God’s Purpose in Illness and Healing

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.

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.

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.