Divine Healing In The Age Of Corona- Part 6
December 6, 2020
Review
- Last week, we continued to build a foundation for a belief in divine healing.
- This series has two objectives:
- To demonstrate that developing faith for divine healing is biblical, practical and beneficial.
- To foster reasonable expectations for divine intervention in the healing and recovery of your physical body.
The Word is the Lens through which we See Jesus
- We look intently at the Word to see Jesus.
- We look intently at Jesus to see who God is.
- Among many other things, God is a healer.
- Once we see God as a healer, we can have faith to be healed.
Old Testament Readers of Scripture Help New Testament Saints Become Better Readers
“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
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
© Joshua D. Smith, Ph.D., 2020