David W Palmer
(Matthew 8:16–17 NKJV) When evening had come, they brought to Him many who were demon-possessed. And He cast out the spirits with a word, and healed all who were sick, {17} that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Isaiah the prophet, saying: “He Himself took our infirmities And bore our sicknesses.”
This was a vital on-the-job lesson for Jesus’s apprentices. What’s more, it is an illustrated sermon on a vital point of absolute truth from the book of Isaiah; and it forms an unshakable foundation for all time: Jesus carried our sickness to the cross. The reason Jesus was able to do the healings and miracles recorded in Matthew, and the basis on which he did them, is found here:
(Isaiah 53:4–5 WEB) “Surely he has borne our sickness, and carried our suffering; yet we considered him plagued, struck by God, and afflicted. {5} But he was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. The punishment that brought our peace was on him; and by his wounds we are healed.”
Isaiah said that Jesus would carry all of our pain, sickness, and suffering—all of our infirmities, diseases, and all of the other consequences of Adam and Eve’s cursed fall. Isaiah prophesied it, Jesus demonstrated it, and Peter reviewed it:
(1 Peter 2:24 NKJV) “Who Himself bore our sins in His own body on the tree, that we, having died to sins, might live for righteousness—by whose stripes you were healed.”
These three witnesses eternally establish several vital truths: Isaiah previewed them hundreds of years before Jesus, Matthew gave an eye-witness account of them, and finally Peter reviewed them decades later:
1. Isaiah was not only writing about the spiritual healing that Jesus would bring in the new birth; Matthew says that Jesus’s demonstration of physical healings and exorcisms were a direct fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophesied promise. So he did carry away our physical sickness as well as sin and grief, etc.
2. Jesus took all of our sicknesses onto himself, represented in the stripes laid on his body by the cruel torturous lashings of the Roman whip. He carried them to the cross, where he—along with the sicknesses he was carrying for us—was crucified. Jesus died while carrying all of our infirmities, diseases, sicknesses, and the curse. But when he arose, he arose without them. Where did they go? They went out of existence. His own innocent blood was a sufficient redemption price to fully pay for everything he carried to the cross. (If not, he could not have ever risen from the dead.)
God’s holy power then resurrected Jesus from death and all of the sin-ridden filth and curse that he was carrying when he died. Astoundingly, he arose whole without any trace of sin, curse, sickness, or death. Romans 6 teaches that we died with him, were buried with him in baptism, and that we were raised up with him:
(Romans 6:5–6 NKJV) For if we have been united together in the likeness of His death, certainly we also shall be in the likeness of His resurrection, {6} knowing this, that our old man was crucified with Him, that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves of sin. (See also: Col. 3:1–3)
If we died with him and rose with him, we simultaneously died with our share of the curse, sin, sickness, and disease; but we also rose in him without sickness, disease, the curse, etc. Therefore, our sickness etc. is gone; it is not part of our new birth in Christ.
3. Through the apostle Peter, the Holy Spirit undoubtedly confirms that we “were” healed by Jesus’s stripes. This is clearly past tense. In God’s mind, our healing was accomplished when he raised Jesus from the dead. The whole issue of healing for those in Christ Jesus is therefore a forever-settled matter: “by whose stripes you were healed.”
Today, however, you may still be contending with the symptoms of sickness and thus wondering: “If Jesus healed us in his death and resurrection, why are so many symptoms apparent in us?”
