"All" My Diseases?

2 Praise the LORD, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits
3 who forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases

In Psalm 103, David couples together two reasons to praise God - complete forgiveness and healing. However, despite the fact that in this verse David treats the two equally, most Christians believe that while the former is offered completely and immediately, the latter is at best sporadic.

Ps 103:3 is then problematic for us, in that if we wish to exegete it consistently we are invited either to proclaim at best a sporadic and patchy forgiveness of sin; or adopt an extreme Pentecostal view of healing in which the presence of pain is the result of a failure of faith. Sadly, the only attraction of either view is its consistency. The patchy-forgiveness approach falls at the hurdle of the rest of Psalm 103, in which our sins are removed "as far as the east is from the west"; the believers confidence in total forgiveness being one of the main points of the whole song. The illness=sin view is not only pastorally outrageous, but stumbles at numerous other texts, not least Job, 2 Cor 12:7, or John 9:1-3.

What then can we do with Psalm 103:3? In my church housegroup last night, several ways of interpreting it were suggested: Cultural, Sociological, Literary, and Eschatological.

Perhaps we can handle this text culturally in that there is a tendency for western Christians to individualise promises of God made to communities. Most of the proof-texts used for prosperity (health and wealth) theology involve taking promises of God to bless the nation of Israel and misapplying them to individuals. So, where Deuteronomy promises that the people will not just survive but thrive in the land, it means that God will provide the nation with sufficient health - not that every individual will live a pain-free life.

Perhaps we can handle this text sociologically in that the notion of what constitutes 'good health' is not a biological absolute but a social construct, governed by expectations and experience. Is it not feasible that David might have been praising God for his health, in the same physical state that we might be moaning to Him about our infirmities?

Then perhaps we could handle the text in regard to its literary type. This is, after all, a song not an epistle, an outflow of praise from the heart, not a thesis in systematic theology. David might be merely then expressing a testimony of what was true for him at one particular time but doing so in poetic absolutes. That a poet might have once have "wandered lonely as a cloud" is not lessened by being read during thick fog.

Or then perhaps we might interpret Psalm 103:3 eschatalogically as a reference to a future state in which healing will be as absolute as forgiveness is now. Certainly some commentaries take this line. More properly perhaps we might want to view this statement as proleptic, that is to say that David experienced the incursion of the future reality into the present. This view would see the healing David testifies to as a foretaste of the universal healing to come.

What then are we to make of these views? Last night's consensus was that the cultural method was probably true in regard to many other texts especially in terms of handling prosperity promises - but not this one where David is speaking personally. Psalm 103 starts off personal and ends up cosmic its scale and this verse is located at the heart of the personal section. The sociological view was thought to be generally useful in handling texts but not ultimately solving our dilemma.

The literary-type approach was far more helpful for most people. If David's praise is testimony, then we are invited to join him in praising God for the measure of life and health we enjoy. We need neither deny the possibility of healing, not universalise its immediate availability. This in turn is compatible with some of the sociological insight that we considered, especially in regard to the fact that many in our world joyfully and profoundly thank God for their daily survival, while we complain if our elevated western expectations are not met.

The eschatological approach was also found to be biblical and theologically powerful, undoubtedly true, but in all honesty probably not what David had in mind when he wrote this Psalm. However - that should not prevent us from interpreting the Old Testament in the light of the New and finding more hope in these words than the author intended. Just as Jesus rose from the dead - so we will rise from the dead, not as disembodied spirits but completed with non-decaying resurrection bodies.

When we are finally with The Lord, our constant testimony will match this outpouring of praise for God's total healing that David offers here. In fact, there is no good theological reason why we may not begin to praise Him for that already! While the Psalm is dominated by spiritual forgiveness, the 'benefits of the Lord' do not exclude the physical; and so it is inappropriate to miss, skip, ignore or Ps103:3. Far better to praise God now for the life we have had, do have and will have in Him - if as the rest of the Psalm stresses, we walk in fear of Him and embrace His forgiveness.

2 Praise the LORD, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits-

3 who forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases