Though Eve was the first to partake in original sin, Adam was the authority and therefore responsible.  We see here this promise that was made, and it said He bore this for us, our griefs and our sorrows, praise God!  And yet mankind, especially the covenant people, the Jews, esteemed Him judged, “stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted” (Isaiah 53:4).  They saw Him dying on that cross because He professed Himself to be God.  They saw Him dying on that cross as a transgressor.  “But,” verse 5 says, “he was wounded for our transgressions… bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed,” hallelujah!  I love that chastisement of our peace in the Septuagint that is soteria, our salvation, praise God!  Our wholeness.  To be saved is to be whole (amen?), to be made and restored back to the complete being that God created us to be in fellowship with Himself.  And by His stripes we are healed.

We’ve said that Reformed theology, which is the popular position to take today, gaining strength, really on a pretty continual basis—they are cessationist, as we’ve shared before.  We’re a people that believe that these great gifts of the Spirit, the power and manifestation of God in healing the sick, casting out devils, working of miracles, the gifts of the Spirit of 1 Corinthians 12—we’re continuationists, in that we believe it’s still manifesting today.  Why?  Because God is the same yesterday, today, and forever; amen?  Why?  Because this is unto you, your children, all that are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call, the Scripture says.  It belongs to us.  It’s for our generation.  It’s perpetual.  Healing did not come just because of a covenant.  Healing has always existed because it’s the essence of God.  Amen?  It’s who God is.  So, when we realize that because it’s who He is, it’s who we should be as we abide in Him, and His words abide in us, as we enjoy that abiding factor.  As the branches, we’re absorbing, or allowing, that imbibing of the Spirit from the Vine.  We abide in Him, and wholeness surges into us; amen?  Deliverance surges into us.  Holiness surges into us.  Prevenient grace.  But it all originates in and by Him, hallelujah!

But that aspect of this being spiritual healing is something that is confronted and refuted in the eighth chapter of Matthew.  And the Scripture says, “When the evening was come, they brought unto him many that were possessed with devils” (Matthew 8:16).  I want to emphasize this, too: Satan, demonic oppression, has done such an ingenious camouflage of hiding himself.  Demons themselves, because of medical science, putting many of their manifestations off into the psychological realm and beginning to call many of these things mental illnesses.  So, we try to deal with it through the pseudo-science of psychology.  I won’t get into that, but we know that psychology is not a science.  It can’t be verifiable.  There’s no constancy to the way it repeats itself, that it could become a law in and of itself, or a truth that would manifest consistently.  So subjective.

Many of these things for which people are trying to take drugs and dull their senses, spending hundreds of dollars an hour for counsel, are demons that need to be cast out of people.  The lunatic, that power of the demons over him that would cast this young man into the fire at different times, and we would see all of these physical manifestations (Matthew 17:14‑18, Mark 9:17‑27).  The demonized man who had almost supernatural power that he would break chains when they would bind him up.  And just a word, and he was free, praise God, and was in his right mind (Mark 5:1‑15, Luke 8:26‑35).  Isn’t that what the Scripture tells us?