Healing and the Atonement

The first one pulls a chair up to the bed. He takes the woman's hand, prays for her healing, and means it. He believes God still heals today. Then he stays. He asks about her grandchildren. He reads a psalm out loud. He sits with the quiet.

The second man brings a list. Has she forgiven everyone who wronged her? Did she confess her healing out loud? Did she waver at any point? Somewhere on that list is the reason she is still lying in this bed. He is certain of it.

Both men say they believe in divine healing. Only one of them is safe to be sick around.

I need to say something here, and I am going to say it again at the end because I cannot let it get buried. I believe God heals people today. I have prayed for the sick and watched God answer in ways I cannot explain away. My tradition anoints with oil and calls the elders, and I think we are right to do it.¹ Nothing in this chapter backs away from that. What this chapter takes up is the machinery that got built around a real gift.

Finis Dake taught that bodily healing was purchased at the cross on the very same terms as forgiveness. Not similar terms. The same terms. Same transaction, same conditions, same kind of faith, same degree of certainty. He puts it this way in his supplement on the atonement:

Read that again. He is not saying God sometimes heals. He is not saying healing flows from the cross in some broad way. He is saying that healing and forgiveness sit on the same shelf, cost the same price, and are collected the same way. If you can be sure of your forgiveness, you should be equally sure of your healing. That is the claim. And everything else in his healing teaching grows out of it, including the parts that end up standing beside a hospital bed holding a clipboard.

Why It Matters

A healing doctrine is not just an idea in a textbook. It is a set of instructions somebody follows on the worst week of her life.

Think about what this does to prayer. If healing is promised on the same terms as forgiveness, then asking God whether it is His will to heal you is like asking whether it is His will to forgive you. You already know the answer. Asking again is an insult. Dake says exactly that, and we will see him say it before this chapter is done.

Now think about what it does to pastoral care. If healing is guaranteed, then a body that stays sick means the deal broke down somewhere. God did not fail. God does not break His own laws. So the failure has to be on the human side. And there is only one other person in the room.

Now think about what it does to a deathbed. This is the part that weighs on me most. A woman who spent thirty years in a church shaped by this teaching, who is now dying of something ordinary and terrible, does not get to die in peace. She gets to die under investigation. Did she believe hard enough? Did she confess a symptom and cancel her own healing? Her last hours can turn into a review of her own faith. That is what the math produces.

But fairness comes first. Dake was fighting a real fight, and on the big question he was right more than he was wrong.³ The preachers he argued with said miracles ended when the apostles died. Some of them taught that sickness is God's chosen gift and should be accepted without question. Dake opened his Bible and could not find a God who enjoys watching His children suffer. He was right about that. He also insisted that ordinary believers could read the promises and expect God to show up. That instinct is healthy. The Pentecostal movement owes a lot of its boldness to men who thought the way Dake thought.

This is not some minor topic he touched on once. He gives healing more space than he gives most subjects in his course. He returns to it supplement after supplement. And the tone throughout is urgent, because he believed people were dying who did not need to die. That urgency is the honest engine behind everything he wrote on it. He was not trying to build a machine that would punish the sick. He was trying to get them out of bed.

So the argument in this chapter is narrow. It is not with healing. It is with a guarantee.

Dake in His Own Words

Dake's healing teaching is not scattered across random notes. Most of it sits in Lesson Fourteen of God's Plan for Man, titled "Divine Healing and Divine Health," along with two supplements attached to it. He covers much of the same ground in three chapters of Bible Truths Unmasked.⁴ Taken together, the material runs over fifty pages. He is careful, thorough, and answers objections as he goes. I will not treat him as if he were careless.

Exhibit 1: The Guarantee

The heading he chose tells you where this is going. In his supplement on the atonement, Dake reaches a section he titles "Healing Is Absolutely Sure." Here is how he opens it.

The first half is about the cross. Christ bore our sicknesses. Healing is part of what He purchased. Many Christians would agree with some version of that, and I am one of them.

But the second half is about timing and certainty. Everyone can get healed now. Not "may be healed." Not "will be healed in God's wisdom and time." Can be healed now, on the spot, by faith, the same way a sinner is forgiven right now. And then the last line closes the loop: if you are not healed, the explanation is already written. You did not believe.

He says it another way in the language of legal rights. In Lesson Fourteen he sums up his case like this:

Five categories of right. Notice that one of them is the word "legal." That is not a throwaway word. In Dake's system, healing is something owed to you. He builds toward that summary through a list he calls "22 Proofs that Bodily Healing is in the Atonement," running two full pages.⁷ In Bible Truths Unmasked he titles an entire chapter "Bible Proof That It Is Always God's Will to Heal." He opens it by arguing that because healing is in the atonement, it must be God's will for every person the atonement covers.⁸

Exhibit 2: The Conditions

Supplement Seven of God's Plan for Man is titled "How to Get Healed and Stay Healed." He lays out nine numbered steps: be born again, have faith, trust God rather than man, obey His Word, make peace with other people, call the elders, control your tongue, live under God's protection, and praise Him for the healing before you feel it.⁹ Read as pastoral advice, most of this is fine. Several items are just ordinary Christian living. But watch what Dake builds around them:

That is the language of a contract. There is an offer, there are conditions, there is performance, and there is a warning that the offer is off the table if you do not perform. "Do not fret because you do not get what you want" is about breach. And the last sentence about God's laws is the beam holding the whole structure up: God will not step outside the system. Not even for you. Because that would make Him unfair to everyone else.

A page later Dake states the promise in its purest form. Seven words, no qualifier:

Think about what that sentence cannot survive. It cannot survive a single faithful believer who prayed and stayed sick. One honest counterexample breaks it. So the system has to find a way to make every counterexample disappear. It does. The next exhibit shows how.

The same certainty reaches backward into the question of who gets sick in the first place. Among eighty lessons Dake draws from the Bible's accounts of sickness, number seventy-seven reads:

Follow that reasoning to the end. A believer walking in holiness will not get sick. If she does get sick, some sin is at work. And if she searches her life and cannot find a particular sin, the last line gives the answer: it may be the sin of unbelief. That is the one fault nobody can ever rule out completely. The door looks open. It closes from the inside.

Exhibit 3: The Diagnosis

This is the hardest exhibit in the chapter, and I want to handle it with care. Dake has to explain why Christians stay sick. He does explain it. And his answer always lands in the same place.

Before God is obligated. That phrase carries the whole system in it. God's hands are tied until the sick person unties them.

On the same page he lists the reasons a believer might keep God from acting. God will not work, he says, because of unbelief; because the sick person refuses to clear God of blame; because of believing lies instead of truth; because of cooperating with Satan instead of God; and because of exercising unbelief instead of faith.¹³ Every item on the list is a fault in the patient.

Eight pages later he meets the obvious objection head-on. Somebody objects that healing cannot be guaranteed because plenty of good Christians are not healed. Here is Dake's answer:

I need to be careful here, because there is a real distinction in Dake that a critic could easily flatten. He does not teach that every illness is caused by the sick person's personal sin. He says so plainly: "We do not mean to say that every person's sickness is a direct result of some personal sin, for this is not true."¹⁵ That matters. He knew John 9, and he refused the crude version of the doctrine. Credit where it belongs.

But notice where the pressure goes. He softens the cause of getting sick, then hardens the cause of staying sick. You may have gotten sick for reasons that have nothing to do with your sin. But you remain sick because you did not believe. The audit is not canceled. It is just moved to the second question, which is the question a dying believer actually asks.

That same logic reaches all the way into how you are allowed to pray. In Bible Truths Unmasked, Dake takes up the prayer Jesus prayed at Gethsemane and rules it out for the rest of us:

Sit with that for a moment. The words Jesus spoke in the garden on the worst night in human history are now sinful when they come out of your mouth over a hospital bed. I do not think Dake wanted that outcome. But his system arrives there.

Exhibit 4: The Enemy Behind the Fever

One more piece completes the picture. If sickness were simply part of living in a broken world, the delay in healing might be bearable. But in Dake's system, sickness is enemy action. Every hour of it is territory surrendered.

In Lesson Fourteen he lays out the causes under headings. God is the lawgiver. Then comes a heading in capital letters: "SATAN THE LAW-EXECUTOR." Under it Dake writes that Satan "is the direct power in executing the law of sin, sickness, and death," and that God "has given the actual power of this law into the hands of demon powers." A page later he draws the practical conclusion:

He extends the idea even to germs. Disease germs, he writes, are "so closely allied to the work of demons" that they should be understood as material agents of Satan at work in the bodies of his victims.¹⁹ The same teaching appears in the posthumous compilation Heavenly Hosts as a catalog entry. Among the things Satan does, the list includes "Cause infirmities," and a section heading announces "Proofs That Sickness Is Satan's Work."²⁰ The Dake Study Bible's own notes confirm the same framework. Under Psalm 104 it states that "there are demon spirits for every sickness, unholy trait, and doctrinal error known among men" and that "disease germs, which are closely allied with unclean spirits, are really living forms of corruption."

The full treatment of Dake's angels and demons belongs in Chapter 19, and I will leave most of it there. What matters for this chapter is what all of this adds to a sick person's burden. In this framework, sickness is not a season to be walked through with God. It is an occupation that must be broken. A believer who is not healed is not simply waiting on God's timing. She is losing ground.

The Answer from Scripture and the Historic Faith

Move 1: What I Gladly Concede

I want to begin by giving Dake everything I honestly can. The corrections that follow are worthless if they come across as a shrug about healing.

The cross does reach the body. This is not some Pentecostal add-on to the gospel. It is the plain shape of redemption. Isaiah's fourth Servant Song puts sicknesses and sins in the same breath:

Matthew quotes that passage and applies it to actual bodies getting well.²² And the church is told to pray for the sick and expect God to act:

So healing is real. It is for today. It is connected to what happened at Calvary. Where Dake defended all of that against the cessationism of his day, he was right and his critics should say so. The argument in this chapter is not about whether God heals. It is about what kind of thing a promise is.

Move 2: What "By His Stripes" Purchased, and When

The New Testament treats the cross as the purchase of our entire redemption, bodies included. But it also tells us, in the very same passages, that the body's portion has not been fully handed over yet. Paul says it about as plainly as anyone could:

Look at who is groaning. Not unbelievers. Not the weak in faith. The people who have the firstfruits of the Spirit. Paul is writing to Spirit-filled Christians, and he tells them flat out that their bodies are still waiting for redemption. And that this waiting is the normal state of things.²³ "Firstfruits" is a harvest word. It means the first basket is real and the rest of the barn is still coming.

Peter, quoting the same Isaiah line that Dake quotes, applies it to sin, not to bodies:

So the New Testament uses Isaiah 53 in two directions. Matthew points it at bodies during Jesus' earthly ministry. Peter points it at sin. Dake takes the Matthew direction and makes it the entire meaning. The church has held both uses together and taught that the body's full healing is guaranteed but not yet delivered.

Theologians have a name for this pattern: "the already and the not yet." It is not something somebody made up to dodge embarrassing failures. It runs through the whole New Testament. We are adopted, and we wait for our adoption. We are saved, and we are being saved. We have the Spirit as a down payment, and we wait for the full inheritance. Healing sits inside that pattern. Real healings happen now, as a foretaste of what is coming. The end of all sickness arrives at the resurrection.²⁵

Notice what he does not say. He does not say the outward man should stop wearing down once the inward man starts being renewed. He says both are happening at once, in the same believer. And God is at work through the whole arrangement. The body wears down while grace builds up. That is not defeat. It is what life looks like between the cross and the resurrection.

In Dake's system there is no room for that verse. A body wearing out is a benefit nobody bothered to collect. In Paul's framework, it is the ordinary weather of faith on its way somewhere glorious.

So Dake's error is not that he expects too much from the cross. It is that he demands the whole harvest out of the first basket.

Move 3: The Sick Saints Dake Had to Explain

A guarantee with no exceptions runs into trouble when exceptions turn up. The New Testament has several.

Epaphroditus, Paul's own coworker, "was sick almost unto death." Paul describes his recovery as God having mercy, not as a benefit claimed. Timothy, a pastor Paul trusted with a church, had a bad stomach and "frequent infirmities." The apostle's prescription was a change of drink. Trophimus was just left behind: "Trophimus I have left in Miletus sick." And Paul himself asked three times for a thorn to be removed. God said no.²⁷

To his credit, Dake does not pretend these passages are missing from the Bible. He works through every one of them. I owe the reader his answers.

Trophimus, he says, was "no doubt run down in body and had a physical breakdown because of his many labors for Christ" and needed rest rather than healing.²⁸ Timothy's problem was a bad water supply, and Paul's advice was dietary. Paul's thorn was not a disease at all but "an angel of Satan," since the Greek word for messenger can mean angel.²⁹

Now weigh those answers on their own terms. The thorn reading has real support. Plenty of careful commentators take the thorn as persecution rather than disease, and Dake has respectable company on that reading. The Timothy explanation is possible too. But look at what has to happen to Trophimus. Paul uses a common Greek word for sick, and Dake has to turn it into exhaustion. Nothing in the text suggests that reading except the need to protect the guarantee.

Epaphroditus gets even shorter treatment. Dake says he "was brought back to health by proper rest and faith."²⁸ And that is the whole thing. Notice what gets left out.

Paul does not credit rest. He does not say his friend failed to claim anything. He says God had mercy, and that if the sickness had ended differently it would have brought Paul "sorrow upon sorrow." That is the language of a gift received, not an entitlement collected. It is also the language of a man who knew it could have gone the other way. A benefit that is guaranteed does not leave an apostle bracing for grief.

One solid counterexample breaks "without exception." The New Testament offers several. And it treats none of them as a scandal.

Move 4: The Death He Lets Stand

Now take Dake's own parallel and run it all the way out, because he built it and it turns on him.

His argument is that sickness and sin were handled in one transaction, and so they should be claimed on the same terms. But sickness is not the only thing the fall brought in. Death came through the same door, in the same verses Dake cites. If the atonement's benefits are all available now by faith, then freedom from death should be available now too.

Dake saw that objection coming. A critic had written that if healing were in the atonement, a Christian would never die. Here is his reply, under the heading "No Christian Needs To Be Sick":

Look at what he just did. He admitted an "already and not yet." Death is defeated at the cross, and death still happens, and it keeps happening until a future day. That is the exact logic he will not allow for sickness.

So the system has two doors. Death goes through the "not yet" door. Sickness has to go through the "right now" door. But what decides which one a curse goes through? Dake never gives a text for that distinction. The only thing separating them is what the system needs to be true.

When Scripture does speak on this, it puts them together. Paul calls death "the last enemy" precisely because it is still standing.³¹ He puts the body's redemption in the future tense in Romans 8, even though the Spirit is already given. Sickness and death are the same curse moving at different speeds, and the New Testament schedules both for the same morning.

Move 5: The Grace That Is Sufficient

There is one more passage, and it is the one I would want someone to read to me in my own hospital room.

Whatever the thorn was, look at the shape of the exchange. A man of enormous faith asks boldly. He asks a second time. He asks a third time. And God does not rebuke him for failing to meet the conditions. God does not send him back to check the list. God gives him Himself instead, and calls that enough.

That answer cannot exist inside Dake's system. There is no room in it for a holy no. Every no has to be reclassified as a failure on the human side, because the only other option is a God who did not honor His own contract. So the sufferer gets handed a lifetime of self-examination in place of a Father.

The historic Christian answer holds on to both sides at once. It prays boldly, because God heals. And it rests, because God is good even when He waits. Job's comforters had a tidy theology of suffering, and God rebuked them for it (Job 42:7). Their mistake was not that they lacked doctrine. Their mistake was that they brought a mechanism to a man God had not condemned. The gospel does not ask the dying to explain themselves. It gives them a Savior who was Himself "a Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief." A Savior who prayed in a garden the very prayer Dake calls sinful.

Answering the Defenses

Three defenses deserve a fair hearing. The people who raise them are not careless thinkers.

"Jesus healed everyone who came to Him. That tells us the Father's will." This is the strongest defense, and it is partly right. The Gospels do report that Jesus healed all who came to Him, and that should shape our expectations. But those summaries describe a season when the kingdom was breaking into the world through the King in person. They are not a description of a standing mechanism He now owes us. In those same Gospels, Jesus walks into a colonnade at Bethesda crowded with sick people, heals one man, and walks away. John writes it down without embarrassment and without explaining the rest. And in that same story, the sinless Son prays, "if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as You will."³² If that prayer is faith and not unbelief in the mouth of Jesus, it cannot be sin in ours.

"Dake's teaching is comforting. He tells people God always wants them well." It comforts people, right up until the moment it does not. That is precisely the problem. The same math that says God certainly wills your healing must also say, when the healing does not come, that the failure is yours. Put the two Dake sentences side by side and ask which one a dying woman hears. "Everyone who has faith will be healed without exception" sounds like good news on a good day. On a bad day it is a verdict.

"You are telling people to pray timid prayers." I am not. And I would push back hard if I were. Gethsemane is not a timid prayer. It is the boldest request in all of Scripture, spoken by the only person who had the power to force the answer. And it ends in surrender. The believer who asks God for everything and then trusts Him with the outcome is exercising more faith, not less, than the believer who has to keep a mechanism steady with her own certainty. Real faith rests on a Person. Dake's version of faith has to rest on itself, and that is why it can never stop checking.³³

Conclusion and the Words

Dake taught that healing is in the atonement on the same terms as forgiveness, drawn right now, by faith, as a legal right. He published the conditions and warned that God will not break His laws for anyone. He taught that God is not obligated until the sick person meets those terms. He taught that the reason Christians stay sick is that they do not believe. And he taught that praying "if it be Thy will" over a promised benefit is a sin.

Against all of that, the Scriptures say the cross bought our bodies and the resurrection delivers them. Spirit-filled believers groan while they wait. Paul left a friend sick in Miletus and did not seem embarrassed about it. And God's answer to a man who prayed the same prayer three times was a grace that is sufficient, not a healing that is owed.

I said at the start that I would repeat myself, so here it is. Pray for the sick. Anoint with oil. Ask God for more than you think you will get, and then ask Him again. If anything in this chapter makes you pray less boldly, I have written it badly.

But when the answer is no, put the clipboard down. Do not audit a dying woman's faith. The believer in that hospital bed is not a failed transaction. She is a daughter waiting for the last installment of a purchase already made in full. The God who kept her through thirty winters is not going to lose her in the spring.

Ray told me once that the hardest funeral he ever sat through was for a woman his Sunday school class had prayed over for a year. Nobody in the room could say out loud what the teaching had trained them to think. That silence is what this chapter is for. A theology that cannot be spoken beside a casket has already told you something about itself.

The system Dake built to guarantee healing runs on laws that bind God, and that machinery gets its own treatment. Chapter 18 takes up the laws of prayer. Chapter 11 takes up the God those laws were built to limit.³⁴ What I want you to carry out of this chapter is smaller and older than any of that. By His stripes we are healed. Every word of it is true. The receipt was signed at Calvary. The full delivery comes at the empty tomb. And it has never once been late.

Notes

↑ 1. The author's continuationist commitment is stated in Chapter 1 and is not a rhetorical concession added here for effect. James 5:14-16 is treated throughout this book as the standing practice of the church, not a relic. On the covenant of fairness governing every chapter, see the same place.

↑ 2. Finis Jennings Dake, God's Plan for Man (Lawrenceville, GA: Dake Bible Sales, 1949; 1977 printing), Supplement Twenty-four, p. 943. All God's Plan for Man page numbers in this chapter follow the printed page markers embedded in the resident 1977 text (GPFM library). Obvious OCR breakage (split words, stray spaces) has been silently repaired in transcription; no wording has been altered.

↑ 3. Dake devotes a full section of Lesson Fourteen to answering the claim that the miraculous ceased when the apostles died, calling it "one of the most insensible and foolish arguments of unbelief today" (God's Plan for Man, p. 254). On the merits of the cessation question this book stands with him.

↑ 4. God's Plan for Man, Lesson Fourteen, "Divine Healing and Divine Health," pp. 236-256; Supplement Seven, "How to Get Healed and Stay Healed," pp. 258-260; Supplement Twenty-four, "Is Healing for the Body in the Atonement?", pp. 942-947. In Bible Truths Unmasked (Atlanta: Bible Research Foundation, 1950), chs. 12-14, pp. 82-99.

↑ 5. God's Plan for Man, Supplement Twenty-four, p. 946, under the section heading "Healing Is Absolutely Sure." The heading is Dake's own.

↑ 6. God's Plan for Man, Lesson Fourteen, p. 248. The Scripture strings are Dake's; his citation "2 Cor. 2:20" appears to be an error for 2 Cor. 1:20, the verse about the promises being "yea and amen," which he quotes correctly elsewhere (p. 947).

↑ 7. God's Plan for Man, Lesson Fourteen, "22 Proofs that Bodily Healing is in the Atonement," pp. 246-248. He cross-references the list from the supplements; see p. 942.

↑ 8. Bible Truths Unmasked, ch. 13, "Bible Proof That It Is Always God's Will to Heal," p. 88. The chapter runs eighteen numbered proofs across pp. 88-92.

↑ 9. God's Plan for Man, Supplement Seven, pp. 258-260; the block quotation that follows is from p. 258. Dake's nine headings are: become converted and born again; have faith in God for healing; wholly trust God in sickness and adversity; obey God and His Word; make peace with fellow men; call church elders and believe in their prayers; control the tongue; live in God and under His protection; praise God in faith for healing. Read as pastoral counsel, items three through nine are unobjectionable; the difficulty is the contractual frame built around them.

↑ 10. God's Plan for Man, Supplement Seven, p. 259. The sentence closes his section on faith and immediately precedes the heading "Wholly Trust God in Sickness and Adversity."

↑ 11. God's Plan for Man, Lesson Fourteen, p. 246, lesson no. 77 of the eighty. Quoted here in full, including the covenant argument and the Psalm 91 appeal, so that the closing sentence is not read out of its setting. Dake's "Points 45-56" refers to earlier items in the same list.

↑ 12. God's Plan for Man, Lesson Fourteen, p. 246, closing the section "Eighty Lessons Gleaned from a Study of the Bible Cases of Sickness" (pp. 241-246).

↑ 13. God's Plan for Man, Lesson Fourteen, p. 246: "God moves within His own laws and He will not work because of unbelief; because of the refusal of the sick one to clear God of all guilt for his trouble; because of belief in lies instead of truth; because of co-operation with Satan instead of with God; and because of the exercise of unbelief instead of faith." The same page adds, "God works only upon the principles of faith and truth, and He will not break His law for any person." On the broader doctrine of a God bound by His own laws, see Chapter 11.

↑ 14. God's Plan for Man, Lesson Fourteen, p. 254, in the section "Excuses of Unbelief Answered with Scripture."

↑ 15. God's Plan for Man, Lesson Fourteen, p. 241, citing John 9:1-4 and 11:4. Fairness requires printing this sentence; a critic who omits it misrepresents him.

↑ 16. Bible Truths Unmasked, ch. 13, p. 90, proof no. 14. Page numbers follow the printed page markers embedded in the resident text. Dake carried the same paragraph into God's Plan for Man, Lesson Fourteen, p. 251, where it appears as item 10 of a parallel list; the wording is substantially identical in both works, confirming that this was settled teaching rather than a stray sentence.

↑ 17. Bible Truths Unmasked, ch. 13, p. 91, under the heading "When Should Men Pray 'If It Be Thy Will'?" Dake does allow the prayer for matters Scripture has not promised, such as travel and business plans (pp. 91-92), citing James 4:13-17. That qualification is real and is recorded here; it does not reach the case of the sick believer, which is the case at issue.

↑ 18. God's Plan for Man, Lesson Fourteen, pp. 240-241. The capitalized headings are Dake's: "SATAN THE LAW-EXECUTOR" (p. 240) is followed on p. 241 by "MAN THE LAW-BREAKER." The quoted sentences about Satan as the direct power executing the law, and about God giving that power into the hands of demon powers, are both on p. 240; the block quotation is from p. 241.

↑ 19. God's Plan for Man, Lesson Fourteen, p. 241: "Disease germs, which are so closely allied to the work of demons, are living forms of corruption which have come into the bodies of men bringing them to death... They are really material agents of Satan corrupting the bodies of his victims." The same page carries his claim that no drug can cure a single disease. The Dake Annotated Reference Bible (newer typeset edition) confirms the same teaching in its note under Psalm 104:4, using substantially identical language about demon spirits and disease germs.

↑ 20. Heavenly Hosts, sections "Satan Is Good At:" and "Proofs That Sickness Is Satan's Work." Cited by section heading because the resident edition carries no printed page markers. Heavenly Hosts is a posthumous topical compilation of Dake's material published by his family and Dake Publishing (copyright 1995), not a book Dake himself saw through the press; it is used here only to corroborate teaching already documented from his lifetime works.

↑ 21. Dake's own discussion of the Hebrew in this passage is careful and largely sound: he notes that the Hebrew choli ("sickness") is used of bodily illness dozens of times and not of spiritual sickness only, and that makob means pain (God's Plan for Man, p. 943). The lexical point is granted here. The question this chapter presses is not what Isaiah 53:4 includes but when the New Testament says it is delivered in full.

↑ 22. Matthew 8:16-17 (NKJV): "He cast out the spirits with a word, and healed all who were sick, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Isaiah the prophet, saying: 'He Himself took our infirmities and bore our sicknesses.'" Matthew places the fulfillment in Jesus' healing ministry, before the cross, which is a point in Dake's favor against those who deny any bodily reference at all.

↑ 23. Greek aparche ("firstfruits"), the first installment of a harvest that guarantees the rest, and apolytrosis tou somatos ("the redemption of our body"), which Paul places in the future while the Spirit is already possessed. Compare Ephesians 1:13-14, where the Spirit is the arrabon, the down payment on an inheritance not yet handed over.

↑ 24. The NKJV punctuation joins the final clause with a dash; it is rendered here with a comma for readability. Peter's context is the suffering of slaves under unjust masters, and his application of Isaiah 53:5 is to the healing of sin. That is not a denial of the bodily reference in Isaiah, but it is a caution against making the bodily reference the only one.

↑ 25. 1 Corinthians 15:26, 54; Revelation 21:4. The resurrection body, not the present body, is where the atonement's bodily benefit is delivered without remainder. On Dake's own account of the eternal state, see Chapter 16.

↑ 26. 2 Corinthians 4:16-17 (NKJV). Verse 18 completes the thought by setting the seen against the unseen. Paul is writing about his own body, and the participle rendered "is perishing" is present and continuous: the wearing down is ongoing, not a lapse to be corrected.

↑ 27. Philippians 2:25-30; 1 Timothy 5:23; 2 Timothy 4:20; 2 Corinthians 12:7-9 (all NKJV). Of Epaphroditus, Paul writes: "For indeed he was sick almost unto death; but God had mercy on him, and not only on him but on me also, lest I should have sorrow upon sorrow."

↑ 28. God's Plan for Man, Lesson Fourteen, p. 254, for both the Trophimus and the Epaphroditus material, which stand in consecutive sentences. Dake argues from the range of the Greek astheneo, which can mean weak or without strength, and notes correctly that it is not always used of disease. The lexical range is real; the difficulty is that in 2 Timothy 4:20 nothing in the context points to exhaustion rather than illness, so the reading is required by the system rather than suggested by the text. On the same page he adds that many in Bible days "did not exercise faith and get healed," citing the Corinthians of 1 Corinthians 11:29-32, which concedes the phenomenon while keeping the explanation fixed.

↑ 29. God's Plan for Man, Lesson Fourteen, p. 255, for both the Timothy and the thorn material. Dake's reading of the thorn as persecution by a satanic messenger rather than a disease has substantial support among commentators and is not part of this book's indictment. It is included here because he offers it as an answer to the sick-saint problem, and because even on his reading the point stands that Paul's threefold prayer received a no.

↑ 30. God's Plan for Man, Supplement Twenty-four, p. 943, under the heading "No Christian Needs To Be Sick." The same page adds: "It is no more necessary for a person to die of sickness and disease than it is for fruit to be diseased and worm eaten before it ripens and falls to the ground."

↑ 31. 1 Corinthians 15:26 (NKJV): "The last enemy that will be destroyed is death." The future tense is the whole point.

↑ 32. Matthew 26:39 (NKJV); John 5:1-9 for the pool of Bethesda, where John notes "a great multitude of sick people" and records one healing.

↑ 33. The broader machinery of conditions, laws, and guaranteed outcomes in prayer is documented and answered in Chapter 18, which owns that material; this chapter has taken up only the part of it that touches healing.

↑ 34. On the same-words method that allows orthodox vocabulary to carry a different doctrine, see Chapter 5 and the reference table in Appendix D. The summary of Dake's position in this conclusion rests on God's Plan for Man, pp. 246, 248, 254, 258-259, 946, and Bible Truths Unmasked, pp. 88-91.