Healing & Salvation – Dr David Petts

 

In recent talks we saw several occasions where Jesus said Your faith has healed you.

The Greek word used here is sozo which can also mean save.

Does this mean that that healing is in some sense a part of salvation?

The answer to this question is NOT NECESSARILY.

 

Is healing a part of salvation?

The fact that sozo (which in the NT is usually translated ‘save’) is sometimes used to mean ‘heal’[1] has been used by some to argue that healing is included in salvation.  

 

John Nelson Parr (Divine Healing p26), for example, comments:

 

“If Peter included healing in ‘being saved’ (Acts 4:9) (…also note the same word in verse 12 twice), are we not justified in teaching that physical healing is included in the salvation purchased for us by the Prince of Life.?”.

 

This conclusion is invalid, however, because it involves an elementary error in semantics.

The fact that the same word is used twice in a passage does not necessarily imply that it is being used with the same meaning on both occasions.  

Nevertheless it will be helpful briefly to consider the meaning and use of sozo.

 

The meaning of sozo

The Greek verb is related to the adjective saos (safe) and means

‘to make safe’

and hence ‘to deliver from a direct threat’

and  ‘to bring safe and sound out of a difficult situation’.  

 

Foerster lists four major areas of meaning for sozo:

saving, keeping, benefiting, and preserving the inner being

 

Saving includes

• being snatched from peril especially in the context of war or of a sea-voyage
• ‘deliverance’ from judicial condemnation
• being ‘saved’ from an illness.

 

Keeping includes

• a king keeping a subject alive by granting pardon
• men being kept from perishing
• the spark of a fire being kept from going out
• lost money being ‘got back’, and of wine or goods being ‘kept’.

 

But sozo and soteria can have a purely positive content.  

Benefiting

• Prayer is offered to Zeus for the soteria of the nation, for peace, wealth, the growth of crops and cattle
• With regard to healing sozomai can mean not only to be cured but to be in good health
• the oath ten men soterian which means ‘by my health’.

 

preserving the inner being of men or things

 

• Plato thought that it was the task of the ruler to sozein the state by maintaining it as a constitutionally ordered state
• sozo and soteria often refer to the inner ‘health’ of man”.

 

So, long before the New Testament documents came to be written, sozo was being used in a wide variety of ways.   

It is noteworthy, however, that in all the examples mentioned above the root meaning of being made or kept safe is clearly discernible.  

This is also true of the use of sozo in the New Testament

Each meaning carries with it the underlying suggestion of being made or kept safe.

 

The use of sozo in the New Testament

New Testament writers use sozo and its cognates to mean being made or kept safe whenever such terminology is appropriate.   Three main ways:

 

• Acute danger to physical life
• Deliverance from disease
• Salvation

 

Acute danger to physical life

• In the stilling of the storm the disciples plead with Jesus to ‘save’ them (Matthew 8:25)
• Peter walking on the water (Matthew 14:30)
• In the accounts of the mocking of Jesus on the cross (Matthew 27:40-42, Mark15:30-31, Luke 23:39) he is challenged to ‘save’ himself.
• Paul’s shipwreck in Acts 27:20, 31, 34
• Hebrews 11:7 refers to Noah preparing the ark to save his household

 

Those who see healing as a part of salvation on the grounds that sozo is used to  mean ‘heal’ must, to be consistent, include deliverance from physical danger on the same grounds!

 

Such a position is of course clearly untenable in the light of NT teaching with regards to Christians who suffer persecution (e.g. 1 Peter, passim, Romans 8:35-39, 2 Corinthians 11:23-33).

 

 

Deliverance from disease

sozo is used to mean ‘heal’in:

 

• the healing of the woman with the issue of blood (Matthew 9:21-22, Mark 5:28, 34, Luke 8:48)
• the raising of Jairus’ daughter (Mark 5:23, Luke 8:50)
• the healing of blind Bartimaeus (Mark 10:52, Luke 18:42)
• Luke’s account of the deliverance of Legion from demon-possession (Luke 8:36)
• the healing of ten lepers (Luke17:19)
• Cripple at Beautiful Gate Acts 4:9
• Cripple at Lystra Acts 14:9
• James 5:15

 

So it’s clear that sozo is used in the New Testament to mean to deliver from both danger and disease.

 

But sozo and soteria in the New Testament mean far more than this.  

Salvation

The danger from which man needs to be saved is more than physical and by far the major emphasis of soteria in the New Testament is that of deliverance from sin.  

 

But does deliverance from sin automatically imply deliverance from sickness and danger?

 

It seems to me that although the use of sozo links deliverance from sickness with deliverance from sin linguistically

this need not in itself imply a theological connection.   

 

The New Testament writers did not develop a systematic theology of soteria subdivided into categories of physical and spiritual deliverance.

They used sozo wherever it might appropriately be used to mean ‘make safe’ or ‘deliver’.  

So to argue from the use of sozo for anything more than a linguistic connection between those uses may possibly indicate a misunderstanding of the nature of language.

 

Nevertheless it seems likely that writers sometimes took advantage of cases of physical deliverance

 

e.g. the healing of blind Bartimaeus to illustrate the principles of spiritual deliverance – how those who are spiritually ‘blind’ might, through faith in Jesus ‘see’

 

But to say this is not to confuse the illustration itself with the truth it illustrates.  

Healing may illustrate salvation without being part of it.  

 

Thus Parr’s claim, based on the use of sozo in Acts 4:9-12, that ‘physical healing is included in the salvation purchased for us’  is shown to be invalid.