I Am Jehovah-rapha

by Ulia Ahn

The first time God is referred to as a healer in the Bible, is in Exodus 15 when God assures the Israelites,“If you will diligently listen to the voice of the Lord your God, and do that which is right in his eyes, and give ear to his commandments and keep all his statutes, I will put none of the diseases on you that I put on the Egyptians, for I am the Lord, your healer.”1

In Hebrew, Jehovah-rapha translates to English as the “the Lord who heals”2 or “healer.” However, there are alternate translations where rapha means “to restore” or “to mend,” altering this title to “the Lord who fixes broken things.”3

I sometimes characterize myself as a “broken thing,” making mistakes each day such as being impatient with my roommate or forgetting about a meeting with a professor. But last semester, my body was physically broken as I sustained two significant injuries.

During this time of healing and reconciling my emotions, at my 2022 winter retreat center, I reflected on the previous semester while I sat on the lake’s shore and watched the sunset on a below-30-degree-day. Like this lake, I had allowed my heart to be iced over as a form of protection and survival during a non-stop semester. I had become very bitter about my circumstances and grew to neglect my spiritual and emotional health too.

I did not realize that my bitterness made me more cynical and apathetic. My normally cheerful disposition, like the flowing water trapped under the ice, could not escape the icy and distant facade I was displaying to myself and others. I did not believe that physical or emotional healing would come quickly enough and frustration slowly manifested over time like this icy surface.

Yet slowly, God’s grace–piercing like the sun even in even the coldest environments – broke down those bonds of bitterness in my heart to the softer layer of water underneath. Sure, the sun was setting, and the night was gradually getting colder, but I heard the efforts and progress of the lake; it was cracking under the pressure of the consistent warmth from the sun’s rays. Some of the cracks were small, but others were so large that I could hear their reverberations in the silence in this solitary moment.

If it were up to me, healing or fixing would be instantaneous. The lake could be melted in one day or my physical injuries fixed by the end of the week. In this moment of serenity and a little clarity, I realized that just as the sun rises and sets everyday with the same intensity of light to soften the lake’s frozen surface, so too does God heal and repair our bodies and hearts to even greater magnitudes that surpass human understanding.

The lake didn’t have to do anything except receive the culmination of the sun’s rays even in below freezing weather just as all I had to do was learn and accept that He was repairing my brokenness, outwardly and internally, during a crazy semester.

In Exodus 15:26, God assured the Israelites that if they put their trust in His statutes and commandments, He would protect them from any disease or plague.4 I too learned to trust in Him through my personal journey, remembering the same God who was able to heal and protect the Israelites in Egypt was healing me in 2022 into 2023. When the world has broken us down, we have to trust that healing is the process of being reminded that the Mender, Restorer, Healer is working and fixing us when we can’t do it ourselves.