29 June 2025
“Hi, I’m Rapha”
Since the focus these weeks is on Jehovah Rapha — “God the healer,” I thought it might be valuable to take us back to the point in the Bible where God introduces himself as such, which, of course is Exodus 15:22-26.
I usually share my own paraphrase of the passage to bring some upfront clarity to the text, but I was so impressed by Eugene Peterson's Message rendering of Exodus 15:22-26 that I want to begin by re-reading the passage in his translation.
Moses led Israel from the Red Sea on to the Wilderness of Shur. They traveled for three days through the wilderness without finding any water. They got to Marah, but they couldn’t drink the water at Marah; it was bitter. That’s why they called the place Marah (Bitter). And the people complained to Moses, “So what are we supposed to drink?”
So Moses cried out in prayer to God. God pointed him to a stick of wood. Moses threw it into the water and the water turned sweet.
That’s the place where God set up rules and procedures; that’s where he started testing them.
God said, “If you listen, listen obediently to how God tells you to live in his presence, obeying his commandments and keeping all his laws, then I won’t strike you with all the diseases that I inflicted on the Egyptians; I am GOD your healer.”
I want to draw your attention to this last line “I am God your healer” — which is the basis of this sermon series "I am Jehovah Rapha.”
In the original Hebrew, this phrase includes the proper name for God, which is transliterated as Y-H-W-H. You’ll notice that there are no vowels because at that point in time there were no written vowels in Hebrew. And since Hebrew readers would always substitute the word my Lord when they were reading, because they wanted to show respect to the personal name of God, no one knows how the word Y-H-W-H was actually vocalized.
If it was ever vocalized that vocalization had been forgotten by the 3rd century BC.
In the Christian Middle Ages, some creative scholars came up with their own vocalization for the Holy Name of God by taking the vowels from the Hebrew word for “Lord,” which, as I mentioned is what Jews were saying as they read the text. So these scholars took the vowels from the word “Lord” (adonai) and inserted those vowels into Y-H-W-H to create the hybrid name Jehovah.
William Tyndale, who produced an English translation of the Bible in the 16th century, was the first to use this new hybrid name, Jehovah, and it became popular for a short time.
However, most modern scholars, with all their linguistic analysis, believe that the name Y-H-W-H is better vocalized as Yahweh. And there are a few Bible translations, such as the Jerusalem Bible, a wonderful Roman Catholic translation from the 1960s, that actually adopted the Yahweh rendering. But most mainstream Bible translations, in keeping with Jewish tradition, still render Yahweh as the LORD using all cap letters.
I know that this bunny trail is probably way more information than you want, but it’s a helpful nugget to tuck in the back of your mind as you start to realize how seriously people were taking the name of God.
Notice, though, that God doesn’t leave it at that. He doesn't just reveal his name, “I AM YAHWEH…” but he also reveals his last name — so to speak. (I’m being slightly tongue-in-cheek when I say "last name" — but there are numerous times in the Old Testament when God adds a descriptive adjective that kind of sounds like a last name.) For example: “Yahweh MKaddsh/Sanctifier” in Leviticus 20:7-8 or "Yahweh Shalom/Peace” in Judges 6:23-24.
Here in Exodus 15, he says “I am YHWH rapha — Jehovah Rapha — God the healer or God the one who restores and makes whole.”
You see, healing or rapha in the Bible is always a very holistic term. Yes, there are physical dimensions. Yes, there are spiritual dimensions. Yes, there are emotional dimensions. Yes, there are relational dimensions. And all of these dimensions are interrelated in the word rapha — healing, restoration.
My personal paraphrase for Exodus 15:26 is “I am GOD, the one who restores.”
In the Saturday morning Bible study, we've discussed how we tend to approach justice as punitive, but God's justice in the Bible is restorative in nature. This is because God is rapha — restorative — even in how he dishes out justice.
His primary objective is restoration or healing in the lives of individuals and all creation. Even when we're not seeing it, all the rapha signs are there.
Recently, I've gotten sucked into a genre of YouTube and Facebook videos that I simply label “restorationists.”
I enjoy one particular channel called QUEST. It features Steve Fletcher and his British crew, who take on restoration projects for people who have emotional attachments to certain old but deteriorated objects.
The other evening I watched the crew restore an early-20th-century push lawnmower—unlike anything I've ever seen. And I grew up with push mowers.
To restore this antique mower, they removed every nut, screw, bolt, blade, and gear and carefully cleaned or remanufactured each part.
At the end, you're looking at this beautiful piece of restored machinery and you're wondering how come you're getting teary-eyed over such a mundane thing as an old lawn mower. But it meant a lot to a family in which a departed grandfather had used the machine. This is rapha.
I watched the team restore a damaged painting. And at the end of the cleanup process, they dramatically unveiled it to the owner, who blurted out, “Wow, not only is the scratch gone, but the colors are now more vibrant than ever before.” This is rapha.
I remember my first car, a 1964 Rambler American. My father found it somewhere for a couple of hundred bucks. I paid for it with money from delivering newspapers. It was pretty ugly—as Ramblers tended to be. And the paint was in terrible shape.
However, we took it to my grandfather, who worked as an auto painter. You can imagine the attention he gave to that cheap old car, stripping it down, knocking out dings, and then painting it with better paint than the original.
Then my seamstress mother made corduroy seat covers. In the end, it was as beautiful as a Rambler could ever be. That's rapha. Healed, made whole.
In Exodus 15, a lake of bitter and dangerous water is restored to be drinkable, and considering the restorationist, you can be sure it was sweet and thirst-quenching. This is how God operates. He is our restoration agent—our doctor—healing what is impossibly run down into something better than ever. Rapha.
Of course, restoration can be quite a process, as I've learned watching the YouTube videos. And sometimes it takes a lot of radical elimination to restore a car. Occasionally, they actually cut the frame apart to repair the body. It seems extreme — but the restored result is way better than the original. Rapha.
In Exodus 15 God is claiming to the traumatized Israelites who had just escaped from slavery in Egypt, pursued by Pharaoh’s army crossing the Red Sea, only to find themselves out in the extreme desert without any drinkable water — God is claiming to be their restorationist, the doctor who will take care of them—as evidenced in the way he transformed the undrinkable water at Marah into Perrier.
This is an incredibly helpful self-revelation. “I am God the healer. Jehovah rapha.”
And all of the Gospel accounts of healing and those in Acts and all the talk about healing in the New Testament letters are based on this foundational self-revelation from Exodus 15:26.
So when Jesus is healing people in the gospels, he’s not just showing off his power to get people's attention, so he can go on and preach to them. Rather, he is pointing to himself as God the rapha-healer. This is why the religious authorities were troubled by all the healing going on everywhere Jesus went.
It wasn't so much because they believed that sick people were no longer getting what they deserved, although there was perhaps some of that kind of thinking. Mostly, though, they were pushing back against Jesus because he carried himself as the rapha, clearly echoing Exodus 15:26.
So, how is this helpful to us—broken people living in a broken world—where disease drags us down and power mongers walk all over the least powerful because they believe it somehow adds to their power?
Perhaps you're feeling a bit broken. Physically? Emotionally? Even spiritually? Maybe all the brokenness in our world is wearing you down, and things feel beyond repair. You championed a certain set of values all your life, only to have them yanked away from you in your old age when you don't have the energy to fight. You feel sick — not just with arthritis and diabetes and heart disease—but your soul feels sick.
What does the Bible say that could help us get back on track?
I want to make four observations rooted in our Exodus 15:22-26 passage and God's self-declaration that it contains. Let's start with #1 (you can fill in blanks on the sermon guide, which is page 3 of the bulletin.
#1. God is by name the healer
The Israelites were out in the wilderness without water and they started to panic. It was in that traumatic moment that God revealed his secret identity—Jehovah Rapha.
If you're feeling overwhelmed by the brokenness—whatever it is, remember that God has revealed his identity to people like you. Latch on to his name. Ponder it. Meditate on it. God the Rapha—the healer.
#2 Sometimes God uses infirmity or dysfunction to get our attention.
I'm not suggesting that this is normally what's going on when we get sick. Several times in the gospels, people are trying to figure out whose sins are the source of someone's infirmity. Jesus ends up telling the snopes that they're reading the situation wrong.
This infirmity, says Jesus, is just an opportunity to glorify God as healing occurs.
That being said, in our Exodus passage, God tells his people that he is going to test them—to give them the opportunity to come clean and develop strong faith. As the passage describes the whole episode—
That’s the place where God set up rules and procedures; that’s where he started testing them.God said, “If you listen, listen obediently to how God tells you to live in his presence, obeying his commandments and keeping all his laws, then I won’t strike you with all the diseases that I inflicted on the Egyptians; I am GOD your healer.”
IOW, when we're stuck with dysfunction in any form, it is always an opportunity to consider if God might be trying to get our attention about something. And it's always appropriate to turn to him for a complete make-over.
In 2 Chronicles 7, God is speaking to King Solomon, and God promises to rapha the land if his people will turn to him.
God says:
“If I ever shut off the supply of rain from the skies or order the locusts to eat the crops or send a plague on my people, and my people, my God-defined people, respond by humbling themselves, praying, seeking my presence, and turning their backs on their wicked lives, I’ll be there ready for you: I’ll listen from heaven, forgive their sins, and restore RAPHA their land to health.”
At least consider if God is trying to get your attention.
#3 All wonders and healing events in the Bible are signs pointing to God as rapha.
Arlene did a good job two weeks ago of emphasizing that ultimately, all this healing stuff in the Bible is about directing honor to God.
God's love for us does not fluctuate with our faith, commitment, devotion, or behavior. God’s love is constant. If someone is healed or not healed in a particular moment, it is not a litmus test of God's love for that person or even their level of faith. God may choose to not heal someone in a given moment because, in his love, he knows that waiting is best.
Sometimes a surgeon will refuse to do a necessary surgery until you are infection-free because she knows that you'll heal better under those conditions.
Of course, you just want to get the new hip in place and the pain to be gone. But delaying until that UTI is under control will, in the long-term, lead to more complete healing—maybe even more quickly.
So don't read God's postponement as a lack of concern. He sees the bigger picture.
Rather, when we do see healing, it's there to point us to God's great restorative nature. It's a sign in that moment, pointing us to God's even grander, glorious plan.
Moments of healing, whether in the Bible or our lives, need to be understood as trailers for the coming future event when God's restorative nature and plan are universally evident. The healing we experience now is merely a signpost pointing to something more complete that is coming.
If you think about it, all those healing events in the Bible are temporary. How many of those people raised from the dead by Jesus are still with us? When was the last time you had coffee with Lazarus?
Don't be silly, despite Jesus raising him from the dead in John 11, Lazarus is once again dead and gone from this world.
Yes, the healings were real, but what they experienced and what we experience are simply trailers or signposts pointing to the future when God totally restores creation—Jesus’ new heaven, new earth, new temple, new lives, new creation.
Yes, the healing we experience now is truly an expression of God's love and compassion. But understood in context, it is to whet the appetite for the whole and complete rapha to come.
Some of you know that I was hospitalized for a stroke on May 15, 2019. (You probably don't remember the date, but I do. Some of you here now were in the room when it became clear that things were not right with me during that Wednesday morning Bible study.)
Well, I thank God for the healing I have received. Even though my body isn't yet totally restored. I'm a lot better than I was. But the thermostat that regulates portions of the left side of my body doesn't quite function right, so the left side is cold and the right side is normal. It's a bit comical… a tug of war. I sometimes feel like I'm in a cartoon with competitors from each side of my body trying to take control—each sending conflicting messages about how much clothing I should wear.
The aftermath of that stroke reminds me daily of how my life was spared and mostly restored. And yet it keeps me thinking of the total restoration to come—when I can go back to wearing short sleeves.
Another thing about the stroke is that when the neurologist was looking at the MRI and CAT scan images of my brain, a few days after I got out of the hospital, she asked me to tell her about my first stroke. My jaw dropped. What?
Apparently, she saw a hidden sign of scar tissue and healing tucked quietly in my brain. The stroke I had in 2019 was really my second stroke, she said. The scarring from the first stroke, of which I had been totally unaware, points to the healing of a problem I hadn't noticed.
We don't currently know about all the healing that God the Rapha has been performing. But we know that he gets a lot done behind the scenes.
#4 Expect God's healing to show up in surprising ways.
None of the healing episodes in the Bible follows a set formula or pattern.
- Sometimes people seek out Jesus for healing.
- Sometimes he seeks them out.
- Sometimes they reach out to Jesus with faith.
- Sometimes faith follows the healing.
- Sometimes it involves someone touching Jesus.
- Sometimes it involves Jesus touching someone.
- Sometimes he heals remotely. “Go on home, your daughter is well…”
- Sometimes he's very hands-on, making mud from his saliva and applying it over blind eyes.
- Sometimes he simply says, “Be healed.”
- Sometimes the healing is instantaneous.
- Sometimes it takes a second application of spit, such as in Mark 8.
- In the Exodus passage, the polluted lake is healed when God has Moses throw a stick into it… a stick? Go figure.
Relax and go along for the ride knowing that God is Rapha — the healer, the restorer.
I know that this can be a bit of a challenge in a world where wars and new rumors of wars slap you in the face with each news cycle. The world is pretty broken. And there are no political solutions to the spiritual epidemic plaguing the world. People are hungry and displaced because the power-hungry don't care about them.
And while we stand in solidarity with the abused and broken, what is even more significant is that God the Rapha is standing in solidarity with the desperate.
Healing and restoration are a part of God's DNA, something revealed to the traumatized Israelites in Exodus 15. And ultimately revealed in the healing established by Jesus through his presence, sacrificial death, and resurrection. And when we trust him, his healing flows into and through our lives. We become his paramedics in a sick world.
So, in summary, I'd challenge you to look for healing, BUT expect to be surprised by the miraculous signposts pointing to the restoration and healing that is a part of God’s DNA. That's my summary statement. Expect to be surprised by the miraculous signposts pointing to the restoration and healing that is a part of God’s DNA.
And that, believe it or not, is the good news.
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