Why Doesn't God Heal Everyone?

Why doesn’t God heal everyone? The question is rarely asked in a classroom. It is asked in a hospital hallway, beside a bed, or late at night by a man who has prayed for the same thing for years. It deserves an answer that is true all the way through, because a half-answer will fail him on the worst day of his life.

Here is the answer in one sentence. God heals some and does not heal others, and both serve His glory and the good of His people. Healing is not God’s plan A with sickness as His plan B. Both come from the same throne, the same wisdom, and the same fatherly love. Neither one means He tried and failed.

God can heal anyone

Start where Scripture starts. The psalmist says God reigns from Heaven and does whatever pleases Him (Psalm 115:3). No disease is beyond Him, no diagnosis outranks Him, and no organ is too far gone for Him to restore. He made the body from the dust and can remake it with a word (Genesis 2:7) (Mark 1:40-42).

He still does. James tells the sick man to call the elders of the church, who are to pray over him and anoint him with oil in the Lord’s name. He promises that believing prayer is the means by which the Lord restores the sick man, and that a righteous man’s prayer is mighty and effective (James 5:14-16). James does not treat this as a relic of the apostles. He writes it as ordinary church practice, and he grounds it in Elijah, a man no different from us (James 5:17-18).

So the first thing to say to anyone who suffers is not that God will not heal. It is that He can, that He often does, and that He invites you to ask.

Healing that displays His glory

When Jesus’ disciples saw a man blind from birth, they asked whose sin had caused it, his own or his parents’. Jesus rejected both options. He told them the blindness existed so that God’s work could be shown openly in this man’s life (John 9:1-3). Then He opened his eyes.

Think about what that means. That man spent his whole life blind, every year of it appointed by God, so that on one particular day the Son of God could stand in front of him and show who He was. The blindness was not wasted time. It was preparation for glory.

Lazarus is the same. When word came that he was sick, Jesus said death was not where this illness was headed. Its purpose was to display God’s glory and to bring glory to Himself, the Son (John 11:4). Then He waited two more days (John 11:6). He let Lazarus die, and then He called him out of the tomb (John 11:43-44). The delay was not neglect. John ties the two together: Jesus’ love for that household is the very reason he gives for the two-day wait (John 11:5-6).

Non-healing that displays His glory

Now turn the coin over, because Scripture does.

The apostle Paul was given what he calls a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment him, so that he would not become proud after the revelations he had received (2 Corinthians 12:7). Notice who gave it. Satan was the messenger, but the purpose belonged to God. Satan wanted Paul broken. God wanted Paul humble. Satan was only the instrument, and God’s purpose was the one that stood (Job 1:12, 2:6).

Paul pleaded with the Lord three times to take it away (2 Corinthians 12:8). He was not short on faith. This is the man who raised Eutychus and whose handkerchiefs carried healing to the sick (Acts 19:11-12, 20:9-12). And the Lord said no. He told Paul that His grace was enough for him, and that His power reaches its full strength in Paul’s weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9). Paul’s response was not resignation but boasting. He said he would gladly boast in his weaknesses so that Christ’s power would rest on him, and that his weakness was the very place where he found Christ’s strength (2 Corinthians 12:9-10).

That is not God saying no to Paul’s good. It is God saying yes to a greater good than the one Paul asked for.

Paul’s companions show the same pattern. He left Trophimus sick at Miletus (2 Timothy 4:20). The apostle with the gift of healing did not heal his own coworker. He told Timothy to stop drinking only water and to take a little wine because of his stomach and his frequent illnesses (1 Timothy 5:23). He did not tell Timothy to claim his healing. He gave him medicine. And Epaphroditus fell so sick that he nearly died, but God had mercy on him, Paul says, and not only on him but on Paul too, so that Paul would not be buried under one grief on top of another (Philippians 2:25-27). Paul calls the recovery mercy, not a reward earned by faith. A mercy is something God was free to withhold.

Go back further. Job lost his children, his wealth, and his health, and the whole book is built on the fact that it was not because of his sin (Job 1:1, 8, 42:7). God had set every limit on what Satan could touch (Job 1:12, 2:6). Joseph spent years as a slave and a prisoner, and at the end he told his brothers that their wicked intent had been overruled by God’s good intent, so that many lives were saved (Genesis 50:20). God did not merely make the best of their evil. He meant it, from the beginning.

And Paul gives the rule that covers every case. Everything that happens to those who love God, the ones He has called by His purpose, is made to serve their good. The next verse defines that good: being conformed to the image of His Son (Romans 8:28-29). Sometimes that image is formed in a body that gets up off the mat. Sometimes it is formed in a body that never does.

Every healed body still died

Here is a fact that settles a great deal. Every person Jesus healed later died. The man born blind died. Lazarus died a second time. The paralytic who walked home carrying his mat was eventually carried out on someone else’s shoulders.

That tells you what healing in this age is. It is not the final answer. It is a sign pointing to the final answer. Paul compares the body to a seed: it goes into the ground decaying, humiliated and frail, and it comes up incorruptible, glorious and strong (1 Corinthians 15:42-44). John saw the day when God Himself dries His people’s eyes, and death, grief and pain are gone for good (Revelation 21:4).

So no believer is ultimately left unhealed. Some receive a foretaste now. All of God’s people receive the whole meal at the resurrection. The question is never whether God will heal His own, only when and in what order.

The first error: “You just need more faith”

One popular teaching says God always wills to heal, so if you are not healed, the problem is your faith. It sounds like confidence in God. It is actually cruelty to the sick.

Test it against the record. Paul was not healed, and Paul’s faith was not the problem. God Himself told Paul why the thorn stayed (2 Corinthians 12:7-9). Trophimus was not healed, and Scripture never blames him (2 Timothy 4:20). Timothy kept his weak stomach and was told to manage it (1 Timothy 5:23). Epaphroditus recovered, and Paul credits God’s mercy, not Epaphroditus’ faith (Philippians 2:27). Even Jesus, in the garden, asked the Father to take the cup from Him if it were possible, and the cup was not removed (Mark 14:36). No one will ever accuse the Son of weak faith.

That teaching also gets the direction of power backwards. It makes God the one who waits and man the one who decides. Scripture says the opposite. Faith itself is a gift from God (Ephesians 2:8-9) (Philippians 1:29). God is never blocked by man’s weakness and never needs man’s strength to act (Daniel 4:35) (Acts 17:25). When He heals, He heals because He decreed it. When He does not, it is not because a man failed to unlock Him.

To the man who has been told his child is still sick because he did not believe hard enough: that was a lie, and you can put it down.

The second error: “God doesn’t do that anymore”

The opposite mistake is quieter but just as wrong. Some, rightly cautious about showmen and faith healers, slide into living as if God no longer heals at all, or as if asking Him to heal is presumptuous.

Scripture will not let us go there either. James commands the church to pray for the sick (James 5:14-16). Paul calls Epaphroditus’ recovery God’s mercy, which means God was acting in an ordinary sickbed in an ordinary church (Philippians 2:27). Jesus taught His people to keep on asking, and promised that their Father in Heaven is far kinder to His children than any earthly father (Matthew 7:7-11). The Father who rules the sparrow’s fall rules every cell in your body (Matthew 10:29-30).

God is no less able today to do the same signs He did two thousand years ago, and He still does them, when and where He pleases. That does not make every claim true. Scripture tells us to test what we hear, and a sober believer weighs every report of a miracle carefully, without scoffing and without swallowing it whole (1 Thessalonians 5:21) (1 John 4:1). God answers His people’s prayers for healing at His own discretion. Doctors, medicine, and surgery are among His ordinary means, and so is prayer. The Reformed churches have long taught that health and sickness alike come to us not by chance but from God’s fatherly hand, by the same almighty power with which He upholds and governs all things (Heidelberg Catechism, Lord’s Day 10, Question and Answer 27, 1563). If sickness comes from His hand, so does recovery, and it is no presumption to ask the Hand for it.

“Then why pray at all?”

If God has already decreed who will be healed, why ask?

Because God decrees means as well as ends. The same God who determined that Paul’s shipmates would survive also determined that the sailors had to stay in the boat (Acts 27:22-24, 31). He ordained that Hezekiah would recover, and He ordained that Hezekiah would pray and that a fig poultice would be applied (Isaiah 38:1-5, 21). Prayer is not an attempt to change God’s mind. It is one of the instruments by which He brings His purposes to pass, and He is pleased to give some things only when His people ask for them (James 4:2).

So ask boldly. Ask often. Ask the elders to come. Ask the church to join you. And ask the way Christ asked in Gethsemane. He laid His desire plainly before His Father, asking that the cup pass from Him, and then submitted His will entirely to the Father’s will (Mark 14:36). Both halves belong together. Bold asking without submission is demand. Submission without asking is not humility. It is unbelief dressed up as piety.

“Is God cruel, or indifferent?”

This is the hardest question, and the one that comes from the deepest place.

Look at Jesus at Lazarus’ tomb. He knew He was about to raise him. He had said so days earlier (John 11:11). And still, when He saw Mary weeping and the mourners with her, grief and indignation rose in Him, and tears ran down His face (John 11:33-35). The God who ordains sickness is not a God who watches it from a distance with dry eyes. The Son took on flesh so He could feel what you feel, and as our High Priest He still feels the frailty He once carried (Hebrews 4:15).

And the suffering of God’s children is not meaningless pain. It is suffering with Christ, and Paul says those who share Christ’s sufferings will share His glory, and that nothing we suffer now can even be weighed against the glory coming to us (Romans 8:17-18). He calls our trouble small and brief, not because it does not hurt, but because it is working out for us a glory that is everlasting and immeasurably heavier (2 Corinthians 4:17). Paul wrote that while being beaten, shipwrecked, and left with a thorn (2 Corinthians 11:23-27).

So be clear about what an unhealed sickness is not. It is not God losing. It is not God trying and being overpowered. It is not God waiting on you to supply what He lacks. He is never blocked, never in need of man, and never fails to do exactly what He intends (Isaiah 46:9-10) (Ephesians 1:11). When He heals, His glory is seen in power. When He withholds healing, His glory is seen in sustaining grace and in a faith that will not let go. Both are His work. Both are good. Neither is a lesser plan.

For the man who must answer

If you are the one who is sick, or the one keeping watch beside someone you love, you do not need a theory first. You need to know that the God who appointed this hour is the God who sent His Son, the Son who wept at Bethany and bore nails in His hands, and that He has already promised a resurrection. Your sickness is not proof that you failed Him, and it is not proof that He failed you.

When someone tells you that a believer who stays sick lacks faith, take him to Paul’s thorn, to Trophimus at Miletus, and to Timothy’s stomach. When someone tells you God no longer heals, take him to the elders’ anointing (James 5:14-15) and to Epaphroditus (Philippians 2:27). When someone asks why pray, show him Hezekiah and the poultice, and Christ in the garden. When someone asks whether God is cruel, take him to the tomb in Bethany and let him watch the Son weep for a man He was about to raise.

And when you have said all of that, remember that the final healing is not in doubt for anyone who belongs to Christ. Every healing now is a preview. The resurrection is the feature.

As you pray, ask God boldly for healing for yourself or the one you love, and ask Him to make you willing to receive His answer from His fatherly hand, whatever it is. Ask Him to keep you from accusing the sick and from doubting His power. And ask Him to fix your eyes on the day when the frail body that was buried rises strong, never to be sick again.