But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.
Isaiah 53:5 (KJV)
Isaiah meant both sin and sickness, and healing is real in this chapter. A promise that this illness will be cured this year is not in it.
The verse is often handed to someone the week a scan shows something wrong, as a promise about the body. Read the line above it before deciding what it promises.
Matthew’s evening in Capernaum
Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.
Isaiah 53:4 (KJV)
Griefs and sorrows sound like feelings. The World English Bible gives it as “Surely he has borne our sickness and carried our suffering,” and Matthew read it that way long before.
When the even was come, they brought unto him many that were possessed with devils: and he cast out the spirits with his word, and healed all that were sick: That it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Esaias the prophet, saying, Himself took our infirmities, and bare our sicknesses.
Matthew 8:16-17 (KJV)
Isaiah 53:4 has to do with bodies, and Matthew says so. He sees the prophecy landing in one evening of healings in Capernaum, early in the ministry, long before the cross. Mark tells the same evening and adds, in Mark 1:33, that “all the city was gathered together at the door.”
Peter’s word to servants
Verse 5 says what the stripes are for before it says what they do: transgressions, iniquities, chastisement, and then healing. Peter reads it there, in the part of his letter written to servants, some under “froward” masters, who might be “suffering wrongfully” for doing right.
Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed.
1 Peter 2:24 (KJV)
His “bare our sins” echoes verse 12 of the same chapter, “he bare the sin of many,” and the lines around it borrow from verses 6 and 9. Peter is reading more of Isaiah 53 than one line. And Peter tells servants who could still be “suffering wrongfully” that they “were healed.” Their suffering was not over when he wrote, and the healing he meant was already theirs.
Matthew takes the chapter to the sickbed. Peter takes it to the sin underneath everything. The servant in Isaiah bears both, because both are part of what is wrong with us. Neither apostle hands the reader a date. Matthew points back to one evening in Capernaum, and Peter says “ye were healed,” a thing already done.
A bill on a bed
Healing happens. It is in this chapter and in Matthew’s evening. The harm is in the sentence people add: that the healing is guaranteed now, so anybody still sick has failed a test of faith. That sentence puts a bill on a bed.
It takes a promise about what Christ bore and turns it into an exam the patient is failing. It has the same shape as the line about God never giving you more than you can handle, a sentence Scripture never says.
Paul could heal people, and in 2 Timothy 4:20 he wrote, “Trophimus have I left at Miletum sick,” of a man who had traveled with him. He asked the Lord three times to take away his own thorn in the flesh, and was told, in 2 Corinthians 12:9, “My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness.” James 5:14-15 tells a sick man to call for the elders and “let them pray over him,” and it is their “prayer of faith” that “shall save the sick.” The sick man is not the one on trial.
This was one of the verses I held through my first wife Sarah’s three years of illness. Sarah was not healed. The verse was still true while she was dying, and it was not true in the way it was meant by the person who quoted it at me. It was still true that his wounds heal what sin has broken, and that he has borne our sickness, as Isaiah says. The healing of the body is still promised, in the redemption Paul says we are waiting for.
If you have been told so often that your illness is your own fault that you have started to think about not being here, please call or text 988 in the United States and Canada, or your local emergency number anywhere else, and let someone stay with you in it tonight.
Healing that is still on its way
Isaiah’s servant bears what is wrong with us, and he shall “justify many,” in verse 11. Paul puts the body’s full healing in a redemption still awaited, in Romans 8:23: “even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.” And Revelation 21:4 promises a day with “no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain.”
Some are healed now and some wait, and Scripture gives no rule for reading the reason off a sickbed. The stripes were real long before any of it reached us, and they will finish the work. If you are still sick, you are not failing a test.