, field politics, work etc., and the religious task was to honor this ONE God in and through all aspects of life. . . . This is not only what constitutes the basis of worship. . . .It is a call for the Israelite to live his or her life under the lordship of one God and not under the tyranny of the many gods”(p. 88)

–Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways

“The Hebraic perspective draws. . .[links] every aspect of life to the eternal purposes of God—this is the intrinsic logic of the Torah. It is a natural extension of the claim of monotheism, namely, that Yahweh is Lord!”(p. 91)

–Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways

“When the early church claims ‘Jesus is Lord,’ it does so in precisely the same way, and with exactly the same implications, that Israel claimed God is Lord in the Shema”(p. 91)

–Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways

• When New Testament believers read Deuteronomy 6:4, they should see Jesus as its actual point.
• Deuteronomy 6:4-9
  • The goal: Love the Lord (Jesus)
  • The Process: Put God’s Word in your heart
  • The steps: Scriptural meditation (reading, talking, listening, pondering, reflecting day and night)
• The Word feeds our spiritual immune system.
• Resisting sickness requires a healthy and immune system.
• When we meditate on the Word day and night, we are taking daily doses of Jesus, our supernatural .

© Joshua D. Smith, Ph.D., 2020