Healing And The Mosaic Covenant
By Linda Josef
The great teachers of divine healing agree that receiving something that is already yours is a different issue than asking for something you are not sure you can have. It is very important to satisfy yourself that it is God’s will to heal you.
We can better understand God’s willingness to heal if we go back to the very beginning of time and see what the Lord intended for His creation. In the early chapters of the Bible, we find that God created a perfect world with no death or disease – a place of joy and intimacy with Him. He did not create a world where disease sucked the strength out of peoples’ lives.
Sickness does not even appear in the Bible until the time of Abraham when both Abimalech and Pharaoh were stricken by God because they tried to take Abraham’s wife.
Disease is not mentioned again until the children of Israel are brought out of Egypt. And at this time, the first promise the Lord made to the Israelite nation was to protect them from disease if they kept His laws. This was the very heart of their contract with Him, called the Mosaic Covenant.
Healing in the Mosaic Covenant
When Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt, they were a multitude with only a dim knowledge of the Lord. They had to learn how to serve the Him and what He would do for them. God made a contract, or covenant, with them that laid out what they must do and what He would do.
We read of this in Exodus 15. Here, the Hebrews had just escaped from Pharaoh’s army. They had traveled without water for 3 days to the springs of Marah, and there they despaired because the water was too bitter to drink. The Lord healed the water so they could drink, and then He spoke to them for the first time.
When the Lord spoke to them He laid the foundation for the Mosaic Covenant, and the basis for all the Jewish law. He told them the qualities of goodness He expected them to have, and then made a great promise to them:
He said, “If you listen carefully to the voice of the LORD your God and do what is right in his eyes, if you pay attention to his commands and keep all his decrees, I will not bring on you any of the diseases I brought on the Egyptians, for I am the LORD, who heals you.” Ex 15:25-26
This is God talking, the creator of the Universe, and He is saying, Serve me and I will keep you in health.
Whenever we are tempted to wonder if it is God’s will to heal, we can meditate on this covenant. If the people met His conditions, He would protect them from disease. That says something powerful about His willingness to heal us.
A modern person would say, ‘You can take that to the bank.’
The Covenant Name of Healer
Another powerful thought in this passage is the way He says, I AM Jehovah-Rapha the Lord who heals you.
The Lord is saying not only that He will do the healing, but that healing is His very nature. It is who He is – I Am the Lord who heals you.
If it is His very nature, then all we have to do is draw close to Him, to be in His healing presence.
From the very beginning, God wanted to be known as the God who heals, and that His people could take it as a covenant right if they kept His laws.
We see this again in Exodus 23.
Worship the LORD your God, and his blessing will be on your food and water. I will take away sickness from among you, and none will miscarry or be barren in your land. I will give you a full life span. Ex 23:25-26
God wants us to be well and strong. He wants us to be safe and to live a full life. That is His will, as laid out in the Mosaic Covenant, His contract with the nation of Israel.
Linda Josef is a Christian psychologist who is working on a book about supernatural healing with Messianic Vision. The book should be available in the next few months. If you have a story of healing that you would like to share, or wish to ask questions or make comments, you can write to Linda at ljosef@usa.net.