Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Blessed is the man against whom the LORD counts no iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit. For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long.
For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer. Selah. I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not cover my iniquity; I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the LORD,” and you forgave the iniquity of my sin.

Psalm 32:1-6

Notice David in this passage is stating how good it is to be forgiven of sin. Why? Because in his condition, he is arguably under conditions of weakness, for which he knows to go to God for forgiveness for his sin, and doing so will remove these conditions. Even if the wording here is used figuratively and with no tangible physical weakness present, it’s worth noting the language David speaks in, knowing God’s goodness would lead him to being restored in his physical condition.

I’ve heard countless stories and anecdotes of people suffering physical conditions as the result of holding on to bitterness and unforgiveness. I read a secular study once showing the difference between cancer patients with religion and those without and how a large percentage of the ones ‘with religion’ in the study had lower blood pressure, less stress, and things like that. Even in the natural unbelieving world, there’s an understanding that the peace that comes from knowing God brings healing in some fashion to your physical body.

“Man is also rebuked with pain on his bed and with continual strife in his bones,so that his life loathes bread, and his appetite the choicest food.
His flesh is so wasted away that it cannot be seen, and his bones that were not seen stick out. His soul draws near the pit, and his life to those who bring death. If there be for him an angel, a mediator, one of the thousand, to declare to man what is right for him, and he is merciful to him, and says, ‘Deliver him from going down into the pit; I have found a ransom;
let his flesh become fresh with youth; let him return to the days of his youthful vigor‘; then man prays to God, and he accepts him; he sees his face with a shout of joy, and he restores to man his righteousness. He sings before men and says: ‘I sinned and perverted what was right, and it was not repaid to me.He has redeemed my soul from going down into the pit, and my life shall look upon the light.’ “Behold, God does all these things, twice, three times, with a man, to bring back his soul from the pit, that he may be lighted with the light of life.
Job 33:19-30

OK, where do we start?

First of all, notice that in verse 19 it says that this condition of the man being spoken of, is a rebuke, or as the King James says, a chastening. This is to serve correction. So let’s for one moment entertain the idea of God putting a disease or a sickness on a person (which I believe is the case way less often than most evangelicals teach and believe), here it says it’s a rebuke, or correction, interestingly. I will not tell someone if they are sick, have a disease or illness that they have some sin in their life that has caused God to send judgment on them, but I’m hard pressed to ignore passages like this. Compare this with the account of the Lord causing leprosy to break out on King Uzziah when he tried to offer up unauthorized incense in the temple, and lived a leper the rest of his life as a result of his pride (2 Chronicles 26:16-22).

These conditions which Elihu goes on to list here, are undoubtedly describing an actual physical experience, possibly a deathbed experience, since it talks of this person’s soul going down to the pit, or grave. Verse 23 talks of an angel or mediator of some kind, who has found a ransom. Scholars are split on just what or whom the ransom spoken of here is, but read this quote from Matthew Henry’s commentary:

“Jesus Christ is that ransom, so Elihu calls him, as Job had called him his Redeemer, for he is both the purchaser and the price, the priest and the sacrifice; so high was the value put upon souls that nothing less would redeem them, and so great the injury done by sin that nothing less would atone for it than the blood of the Son of God, who gave his life a ransom for many. This is a ransom of God’s finding, a contrivance of Infinite Wisdom; we could never have found it ourselves, and the angels themselves could never have found it.”

Matthew 20:28, and 1 Timothy 2:6 indicate Jesus is the ransom for our souls. Even if it can’t be concluded accurately if this was foreshadowing Jesus Christ’s atonement for the sinner, this is still worth taking into consideration. The way the Hebrew word for ransom, kopher, is used elsewhere in Scripture strongly suggest this is an appropriate assumption, but I digress.

And for a change of gears slightly, take a look at the healings Jesus performed in the Gospels. I’ve already covered in a few past entries about why Scripturally healing is provided for in the atonement, so I will not belabor that point here. But notice what Jesus says in Luke 13:16, when the Pharisees are on Jesus’ case: His response to their accusations that He is breaking the Sabbath is “ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen years, be loosed from this bond on the Sabbath day?” I don’t want to only draw attention to the fact Jesus is saying ‘the Sabbath day the most appropriate day to heal someone’, but the fact he’s saying because she’s a daughter of Abraham, she should be loosed from the bondage of Satan in her body. See also the story of Zacchaeus.

We are not sons or daughters of Abraham. Well we are, but I mean we are saved through the blood of Jesus, and are not under the old covenant like this woman, but a better one (Hebrews 7:22, 8:6, 12:24).

If the old covenant had promises of healing, then how much more the new one we partake of?

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