Healing has always fascinated human beings in all of history. Before it was specialized, it was communal and lots of knowledge about healing was held by the community in addition to the healers.
Since God created us and loves us, then our healing is also important to him. The words healing, heal, healed, and health appear 110 times in the Bible. When Jesus heals, he makes a clear association between healing and the spiritual dimension, “your faith has healed you.” Jesus clearly warned those that he had healed to not sin anymore lest something worse happens to them.
The social sciences, for a long time and still in many places, view the human person entirely as a physician would; understand its mechanism, capture it and fix it. The relationship between sin and human healing was not captured and still isn’t. However, healing the person without healing the spirit still leaves the individual dissatisfied. Indeed, “our hearts are restless until they rest in you O Lord.”
Any healing that denies the role of God and the nature of the human spirit as divine is ‘unsustainable development.’ Excluding God in healing is excluding the very healing that is sought.
Of note, however, Jesus mentions that “it is not him or his parents who sinned for this man to be born blind.” This does not contradict his earlier statements. The spiritual nature of the human always means that more often than not, whatever ailments ravage the body will affect his spirit and vice versa. Since we are not Jesus who can spot an ailment with a spiritual source and one that doesn’t, it is always better to assume a spiritual basis even as we speak a scientific explanation and treatment.
Healing and Freedom
Spiritual healing is not just for physical ailments but also psychological. It is possible that our psychological struggles may, more often than not, have a spiritual basis. However, healing requires our freedom, which neither God nor satan, can contravene. God needs our invitation. As St Augustine says, God who created us without us cannot save us without us. Satan, however, does not mind manipulating and lying to us to get his way into our lives. Indeed, he presents himself to us as lucifer, the bearer of light.
To ensure the integrity of our freedom, we have to live a rather intense communion with the Spirit that proceeds from the Father and the Son.
Why does God heal?
God did not will us to live in sickness and suffering. But it was a risk he took by giving us the choice to reject him or accept him because love is never forced but proposed. But even when we reject him, he continues to do everything that he can, without forcing out our freedom, to make our lives whole. That God-given freedom is what makes us particularly human and also the image of God. That image or spirit in us is the communication post between us and God and between us and other humans. When we lock this communication post due to anger and hurt while trying to defend ourselves, we not only close ourselves off to others but also to God. We have one spirit and one communication post. That is why God wants to heal us because if we don’t heal, we cannot love him well or experience his love and that hurts him because he lives to share his love with us. And also, we are unable to love and experience the love of our neighbours too!
Since God, by his own will, is prevented from healing us without our consent, it becomes necessary therefore that we constantly renew our surrender. God cannot force us into heaven; he leaves us alone to make that choice. Even before the original sin, there was freedom to choose him or not.
Satan on the other hand is always trying to invade our hearts and block our blessings. We become numb to God’s healing and his desire to communicate himself to us. God wants to heal us by removing this blockage of the evil one so that we can experience his Grace.
Our Choice for satan
Temptations, avoidance of hurt, or ignorance lead us to be closed off from God and become easy targets of satan. He makes us think that certain choices which implicitly go against God, ‘is the only logical thing to do.’
Satan is envious of humans because unlike him, we can repent since we are within time and space. We don’t make final choices in a single event, like the fallen angels. He is always tricking us to surrender our freedom to him and then plagues us with all sorts of unnecessary suffering and makes us think that God has abandoned us or caused the suffering. This makes us resent God, and Satan celebrates this and controls our lives even more.
Since we are born into families and spend a huge part of our vulnerable stage of life there, Satan takes a particular interest in families to spread his evil. The loss of freedom of parents to Satan starts to affect those around them and especially their children. Satan orchestrates an inheritance of evil, both physical and spiritual, and mostly the latter.
From: The healing of Families – How to pray effectively for those stubborn personal and familial problems – Fr. Yozefu Balikuddembe Ssemakula
Chapter One – Human Healing and the Human Spirit
