Healing is a covenant right, not a lottery

Derek Prince came to the subject of healing not through a dramatic miracle but through careful study. His Cambridge training had made him instinctively suspicious of theological shortcuts, and he brought the same rigour to Isaiah 53 and Matthew 8:17 that he brought to every other passage. What he found, he argued, was not ambiguity but clarity.

The argument begins with the atonement. Isaiah 53:4-5 states that the suffering servant bore our diseases and by his wounds we are healed. Matthew 8:17 quotes this passage explicitly in connection with Jesus healing the sick. Peter echoes it in 1 Peter 2:24. Prince's conclusion was that if the text means what it says, healing is not a sovereign option God exercises case by case. It is a provision already secured in the same redemptive event that secured forgiveness.

He anticipated the obvious objection: why do people remain sick if healing is a covenant right? His answer was not that healing is guaranteed on demand but that the failure is consistently on the receiving end, not the giving end. Lack of knowledge, unconfessed sin, failure to act in faith, these are the variables, not the will of God. He was careful to say this without condemnation, but he would not soften the logical structure of his argument to make people more comfortable.

The practical consequence of his teaching was to move people out of a posture of petition, asking God to do something he may or may not choose to do, into a posture of appropriation, laying hold of something that has already been done. That shift in posture, he argued, is not presumption. It is exactly what the New Testament models.

Prince lived to 88 and was known throughout his ministry for his own robust health, which he did not claim as a personal achievement but as a natural consequence of taking God's word at face value. Whether or not you land where he did on every point, the rigour of his engagement with the text is worth sitting with.