What does “By His wounds we are healed” mean?
“He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree; so that, having died to sins, we might live for righteousness. 'By his wounds you have been healed'. 'For you were like sheep going astray', but you have now returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls.” 1 Peter 2:24-25 CSB
Understanding proper context here is to get in the mind of an ancient Jewish man (Peter) writing to other Jews, describing the theology of what Jesus’s cross work accomplished by quoting their famed prophet Isaiah. On the tree Jesus took on himself our sins and the curse of the Law so that we are found righteous in God’s sight, but it’s more than that. He quoted Isaiah 53:4-5 which, we must understand that particular passage’s context in a Messianic prophecy— a revealed and spoken word from God through Isaiah as his mouthpiece about the One who would come as Savior.
What he saves us from are the diseases of humanity that make us lust for empire causing injustices and the root cause of our sin sickness that brings us to commit immorality and idolatry. That is what it means when Isaiah first and next Peter wrote “by his wounds we are healed”. It has little to nothing to do with physical healing and has everything to do with our heart and our spirit being healed because of what Jesus accomplished on the cross.
We see that as we read the next verse Peter wrote and we see how he again quoted from Isaiah, but this time we must go read the full verse of Isaiah 53:6 to clearly see how God put the iniquity of us all on Jesus on the cross. Truly, it all comes together when we read the full chapter 53. That brings this all together in context of the sin sickness we all have that Christ bore on our behalf. That’s the real, true healing we need deep within our souls and that we could see in the context of this passage when we read to understand it in the light of proper hermeneutics.
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