God’s Purpose in Illness and Healing

Isaiah 38

Indeed, it was for my own well-being that I had such intense bitterness. (Isa 38:17)

Main Idea: God heals Hezekiah from illness and teaches him humility and obedience by what he suffered.

1. The Scourge of Sickness
   1. The variety of sickness worldwide
   2. In Adam we all sinned; in Adam we all die.
   3. Christ’s atonement is the only ultimate cure.
2. Hezekiah’s Misery and Prayer (38:1-3)
   1. Put your house in order because you’re going to die!
   2. Hezekiah’s reaction
   3. Hezekiah’s prayer
3. God’s Promise of Healing and Its Fulfillment (38:4-8,21-22)
   1. God answers Hezekiah’s prayer with an amazing promise.
   2. God grants Hezekiah an amazing sign.
   3. God uses medicine to work the miracle.
4. Hezekiah’s Thoughtful Praise (38:9-20)
   1. Hezekiah displays bitterness toward God.
   2. Hezekiah learns from his illness.
   3. Hezekiah focuses on praise.
5. Central Lesson: From the Sickbed

The Scourge of Sickness

This chapter ushers us into the sickroom of King Hezekiah that we may learn the painful lessons God taught him there. Here we see the mighty king reduced to a quivering, crying babe. Here we see the devastation of disease, a silent, invisible enemy, destroying life from within. Here we also see the power and goodness of God in healing Hezekiah but only after the disease has led Hezekiah to question God’s love for him. Here we are led to ask the deepest questions of life, about God’s goodness in our pain and suffering and his purpose in it. Why does he allow it—even bring it? Is God truly powerful enough to heal it? And if so, why doesn’t he heal it every time? As always, Isaiah will ultimately point us to Jesus Christ, the Great Physician.

The fundamental truth is that, when Adam sinned, suffering and death entered the world (Rom 5:12). The gospel proclaims the parallel truth: “For just as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive” (1 Cor 15:22). Christ is the Second Adam, and by his wounds all God’s people are healed. But God has willed that death should be the last enemy to be put under Christ’s feet, so every single person must face diseases and injuries while we live.

And those diseases and injuries are legion! There is not a single part of the human body (inside or out), and not a single bodily function, that does not have some recognizable array of diseases attacking it. The World Health Organization categorizes 12,420 disease categories in the International Classification of Diseases (ICD). There are seventeen main categories, including infectious and parasitic diseases (e.g., malaria); neoplasms (e.g., tumors); diseases of the blood and blood-forming organs (e.g., leukemia); diseases of the immune system (e.g., AIDS); diseases of the nervous system and sense organs (e.g., multiple sclerosis); and injuries and poisoning (accessed 1/12/2017, http://www.who.int/classifications/icd/en). Our sin-cursed planet is a seething cauldron of suffering and death. We can hardly imagine how many cries of pain or pleaded prayers to God for healing come every single day.

The ultimate solution to this river of suffering is the atoning work of Jesus Christ. Medical science may divert the flow of this river and stem some of its tributaries (e.g., smallpox has been completely eradicated), but everyone who lives will die of something. Isaiah 38 escorts us beyond Hezekiah’s sickbed to the cross and empty tomb of Jesus Christ: “He was pierced because of our rebellion, crushed because of our iniquities; punishment for our peace was on him, and we are healed by his wounds” (Isa 53:5).

Hezekiah’s Misery and Prayer

Isaiah 38:1-3

The chapter opens with the news of Hezekiah’s illness, which carried him close to death. Isaiah the prophet is dispatched to Hezekiah’s sickbed to tell him to put his affairs in order because he is about to die (v. 1). But Hezekiah does not take this news well. Instead of trusting in the joy of eternal pleasures at God’s right hand, Hezekiah turns his face to the wall and begins to weep. He also prays that God might remember all the faithful service and wholehearted devotion he’s displayed throughout his life. This is not the best ground on which an individual should stand before a holy God. For us as Christians, the best place to stand is the perfection of the Savior, Jesus Christ. At worst, Hezekiah’s prayer may imply that he believes God has dealt with him unjustly, that God owes him a better outcome after all the many ways he’s served him. It is so easy for those in suffering to lose perspective!

God’s Promise of Healing and Its Fulfillment

Isaiah 38:4-8,21-22

God’s fatherly love sees through the weakness of Hezekiah’s faith and sends him a surprising message: God will add fifteen years to his life. Beyond that, God promises to continue to deliver Jerusalem from the king of Assyria (vv. 4-6). For this reason, some scholars believe that the events of Isaiah 38 actually preceded the events of Isaiah 36–37 (Oswalt, Isaiah Chs. 1–39, 674–75; Young, Isaiah Chs. 19–39, 508–9). However, Hezekiah’s illness and miraculous healing are given in three different places in Scripture (Isa 38; 2 Kgs 20; 2 Chr 32), and in all three places, the order is Assyrian invasion/defeat, then Hezekiah’s illness and healing, then the Babylonian envoys (Isa 39). Therefore, we should accept this sequence.

Actually, the promise of fifteen more years is what causes deeper issues. God had already told him to put his house in order because he would die from this illness; now it seems God has changed his mind based on Hezekiah’s prayer. It is not easy to harmonize these two statements from an omniscient God, especially since Psalm 139:16 says that all our days were written in God’s book before one of them came to be. It seems that Isaiah 38:5 is teaching us that (1) God can heal anyone at any time from any illness; and (2) “The prayer of a righteous person is very powerful in its effect” (Jas 5:16). Our God is a prayer-answering God. The original statement by Isaiah was not false, merely incomplete. It seems the fuller statement would be something like this: “Put your house in order because you are going to die unless you seek me in prayer and ask me to extend your life. But if you do, I will!” But it was best for Isaiah to leave that last part out and allow Hezekiah to decide to come to God in prayer. The bottom line is, we should not imagine that the omniscient God who never must learn a single thing that he didn’t already know should change his eternal plans based on input from fallible human beings.

The account ends with how God worked the healing and with the astonishing miraculous sign God gave Hezekiah to bolster his faith (vv. 7-8,21-22). The fuller account of this is in 2 Kings 20:8-11. Hezekiah requests a sign (Isa 38:22; 2 Kgs 20:10), and in response God treats the stairway of Ahaz like a sundial but makes the shadow go backward, as though time had reversed. It is difficult to know how God did this—it is a miracle that defies any scientific explanation—but in any case, the Lord used this astonishing sign to bolster Hezekiah’s faith at a critical moment in his life.

Hezekiah’s Thoughtful Praise

Isaiah 38:9-20

The rest of the chapter is given entirely to Hezekiah’s amazingly thoughtful psalm of praise to the Lord who healed him. It recounts with tremendous emotion Hezekiah’s journey of faith, from bitterly questioning the Lord because of his illness to seeing God’s wisdom in bringing the affliction into his life.

From verse 9 it is clear this is a poem Hezekiah writes later, showing a mature reflection on his experience of illness and healing. In verses 10-14 Hezekiah recounts vividly his bitterness toward God for his suffering: he felt it was unfair that God was robbing him of the best years of his life, as though God were hunting him down like a lion to crush his bones.

But in verses 15-17 Hezekiah turns a corner. He realizes that God struck him with bitterness and anguish to humble him, to teach him to walk meekly before God for the rest of his life. Psalm 119 teaches the same lesson (vv. 67,71,75,92): affliction teaches humility and causes us to walk more carefully and obediently before the Lord. The promise of God spoken by Isaiah restored his hope and gave him life (Isa 38:16). Ultimately, it was for Hezekiah’s well-being (Hb shalom; peace, welfare) that he experienced such intense bitterness. Hezekiah, like all great men, surely struggled with pride, but God designed the affliction of disease and this miraculous cure to humble him to the core of his being.

The final portion of Hezekiah’s praise (vv. 18-20) gives his reason for deliverance—so that he might praise God for his faithfulness and power.

Central Lesson: From the Sickbed

The central lesson of the universal human struggle with sin and death is this: “The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 6:23). As Hezekiah celebrated how God put his sins behind his back in forgiveness, that forgiveness comes only by Jesus Christ. And the forgiveness of our sins is our top priority, not the temporary healing of the body this side of death. When the paralyzed man was lowered through the roof to be healed by Jesus, Jesus saw their faith and said to the man, “Have courage, son, your sins are forgiven” (Matt 9:2). He was still paralyzed, but his true need had now been met! The desperate pressure that people feel for healing, for deliverance from the suffering of disease, can obscure the infinitely greater need for forgiveness of sins. A paralyzed but forgiven man will spend eternity walking and leaping and praising God in heaven. An Olympic runner who dies in his sin will spend eternity bound hand and foot in outer darkness, weeping and gnashing his teeth in agony. Jesus’s physical healings proved his authority on earth to forgive sins (Matt 9:6-7), and they showed a foretaste of the fact that forgiveness of sins guarantees perfection in body after the resurrection from the dead.

Second, we should all heed the command Isaiah gave to Hezekiah: “Set your house in order, for you are about to die.” It is appointed to each of us to die, and after that, to face judgment (Heb 9:27). We should live every day aware of our mortality, and we should flee to Christ for salvation and power to make the most of the limited time we have.

Third, we should embrace affliction as Hezekiah and the writer of Psalm 119 did, as working vast spiritual benefits in us: it humbles us and causes us to walk softly in God’s laws.

Finally, we should use our own experiences in suffering to make us genuinely compassionate to others who are suffering (2 Cor 1:4). We should use the brief time we have in this life to alleviate all suffering we can but especially eternal suffering. We address physical suffering by giving the kind of ministry the good Samaritan did to the man he found bleeding by the side of the road. We address eternal suffering by proclaiming the gospel of Jesus Christ to the sufferers in the world so that they will never experience the infinitely greater torments of hell.

Reflect and Discuss

1. How is sickness part of the curse of the entire human race in Adam?
2. What do you make of the amazing variety of sicknesses (12,420 disease categories in the International Classification of Diseases)?
3. How do you understand this statement in Isaiah 53 about Christ: “Yet he himself bore our sicknesses, and he carried our pains; . . . and we are healed by his wounds” (Isa 53:4-5)?
4. What do you make of Hezekiah’s reaction to Isaiah’s news? Do you think Hezekiah shows a lack of faith here?
5. Do you think it wrong for Hezekiah to talk to God about how faithfully he’d walked with him all those years? Why or why not?
6. How do you harmonize God’s statement in verse 1 (“you will not recover”) with the promise of healing in verse 5? What does this teach you about prayer and God’s sovereignty?
7. How do you understand the astonishing sign to Hezekiah of the reversal of the shadow on the steps of the stairway?
8. How does Hezekiah show the bitterness of his soul in this psalm (vv. 9-20)? Why do you think he is so angry and depressed about death?
9. What central lesson does Hezekiah seem to have gleaned from his sickness (vv. 15-17)?
10. How can we learn to suffer well, and how do we avoid displaying a lack of faith in God and in the resurrection by suffering illness as the unbelievers do?