Douglas Tilstra
What Type of Healing?
The battle between David and Goliath—was it spiritual or literal?” The question from Dr. Hans LaRondelle hung motionless in the air for several seconds as 80 seminarians, I among them, tried to determine whether or not our eschatology professor was asking us a trick question or not. Finally Dr. LaRondelle broke the silence, “Both, of course.” His point in that particular lecture was to prod us to a deeper understanding of the Battle of Armageddon.
The truth, however, applies far beyond the field of eschatology. As a Seventh-day Adventist health care provider, is the healing you facilitate spiritual or literal? No doubt you have been asked a variant of this question before, perhaps even asked it of yourself. For the next few minutes would you be willing to consider it once again, probing just a bit deeper, challenging yourself with possibly a few new insights from Scripture, and potentially embarking on a new phase of your healing ministry by embracing a fresh practice and approach?
Can you recall any recent interaction with a patient during which you delivered some sobering news, some serious test results, some announcement of needed surgery or extensive treatment, or perhaps a warning of harmful effects if the patient made no lifestyle changes? Do you remember the patient’s reaction? Perhaps it was dismissive, or perhaps fear-ridden, or cautiously optimistic, or curious, or stoic. In many cases, it is likely that such a patient would turn to you with a question, or more likely a stream of questions. “So what’s next, Doc? What am I supposed to do? Where do I go from here? What do you recommend? What are my options? What are my chances?”
Such a string of questions is not that different from a question that a frightened man asked Paul and Silas in a similar crisis situation. Most of us have read his story (found in Acts 16:22-34) and heard his question dozens of times with little real consideration of the question itself. In our eagerness to emphasize the answer, we’ve rushed by the question. Perhaps lingering on the question of the terrified jailer will instruct us as we ponder the questions of our patients and prepare to give them a life-giving answer as Paul and Silas did the Philippian Jailer.
The question of course is, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” (Acts 16:30, NIV). We’ve usually made the assumption, and with good reason, that the jailer is asking Paul and Silas to give him instructions on repentance, conversion, and belief in Jesus as Savior from eternal death. After all, their answer is, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved.” (Acts 16:31, NIV). However, the question, and even Paul and Silas’ answer, may contain far more than appears on the surface. Questions are often like that.
When the jailer blurted out his panic stricken query, he had just experienced five or ten minutes of adrenaline-pumping action. “About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the other prisoners were listening to them. Suddenly there was such a violent earthquake that the foundations of the prison were shaken. At once all the prison doors flew open, and everyone’s chains came loose. The jailer woke up, and when he saw the prison doors open, he drew his sword and was about to kill himself because he thought the prisoners had escaped. But Paul shouted, ‘Don’t harm yourself! We are all here!’ The jailer called for lights, rushed in and fell trembling before Paul and Silas. He then brought them out and asked, ‘Sirs, what must I do to be saved?’” (Acts 16:25-30, NIV).
The jailer’s question, like that of some of your patients, is spontaneous, unstudied, blunt, and motivated by more than a little fear. The jailer expresses a desire for safety. In the moment there is plenty that seems to threaten his safety. And in the future, who knows what else may loom darkly ahead to rob him and his family of wellbeing and safety. We catch a glimpse of his desperation in his attempted suicide— no doubt an attempt to avoid the pain and shame that would come to him and his family if he were executed for dereliction of duty. Paul’s plea for the jailer not to hurt himself appears to be the trigger to the desperate man’s question, “If not suicide, then what better solution do you have?”
The evidence for this perspective on the jailer’s question goes beyond mere imaginative speculation. When the jailer demanded of Paul and Silas help in finding safety and security he used common language and terminology from everyday life—not the language and terminology of theologians. It is true that the word he used (sozo in the original language) is the word that Paul and subsequent theologians use to describe salvation from sin and eternal death. But it was not always so. Paul and the theologians did not invent that term. They borrowed it from the everyday vocabulary of working men and women who spoke in common words of the fears and anxieties of life and the needed deliverance and safety from them. Put simply, the word we translate as “saved” (sozo) was not even a religious term. In the mouth of the jailer, it had less to do with eternal destiny and much more to do with provision for his family, economic stability, job security, emotional well-being, avoiding pain and disgrace in the community, and overall quality of life. Given the jailhouse events that night, his question makes good sense.
Sozo had carried this meaning for several hundred years before it surfaced in the jailer’s desperate cry for help. Plato, 400 years earlier, described sozo as the effect from forces of goodness that preserve and strengthen against all the destruction of evil. He gives examples of such destructive forces—sickness for the body, rot for wood, and rust for iron. Homer, two centuries before Plato, used the word sozo to denote rescue and deliverance in time of war or danger on the sea. And Plutarch, a contemporary of Paul, Silas, and the Philippian Jailer, used sozo to describe “safe return home.”
The word sozo is used even in the New Testament in this common, nontheological way many times. Luke uses it in Acts 27:20 describing the shipwreck he and Paul experience together on their trip to Rome, “When neither sun nor stars appeared for many days and the storm continued raging, we finally gave up all hope of being saved (sozo).” Later during that same storm, Paul used the word sozo to speak, not of salvation from sin, but salvation from the terrible storm, “In an attempt to escape from the ship, the sailors let the lifeboat down into the sea, pretending they were going to lower some anchors from the bow. Then Paul said to the centurion and the soldiers, ‘Unless these men stay with the ship, you cannot be saved (sozo)’” (Acts 27:30-31, NIV).
Similarly, Matthew uses sozo to report the panic-stricken cry of the disciples as they wake Jesus in the storm on Galilee, “Lord, save us! We’re going to drown!” (Matthew 8:25, NIV); to report Peter’s desperate cry for help as he sank into the raging billows, “…when he saw the wind, he was afraid and, beginning to sink, cried out, ‘Lord, save me!’” (Matthew 14:30, NIV); and to report the taunts of Jesus’ enemies while He suffered on the cross, “Those who passed by hurled insults at him, shaking their heads and saying, ‘You who are going to destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself! Come down from the cross, if you are the Son of God!’” (Matthew 27:39-40; also Mark 15:30 and Luke 23:37, 39, NIV). In each of these stories (and more than a dozen others) in the Gospels, the writers employ sozo not as a theological term to describe salvation from sin, but as an ordinary expression about finding safety from some imminent danger – much as the Philippian Jailer seemed to use it.
There is another “non-theological” use of sozo in the Gospel accounts. It is used repeatedly to describe physical healing. The woman suffering twelve years of bleeding says to herself, “If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed (sozo).” (Mark 5:28, NIV). Jesus assures Jairus regarding his dead daughter, “Don’t be afraid; just believe, and she will be healed” (Luke 8:50, NIV). Jesus says to both a cleansed leper and formerly blind Bartimaeus, “Your faith has healed you” (Luke 17:19; Mark 10:52; and Luke 18:42, NIV). The disciples mistakenly think Lazarus is napping and thus recovering when they say, “Lord, if he sleeps, he will get better (sozo)” (John 11:12, NIV). The word sozo is also used to describe physical healing in Mark 6:56 to report that all who touched Jesus were healed; in Luke 8:36 to report the demoniac’s healing, and in Luke 6:9 as Jesus is about to restore a man’s withered hand.
With these “non-theological” uses of sozo scattered throughout the Gospels, what might be the implications for our understanding of salvation from sin when it too is described with the term sozo? Consider a few passages. “She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save (sozo) his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21, NIV). “For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19:10, NIV). “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him” (John 3:17, NIV). “I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved” (John 10:9, NIV). These passages, and others like them, appear in the Gospels alongside those which employ sozo in its’ more mundane and common usage. What is the point? What did it mean to Paul, the Gospel writers, and the early Christians to seize upon such a commonly used word and elevate it to describe the profound experience of salvation from sin? What does that tell us about their understanding of salvation? What might it tell us about hearing the questions and apparently “non-theological” requests of patients?
Could it be, that like the Philippian Jailer, your patients are speaking from a spot of human desperation and need? Could it be, that like the jailer, they unwittingly cry out for eternal safety they don’t yet even comprehend? Could their cries possibly be the desperate longing for something eternally better that God has planted in every human heart? Put another way, might they be longing for salvation from sin and not even know it? Without realizing it, they confess that all disease, death, disability, dysfunction, decay, and every sort of destruction, are all the domain of the devil. In crying out against these evils, they unwittingly appeal to God, “Thy Kingdom Come…” Like the Philippian Jailer, your patients, and others around us, may be crying out for salvation and never realize it.
Unbelievers are not the only ones to dimly comprehend God’s gift. The salvation from sin that Jesus offers is so much more than many of us as believers even realize. Too often we envision salvation as some sort of fire insurance policy or cosmic “get-out-of-jail-free” card that miraculously (magically even) sweeps us away to heaven at the second coming, possibly even by the skin of our teeth! With the use of the word sozo the Bible writers seem to brush aside such foolish notions of salvation. For them, salvation is far more than mere escape from crisis. It is total healing, restoration, and wholeness. It does include a “mansion in heaven” but is certainly not limited to that. Rather, sozosalvation is like a new lease on life after twelve years of uncontrollable bleeding. It is like the restoration to family and friends after the isolation of leprosy. It is sight and sanity restored. It is a new life of wholeness and continued healing that creates greater peace and safety even in the midst of storms.
More than that, sozo-salvation is indeed rescue from drowning in a deadly storm or sinking in angry waves. It is God’s response to Philippian Jailers who say, “The chaos and crisis in my life are so overwhelming, I might just kill myself unless You have something better to offer me!” And the good news is, God does have something better— much better—to offer. Do we hear those cries for something better? Or do we only hear requests for pain management or symptom control in the here and now? Do we hear the deeper longings that even they may not recognize—the longings for life as God intended it; life as Jesus offers it; life as given in sozo-salvation?
When the Philippian Jailer asked Paul and Silas, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” he may well have been voicing something closer to, “What am I going to do about this mess my life is suddenly in?!” Similarly, our patients may voice questions about coping with diagnoses, treatment plans, disabilities, disfigurements, terminal illnesses, loss of loved ones, changes in expectations, or any number of anxieties. Are we prepared to hear their questions as Paul seemed to hear the jailer’s? Notice that before Paul spoke to the jailer about Jesus, he first addressed the jailer’s most immediate threat to well-being, “Don’t harm yourself! We are all here!” (Acts 16: 28, NIV). Only after the suicide attempt was averted did Paul say, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved—you and your household” (Acts 16:31, NIV). Paul heard the cry for help, addressed the immediate felt need, then responded to the deeper cry that lay just below the surface. As an Adventist health care provider, is the healing you facilitate spiritual or literal? As an Adventist health care provider, do you hear your patients’ questions and requests as spiritual or literal? The answer, ideally, of course, is both. We cannot afford to miss either the literal or the spiritual. Like Paul and Silas, we dare not address only one and not the other. When we do recognize and address both spiritual and literal we offer salvation in its fullness and totality. We offer not merely a “religious solution” on the one hand, or merely a “medical solution” on the other. We offer sozo-salvation, total healing, restoration, and wholeness.
The next time a patient asks you an “Acts 16:31” question, how will you hear it? How will you answer it? When they ask, “So what am I supposed to do with this crisis?!” will a certain Philippian jailer come to your mind? Will you hear, “What must I do to be safe…now and forever?” Will you ponder their question, answer the immediate need, and look for an opening to address their ultimate needs? Is the healing you facilitate as an Adventist health care provider spiritual or literal? That, my friends, all depends on you – your experience with Jesus, your willingness to listen to your patients and the Holy Spirit’s prompting, and your readiness to answer, “Here’s a way to safety in the moment, and here’s a way to safety for eternity. Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved.”
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