Why Jesus Would Have Healed Ramah in "The Chosen."

(reposted from my Facebook page)

In the series “The Chosen,” there have been several episodes where Jesus chose to not heal someone. The latest example is Ramah, who is killed and dies while Jesus watches, because it is “not her time” to be resurrected. The reasoning behind this fictional side plot is that Jesus doesn’t always answer prayer the way we want, not everyone receives healing, and sometimes God allows bad things to happen for His purposes.

While there is truth in those statements that applies to our life today, there is a huge problem with adding those scenarios during the time of Jesus.

When Jesus walked physically on this earth, He healed people, not just because He had compassion on them, which He did and still does, but because He was fulfilling prophecy and declaring Himself to be the Messiah. Right at the beginning of His ministry He read Isaiah 61 from the scroll in the synagogue and declared the year of the Lord’s favor had been fulfilled in His arrival. Jesus displayed His power with signs and wonders, calming the wind and waves, turning water into wine, feeding the five thousand, healing the sick, the lame, and the blind, casting out demons, and raising the dead. He fulfilled scripture of what Messiah would do and demonstrated that He had authority over all things—the physical world as well as the spiritual. All who came to Him in faith or who were brought to Him by others were healed. No one was turned away, not even outsiders such as the Canaanite woman.

When the Pharisees asked why His disciples did not fast, Jesus said that no one fasts when the Bridegroom is present, but that soon the Bridegroom would be taken away and then they would fast and mourn. Today, we do live in a time when Jesus doesn’t always heal, but we live in expectation that when He returns, He will make all things new.

Yes, there were people in Jesus’s time that died or were not healed, but they were never brought to Him for healing. Everyone in the Bible who came to Jesus for healing or who was brought by someone else received healing, without exception, because He was revealing Himself to be the Messiah. That is why I believe that If “The Chosen” had followed the Biblical pattern, He would not have denied Thomas’s request to heal Ramah. Be careful when watching TV shows. They may be based in the Bible, but they are not Scripture. Keep reading your Bibles and never rely on fiction to understand doctrine.