No Hospitals in Heaven
When Jesus came into Peter’s house, he saw Peter’s mother-in-law lying in bed with a fever. He touched her hand and the fever left her, and she got up and began to wait on him.
When evening came, many who were demon-possessed were brought to him, and he drove out the spirits with a word and healed all the sick. This was to fulfill what was spoken through the prophet Isaiah:
“He took up our infirmities
and bore our diseases.”Matthew 8:14-17
There are 118 hospitals in the DFW Metroplex serving 6.5 million people.
There are 0 hospitals in heaven serving the countless souls who now rest with God.
That may seem obvious, but it’s a point worth emphasizing. Most of us spent our first days in a hospital. Many families have made visits to the ER for a broken arm or stitches. Some have been in the hospital so often they know every nurse by name. As you get older, you tend to visit the hospital more often, for surgeries, for illnesses. And many leave this world in the same place they entered it, a hospital.
But there are no hospitals in heaven. We won’t need them anymore. That’s because Jesus has come to take away the root cause of all our diseases.
We see Jesus healing people, casting out demons, giving sight to the blind and hearing to the deaf. The evangelist Matthew tells us that this fulfilled Isaiah’s prophecy: “He took up our infirmities and bore our diseases.”
Maybe you heard those words as recently as last Friday. They come from a longer well-known section of Isaiah in chapter 53:
Surely he took up our pain
and bore our suffering,
yet we considered him punished by God,
stricken by him, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him,
and by his wounds we are healed.
We all, like sheep, have gone astray,
each of us has turned to our own way;
and the Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.Isaiah 53:4-6
Isaiah 53 points to Jesus’ suffering as payment for our sin. The apostle Peter makes that clear in the second chapter of his first letter. But the Holy Spirit also inspired the apostle Matthew to connect his suffering and death to our infirmities and diseases. In his wounds, God promises us eternal healing when we get to heaven. By his death, he has defeated physical death for us and all its symptoms. Because in heaven there will be no more death, there will also be no more hospitals.