So Abraham prayed to God; and God healed Abimelech, his wife, and his female servants. Then they bore children; for the Lord had closed up all the wombs of the house of Abimelech because of Sarah, Abraham’s wife. (Gen 20,17-18)
In particular, we find six kinds of healing in Scripture:
1. healing by power accompanying the preaching of the word (as a sign from above)
2. healing by the faith of the sick person (e.g. the case of the woman with the hemorrhage)
3. healing through the gift of healing (1 Cor. 12)
4. healing as a prophetic sign (e.g., the healing of Naaman)
5. healing through intercession (see petitions for fellow workers in the epistles)
6. healing through confession of sin and forgiveness (and note, this is not speaking of new believers, but of confession of sin and its forgiveness among long-time believers (see Jam 5:15)
It is interesting that today in the Church (i.e., by people who have been believers for a long time) the issue of supernatural healing is viewed primarily at two extremes. The first more or less denies it. According to him, the power of God does not operate today as in the beginning, when it was necessary for it to confirm the preached word. But after the period of the first apostles, it is said, it was no longer needed to that extent, and so supernatural manifestations ceased. After all, today we have doctors and God uses them to heal.
The problem is that none of these inferences are explicitly in the Bible. Even Jesus, in his last discourse in J14, apparently did not count on the manifestations of his Spirit gradually subsiding, quite the opposite. (And doctors were around then too, by the way, though obviously not on the level of today's medicine).
The other extreme is the claim that if we believe properly, we are all healthy, right HERE and NOW. Of course, anyone who has tried practicing this for a few years (and isn't in their twenties anymore, so naturally there already are some issues in their body) could develop their own opinion about the reality of this approach.
Somewhere between these two extremes is the "intercessory" approach. Its proponents pray for healing, often in secret, but they also have no problem praying openly with the person. They believe that it is in God's power to heal, but they do not claim it by force, rather they wait to see if there will be intervention from above, that is, if and what will happen. (Admittedly, the results today are not somehow dazzling, but it still happens occasionally - I wish there were more of it).
The first two extremes don't actually count on God acting specifically and personally with a given case. According to them, it works either never or always. It is not God directly at work, but his principle - which works according to the theology being held: in no or every case.
It is therefore remarkable to realize that Abraham's prayer for the women of Abimelech's house, this first prayer for healing in Scripture (!), was not a prayer of faith but a prayer of restoration. It falls into the last category of the six named. It teaches us that perhaps more often than we admit, physical healing requires breaking down the barriers that stand between God and the person. To remove the block, the disfavour, and often to confess and forgive the guilt. And then to allow the flow of God's life to renew that person again, from spirit to body.
God dealt with Abimelech in a very specific and personal way, not as an impersonal principle, but with a clearly manifested will and through a specific revelation given to his servant Abraham.
