To What Extent Can We Claim Old Testament Healing Promises?

As a New Covenant believer, you should mainly focus on New Testament healing facts as opposed to Old Testament healing promises.  Always remember that the New Covenant is a better covenant established upon better promises (Hebrews 8:6).  You can learn a lot from the Old Testament.  Believers are never encouraged to throw out the Old Testament, which was written for our admonition.  It was written for us, while the New Testament was written to us, especially the epistles.

If something is a statement of fact, it is as true now as it ever was.  For example, God declares that He IS the Lord Who Heals You.  God never changes (Malachi 3:6), so He still IS the Lord Who Heals You.  So you can still bank on that statement under the New Covenant.  Likewise, when God says that He heals all your diseases, you can still count on Him being the One who heals all your diseases today.

If something is a blessing that is conditional based on your right standing with God, you can claim it based on your right standing with God that you have in Jesus Christ.  For example, there are blessings in the first 14 verses of Deuteronomy 28 that depend on you keeping the entire Law of Moses.  You haven’t kept the whole Law, but because you are in Christ, God will deal with you as if you had Jesus’ perfect track record of keeping the whole Law.  In other words, His blessings are yours as if you had never sinned at all under the Old Covenant.  So the first 14 verses of Deuteronomy 28 contain blessings for you to enjoy.

If something is a blessing that would require you to keep a Jewish feast, you need to rightly divide the fact that Christ fulfilled the Law.  God healed Hezekiah’s people when they kept the Old Testament Passover.  That does not mean that you should keep the Passover to get healed today.  The Passover pointed to Christ our Passover (1 Corinthians 5:7) in the New Testament.  So it would be reasonable to expect to be healed today celebrating the Lord’s Supper, not by celebrating the Jewish Passover feast.

If a blessing refers to Israelites or others when God’s favor was on them, you can take that as God’s way of treating you because you now have God’s favor thanks to the blood Jesus shed for you.  Old Testament prophecies often contain a long list of promises to ruin Israel and other nations as punishment for blatant, unrepented sin.  But toward the end of these same prophecies, there is often a restoration prophecy that in some cases includes healing promises.  When God restored Israel, He was willing to heal Israel.  You should consider yourself to be in the standing with God that Israel had when God purposed to rebuild the nation, not when He purposed to tear it down.

If a blessing refers to the future millennial rule of Christ, it cannot be appropriated as a promise for today.  There are quite a few such Scriptures, particularly in Isaiah.  If the time described refers to the lion lying down with the lamb, it clearly is not describing something applicable for today.  However, even in such cases, you can learn about God’s heart to heal, as once the day comes that Christ rules in Jerusalem, healing will be in far more actual manifestation than it is today.  This still shows that when Jesus has His way, people are healed.

If healing was obtained by atonement, you can see that Christ’s atonement for you has provided healing for you.  You do not need to do whatever they did to atone for sin; Christ already did everything that will ever need to be done.  So when you read that people ran around with censers and made atonement for the people’s sin, you can rejoice that Christ has already made the atonement needed to stop any plague.  You do not need to run around your town with censers to accomplish something that Christ already accomplished.

If there is a condition requiring your action attached to a promise, you should assume that the same condition applies today.  For example, Psalm 91’s protections only apply if you “dwell in the secret place of the Most High” – not if you think that your child’s Sunday soccer game is more important than church and you take the things of God lightly.  The promises of prosperity and success if you will meditate in the Word day and night should only be taken to apply to you if YOU meditate in the Word day and night.

If a statement appears without conditions, you should assume that the blessing applies to you today without conditions because all the promises of God are “yes” and “amen” in Christ by us (2 Corinthians 1:20).  Thus, “who heals all your diseases” (Psalm 103:3) should be accepted as a blessing for the believer today.

The #1 thing you have to remember about healing while reading the Old Testament is that under the New Testament, you were healed by Jesus’ stripes.  This was a wonderful condition that no one in the Old Testament was able to enjoy.  You have a better covenant established upon better promises, so apply God’s better covenant to yourself rather than limiting yourself to a worse one.