We can receive Kingdom healing from God throughout our lives without having to die from an illness.
Sickness is not a prerequisite for death. There are a number of examples of this illness–free dying found both in Scripture and in the everyday experience of Christian life.
Even though some of us do die through sickness, there is no condemnation —on the contrary, we are made whole in our dying.
Smith Wigglesworth, the famous teacher, is an example of someone who died without being either sick or injured. It is said that he did not even have any tooth decay.
Even elderly people who are generally healthy do die without any apparent sickness being the cause of their leaving us.
The idea that pre–death sickness in our old age is fairly well inevitable, that it is somehow a method that God often uses to bring us to the point of dying, creates serious doubt for the very ill, and for those who love them.
Healing is possible, and is God’s will, right up to the point of our death. This view is quite consistent with the Father’s will as it has been revealed to us through Jesus. There would certainly have been elderly and dying people in those crowds who came to him and he healed them all. Such ‘doubting doctrines’ as the inevitability of sickness in old age are responsible for many untimely deaths by injury and sickness.
Persuading people not to ask for healing or perhaps to ask in a double–minded fashion, reflects doubt concerning God’s purposes, and it is that doubt which is harmful.
The sick person is hindered from coming to Jesus in simple faith. Doubting doctrines have made it all so complex and mysterious for us.
The expression ‘natural causes’ on a death certificate can mean that there was no discernible reason found for death, even after a post mortem.
To add to this, there are numbers of apparently healthy people who die instantly, or at any rate almost instantly, in battle or in traffic accidents, of
heart attacks, strokes, accidents at work or in the home, murder and other kinds of trauma massive enough to kill them.
There have also been many martyrs down the centuries who experienced massive and life–threatening injury only moments before death.
So we do not have to be sick in order to die; death by sickness is certainly not inevitable.
