“I Will Heal Your Faithlessness” Jeremiah 3:22
“Return, O faithless sons; I will heal your faithlessness.” (Jeremiah 3:22)
God’s call here to His people is not a mere request, as though heaven were awaiting human permission. It is a sovereign summons inseparably joined to a sovereign cure.
When the Lord said to Israel, “Return, O faithless sons; I will heal your faithlessness,” He was not extending an invitation to self-reform. He was declaring what He Himself would accomplish. The decree contained both command and cure, the return and the restoration bound together in the same divine act.
Faithlessness is not a mere physical wound that can be treated. It is the total incapacity of the human heart to trust God at all. And if God promises to heal that very condition, then He must, by the act itself, restore the very faith that was absent.
- A healed eye sees; a healed limb walks; likewise, a healed heart believes.
When the Lord heals or “cures” (per some versions) faithlessness, He recreates the capacity to trust, and the evidence of that healing is faith itself.[1]
God is not saying He will merely “mend”. While the word may indeed have that meaning in certain contexts, it is clear from this context and God’s usage of it, that He means to cure and that is reflected in the way some versions translate the word as cure (see NIV, CEV).
Synergism’s dilemma
This is why the promise in Jeremiah 3:22 stands in open contradiction to every synergistic model of salvation. Synergism asserts that God’s grace merely assist /enables, but does not determine, the response. Yet the text does not say, “Return, and I will help you if you first choose to turn. Or if you continually consent.” It says, “Return… I will heal.” The command and the cure proceed together. The very thing that is the root of their disobedience – the absence of faith, is the very thing God pledges to heal.
Even if, for argument’s sake, one said that God heals only when asked, the question immediately arises:
How does one ask for healing from faithlessness without already possessing the faith to even so ask?
- The condition of faithlessness itself renders the request impossible.
- It is akin to asking a blind man to consent to seeing a rainbow – impossible!
The patient cannot perform surgery on himself. To say otherwise is to make the cure depend upon the very capacity it seeks to restore: This is a contradiction in both theology and logic.
Prevenient Grace: Is not an answer
Some will reply that prevenient grace (grace “coming before” faith), heals faithlessness universally, restoring a neutral freedom by which each may choose to believe. Yet if prevenient grace truly heals, then the disease of faithless which necessitates God’s healing is thereby universally gone; faith should necessarily follow -per the doctrine. So why then are there any unbelievers in the world – let alone the majority of this race? The doctrine of prevenient grace teaches that by a supernatural action God removed the “determinative” power of sin for every human being – the power of sin that made each response certain hence determined by that power.
Note: Synergists will routinely argue and protest the idea that God cannot save a person apart from their “consent,” He can’t regenerate a person apart from their “consent”, without such an action “violating” the person (per Roger Olson et al). However, they give God a pass here because He is able – so they say – to supernaturally, unilaterally remove the determinative element of sin without anyone’s consent. They will allow the sovereign God to do that – but nothing more. Alright, but if the determinative effect of sin has been removed as per the doctrine, again I ask, why are there any unbelievers in the world?
Is unbelief a sin? Yes. For the New Testament teaches that “whatever is not of faith is sin” (Rom 14:3), And again “without faith it is impossible to please God” (Heb 11:6), Jesus said that when the Holy Spirit comes he will convict the world of sin and then he added of sin because they believed not on me” (John 16:9); John in his first epistle says that believing in the person of Jesus Christ is the command of God (1 John 3:23). This clearly all demonstrates beyond refutation that God considers unbelief sinful. So, I’ll ask it a third time, why are there still unbelievers still in the world even after God has supposedly done this? Most of humanity remain “unhealed” – meaning they live and remain in unbelief regarding the person and work of Jesus Christ. This so-called prevenient grace then, did neither “heal” at all, nor certainly not everyone! It merely offered an opportunity for healing.
In other words, even the people that advocate for the doctrine of prevenient grace inherently contradict themselves and are inconsistent with their own doctrine – for none of them can answer this question – not credibly or cohesively. For to answer it they must redact or restate something within their own doctrine. Scripture never calls healing an opportunity. One is either healed or they are not. There is no such status as “healing…pending” in scripture. Even if there are steps or instructions that precede the healing itself like the leper Jesus told to “go wash…” The biblical language allows no middle ground. When God says, “I will heal,” He is not announcing a potential; He is declaring He will actually heal.
A Categorical Difference:
The difference between effectual grace and synergistic grace is therefore not cosmetic but categorical. One saves; the other only suggests. One cures; the other merely consults. One rescues; the other stands on the sidelines of drowning humanity asking “Do you want my help”
To reduce divine healing to mere conditional assistance is to make God’s promise of no effect. He said He will – not can, heal – not help. It is to say, in effect, that God prescribes the medicine but cannot ensure its effect.
- Who would trust a ‘physician’ who did likewise? Is the prescription the actual cure or not?
Scripture consistently presents His word as doing what it declares: “He sent His word and healed them” (Ps 107:20). The command is its own enablement. Further, He said
“So will My word be which goes forth from My mouth; It will not return to Me empty, without accomplishing what I desire, and without succeeding in the matter for which I sent it.” (Isa. 55:11).
In categorical language, God here said when His word – His decree, summons, promise, goes forth from Him, it will accomplish His intent. It will not return to Him “empty”. This is why synergism fails the test of internal coherence and logical consistency.
How is “healing” evidenced?
Analogy is helpful here. If God heals a blind eye, sight returns. The one healed may indeed “choose to close their eyes” again, but the eye remains healed regardless. The act of closing them does not negate the restoration of sight itself.
- How much more with faith!
Only in the context of faith, once restored, it is now permanent. It must be, otherwise the all-knowing God would be in an endless loop where He restores faith by healing faithlessness, the person/s so healed lapse into faithlessness again, requiring another summons and act of healing ad infinitum and absurdum.
Faithlessness is a metaphysical state, not a physical impairment
Faithlessness is not a material, physical impairment like a lame leg, a blind eye, a diseased liver etc. It is a moral and spiritual condition. When God heals it, He grants a new heart (Jer. 24:7; Eze. 36:24-26; Ps. 51:10; 86:11). This “new heart” believes, repents, and endures. That healing is not momentary; it is preservative. The same grace that initiates faith sustains it.
“He who calls you is faithful; He will surely do it” (1 Thess 5:24).
This is precisely the pattern we see in Christ’s intercession for Peter: “I have prayed for you, that your faith may not fail” (Luke 22:32). The Savior did not merely request that Peter try to stand; His intercession secured that he would be restored – that his faith would not permanently “fail.” The evidence of efficacy was seen in that Peter’s moment of faithlessness was totally “healed” and he did “return” as the Lord also foreknew and foretold, and he did live and ultimately die as a martyr full of faith!
- The prayer of Christ was the decree in action. His word did not return to Him “empty” – it accomplished what He sent it to do.
The Incoherence of Undefined Grace
When the synergist is pressed to define what grace actually is and does, they often retreat into vague abstraction; speaking of influence, opportunity, or enabling, yet without certainty as to where grace actually begins or ends; what it actually does. It becomes an undefined continuum: like asking, “Where exactly does the east cease to be east and become west?” The boundary is never found, because the concept itself is indefinite.
Such vagueness empties grace of its glory. If one cannot say what grace accomplishes, one cannot thank God rightly for it. As Luther argued, we cannot give true thanks for what we do not understand. Gratitude without comprehension reduces worship to sentiment. But when one knows that God has not merely offered healing but has actually cured the soul, then thanksgiving rises from the depths of understanding!
Conclusion
The omniscient God knows of no other cure for faithlessness than His own effectual act of healing. For this is His prescription and His word never returns to Him empty, futile or unfulfilled. The synergist, denies this, defies the absolute principle of Isaiah 55:11 and says, “Not so!”
- The call to return is itself empowered by the healing it promises.
To deny that cure its efficacy is to make grace an uncertain offer rather than a saving act.
Here, then, stands the gospel’s great paradox resolved: the same God who commands faith creates it; the same Word that calls the sinner home carries the power to bring him there.
“Return, O faithless sons; I will heal your faithlessness.”
[1] The Hebrew word רָפָא rendered “heal” means, “properly, to mend (by stitching), i.e. (figuratively) to cure — cure, (cause to) heal, physician, repair, X thoroughly, make whole. “