Question: On what basis can we expect a healing? How much does it cost?
Answer: Jesus paid for it already! His grace is free to us.
It is important for us to realize that God does not just give a whimsical promise for our healing, without cost. It cost Him terribly. Jesus paid dearly for it, with horrible, excruciating pain, and with His own divine, precious blood. And what He paid so greatly for, He wants us to understand and benefit from. He did it just for us. For you! Let His sacrifice not be in vain. Ignoring, denying, or taking lightly His great sacrifice for us is an offense to Him.
Hundreds of years before Christ, the prophet Isaiah wrote about this Messiah to come: "with his stripes we are healed" (53:5, KJV). It is the stripes, or scourging, Jesus experienced that we need to better understand. If you review the events of that awful day we call Good Friday, you remember that Jesus Christ was tried before Pontius Pilate, then surrendered to the Roman soldiers to be scourged. The word "stripes" doesn't have much impact until one realizes what it really means. In scourging Jesus Christ, the Son of God, they took Him and tied Him to a pillar, or post. Then they stripped the clothes from His back. He was handed over to a Roman legionnaire, a man used to brutality and violence, a course man of brute strength. He was a Roman soldier.
They gave this soldier a cat-o'-nine-tails, a whip that had nine thongs with little metal, bone, or stone pellets at the end of each of the thongs. The scourging was what the Jews called "the near death": 40 lashes less one - 39 stripes. This ordeal alone actually caused death in many victims.
STRIPE! The lash whistled through the air into the back of Jesus. Little bits of flesh tore loose and red welts developed. STRIPE! STRIPE! STRIPE! Again and again, the lash. More skin torn off. The flesh was opened up. Bone began to show. The Savior's blood was pouring down His back out of those cuts. They called them stripes. They looked like paint stripes but it was not paint - it was the blood of Jesus, pouring from those 39 deep, oozing slashes in His body.
This is vitally important - Jesus did not have to endure this horrible scourging for our salvation! He was still going to the cross for that. Yet, each of those momentous events on that Passover day was for a specific, divine purpose. Why the stripes? Jesus came to deliver us from the curse and to make us whole in spirit, soul, and body. He paid the total price. The stripes were for our physical healing! "With his stripes we are healed" (Isaiah 53:5, KJV). We are healed for eternity, but it is also available now until the day the Lord takes us home.