Objection 37

From Sovereign Grace and the Scope of Election: A Comparative Examination of Attainment Theology and Grace Theology, with Particular Attention to the Question of Whether God's Elect Are Found Among All Nations and Religions

Isaiah 53:5 / 1 Peter 2:24, "with his stripes we are healed." Healing is in the atonement; medicine is unbelief.

Peter quotes the verse and interprets it in the same sentence: "Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed" (1 Peter 2:24), the healing is from sin, unto righteousness; the disease in Isaiah's context is iniquity ("the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all," 53:6). Matthew 8:17 applies the passage to Christ's earthly healing ministry as Messianic identification, not as a standing draft every believer may cash on demand, or Paul's thorn, Timothy's stomach, Trophimus's sickness, and Epaphroditus's near-fatal illness (Philippians 2:26-27, healed by God's mercy, not by Epaphroditus's faith-refusal of means) become four apostolic failures of consecration. As for James 5:14-15, note what it actually institutes: the sick man calls the elders, who pray and anoint with oil, oil being, in the first century, also the common therapeutic (Luke 10:34, the Samaritan pouring in oil and wine). Prayer and means together, at the initiative of the sick, with the outcome resting on "the Lord shall raise him up", a text of humble dependence, not a prohibition of physicians whom Scripture never condemns and once canonizes (Colossians 4:14).