What a day that we need to lift him up!  He’s worthy of praise, hallelujah!  And that’s where our strength and our joy come from.  “He inhabits the praises of His people” (Psalm 22:3).  We need to praise God more.  We need to worship Him more, and His visitation will manifest itself to us.  We’re living in that day when Satan’s going to move, and there are going to be all kinds of false prophets that are going to arise.  They’re going to bring doctrines of devils, the Scripture says.  They’re going to deceive many.  These things have already begun to occur and are manifesting themselves even to a greater degree as we come into these last days.

We realize that part of what we, the church, need to believe God for are the manifestations of these great, great promises to us, to strengthen us to endure as the restrainer.  Not just to endure to finish the race—we, the church, are restraining the power of Antichrist; amen?  And I think we need to do it in an expectation of restraining him in holiness and living victorious lives, that highway of holiness that we’ve been called to.  I think it would behoove us to believe God and to be able to, as that restraining power, do it in health, in physical strength, enabling us to pray and to bring opposition, to go out and evangelize, as we go into all the world and preach this gospel.  See, our healing and our strength isn’t just about us getting well; it’s about fulfilling the call of preaching the gospel of the kingdom.  Amen?  These are things that we want to, of course, put in our minds as we’re going through this doctrine and why this doctrine is so important.

Isaiah 53, we’ve looked at that passage.  We want to refresh ourselves with it, and the reason being that in this particular hour, we’re going to be contending not only with principalities and powers, lying spirits, false doctrine, but we’re going to have to contend with the professed church.  And in this hour, we see coming to preeminence a Fundamentalist aspect of the church, the Reformed theology that we’ve talked about before, Calvinism being a part of Reformed theology that would tell us that Isaiah 53, here, deals primarily with our spiritual healing, or our regeneration.  Thank God for our spiritual healing; amen?  Thank God for redemption.  Thank God that the blood of Jesus has sufficiently blotted out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us.

We’re pure this morning by the blood of Jesus; amen?  Free from all condemnation.  Free from the fear of death.  And I don’t just mean the cessation of this life; I’m talking about death that causes us to be cast into the lake of fire.  So good to be free from that torment and to know that we’re sons of God, heirs and joint heirs with Christ Jesus.  But the Scripture says, “Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows” (Isaiah 53:4), that Hebrew word for “griefs,” meaning “sickness, weakness, and pain.”  Aren’t you glad He has borne those things on Himself?  Amen? He took them for us.  He was made sin with our sin.  He was made pain with our pain.  He bore that disease that came from man’s transgression of rebellion to God.

Sickness is a result of the original sin.  It’s part of the curse.  And we’re redeemed from the curse, hallelujah!  But when we realize, then, the source of it—people often just wrestle with, “How can God allow this sickness?  And how come God made that person sick?”  God doesn’t make people sick.  Sickness is universally present.  Amen?  Sin is universally present.  Sin did not originate from God.  It originated in the rebellious heart of Lucifer and then transferred to humanity through the headship of Adam.