“Who Healeth All Thy Diseases”: Jesus, the Psalms, and the God Who Leaves Nothing Out

By Hayley Louisa Mark

I read Psalm 103 out loud the first time in a kitchen at six in the morning, before anyone else was awake, with my hands still cold from the tap and a person I loved upstairs sleeping off a long week of being unwell. I was not looking for poetry. I was looking for something I could believe — a sentence I could stand on that would not crack the moment the day got hard. And I got as far as who healeth all thy diseases and I stopped, because a small, stubborn voice in me said the thing it always says: yes, but that is just David being lyrical. That is just the kind of beautiful, sweeping thing a psalm says. It does not mean it the way you need it to mean it. It is a song, not a promise with my body in it. And I almost put the Bible down. What changed everything for me was not arguing with that voice. It was turning a few hundred pages forward, to a road in Galilee, and finding the very same word — all — but this time not in a song. This time happening. “Healing all manner of sickness and all manner of disease among the people.” The psalm had sung it; the Gospels showed it walking around on two feet. And I realised the thing I had been reaching for was not two separate verses I had to choose between. It was one thread. The promise and the Person. The song, and the man who got up and made it true.

That is what this page is for. Not “does God heal in general,” and not “look how many people Jesus healed” — there are sibling rooms for both of those, linked below. This is the narrower, sturdier thing: the thread itself — the place where the psalm’s who healeth all thy diseases and the Gospel’s healing all manner of disease turn out to be the same sentence said twice, once as a promise and once as a fact. Because if the all in the psalm were only lyrical, you would have to wonder whether your particular illness slipped through a gap in the poetry. But the psalm does not stand alone. It has a Person standing behind it, in flesh, on a real road, leaving — by the plain testimony of four witnesses — nothing out.

The short answer. The Bible’s clearest jesus heals all diseases verse is really two verses braided into one thread: the psalmist blesses the LORD “who healeth all thy diseases” (Psalm 103:3), and the Gospels show Jesus enacting that very word: “healing all manner of sickness and all manner of disease among the people” (Matthew 4:23; Matthew 9:35). The song and the Saviour are one thread — the promise sung in the psalm is the same reach walked out in Christ, who “is the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever” (Hebrews 13:8). Held honestly, the word all tells you no disease falls outside His ability to heal; it is not a guarantee He removes every disease from every body in this life, and it never makes your faith the lever. Trust the Person the psalm sang about — and keep your doctors; faith and medicine are not rivals.

Please read this before the verses. I am a writer who loves Scripture, not a clinician, and this is a reflection, not medical advice. Nothing here diagnoses, treats, or cures any condition, and no verse on this page is a medicine or a formula. If you are unwell — or someone you love is — keep every appointment, take what you are prescribed, ask the hard questions, get the second opinion. And here is the honesty this particular page owes you, right at the top, because the word all is the most easily twisted word in the healing vocabulary. When the psalm and the Gospel both say all, they are telling you something true and enormous about who Jesus is — that there is no disease outside His reach, no illness His ministry stepped around, no diagnosis the word all forgot to mention. That is a statement about His power and character. It is not a contract that He will lift every disease from every faithful body before the grave. The same Bible that records Him healing “all manner of disease” also records, without blinking, faithful people who were not healed in this life — Paul’s thorn, Trophimus left sick at Miletus. So I will hold both for you. Jesus heals; the thread is real and meant to build your trust. And He does not always heal the body on this side of heaven, and His nearness inside an unhealed thing is not a smaller answer or a runner-up prize. Read these verses as a portrait of the Healer — never as a lever you can pull to oblige Him. There is no shame on this page for the still-sick.

Follow the thread

These twenty verses are not sorted by your diagnosis or by who Jesus healed (the sibling rooms do that). They are sorted by the thread itself — the way the psalm’s promise and the Gospel’s fact weave into a single argument that no disease is left out. Follow it in order, or jump to where you are tonight:

A word on the wording: every verse is quoted exactly from the King James Version — the old healeth, all manner, whole left intact — because the thread is easier to see in one consistent old cadence, and because the unhurried rhythm steadies a breath that worry has knocked high and shallow. Where an ellipsis appears, it trims for length only and never bends the sense.

The promise, sung whole: Psalm 103 in full

We always quote who healeth all thy diseases on its own, like a slogan torn off a banner. But the line lives inside a sentence, and the sentence changes how the line lands. So before anything else, here is the psalm given its own breath — because half of trusting the promise is seeing the company it keeps.

1. Psalm 103:1–2

“Bless the LORD, O my soul: and all that is within me, bless his holy name. Bless the LORD, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits:”

Notice the psalm does not begin with the healing. It begins by turning the whole inside of a person toward God — all that is within me — and by naming the danger it is about to fight: forget not. This is a psalm written against forgetting. David is talking to his own soul the way you talk to yourself at 6am, reminding it of things it keeps mislaying under fear. The healing line that is coming is not a boast. It is a thing David is making himself remember. Body practice: lay one hand flat on your sternum — all that is within me — and before you read the famous line, say only the first instruction of the psalm out loud: forget not. Let it be a steadying, not yet a claim.

2. Psalm 103:3

“Who forgiveth all thine iniquities; who healeth all thy diseases;”

Here it is — but read it welded to the clause in front of it, the way it was written, because the welding is the whole point. Forgiveth all… healeth all. The same total word, all, governs both the soul and the body in one breath. The psalm does not treat your sin as fully covered and your sickness as a maybe; it sets them in the same grammar, under the same all. Whatever you believe about forgiveness — that He forgives all, fully, no exceptions — the psalm is asking you to lend that same confidence to the second clause. The all that holds your forgiveness is the all that holds your diseases. Body practice: say the two clauses as one slow sentence, hand still on your chest — who forgiveth all… who healeth all — and notice which clause you believe more easily. Then let the easy belief lean over and steady the hard one.

3. Psalm 103:4–5

“Who redeemeth thy life from destruction; who crowneth thee with lovingkindness and tender mercies; Who satisfieth thy mouth with good things; so that thy youth is renewed like the eagle’s.”

The psalm does not stop at healing; it keeps stacking — redeemeth, crowneth, satisfieth, renewed. The healing of the body is named as one benefit inside a whole avalanche of them. This matters for the night when the one benefit you are desperate for has not come yet: the psalm sets it in a list of mercies, several of which you may be receiving even now without noticing — your life still here, some small good thing in your mouth, a kindness today you did not earn. The healing is in the list. It is not the only thing in the list. Body practice: name one benefit from this passage that is true of you today — that you are still here, that one good thing came, that some mercy arrived uncrowned — and bless God for the one you have before you ask again for the one you want.

The promise put on two feet: where Jesus heals all diseases

Now turn the pages forward. The reason the psalm’s all is not just lovely poetry is that, centuries later, someone walked into the world and did it — not as a metaphor, as a Tuesday. Watch the same word leave the song and start happening. This is the hinge of the whole page.

4. Matthew 4:23

“And Jesus went about all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing all manner of sickness and all manner of disease among the people.”

Lay this beside Psalm 103:3 and read them in the same breath: who healeth all thy diseases — healing all manner of sickness and all manner of disease. That is not a faint echo. That is the psalm’s promise translated out of the future tense of a song and into the past tense of a witnessed event. All manner means the whole taxonomy, every kind there is; the sibling page on diagnosis-breadth sits with that word for the frightening name on your chart, and I will not duplicate it here. What I want you to see is the seam — the exact place the song becomes a fact. The all you doubted was lyrical got up and walked across Galilee. Body practice: read the two verses one after the other out loud, psalm first, Gospel second — who healeth all thy diseases… healing all manner of disease — and let your voice land the second one as the heavier of the two, because it is the song proved true.

5. Matthew 9:35

“And Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every sickness and every disease among the people.”

Matthew says it twice — once at the start of the ministry, once further in — and the second time he swaps all manner for the even barer word every. This is the Gospel writer doing on purpose what the psalmist did: hammering the total word so no exception can wedge itself in. And notice it is bracketed by teaching and preaching on either side — the healing is woven right through the same cloth as the message, not a sideshow to it. Jesus did not heal to prove a point and move on; healing was the kingdom arriving in bodies. Body practice: say every sickness and every disease, and on the word every the second time, let your shoulders drop on a long exhale — the word is roomier than your fear, and the breath should be slower than the fear too.

6. Matthew 8:16–17

“…and he healed all that were sick: That it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Esaias the prophet, saying, Himself took our infirmities, and bare our sicknesses.”

Here Matthew makes the thread explicit — he tells you outright that the healings were a fulfilment, a promise from centuries earlier coming true on the spot. That it might be fulfilled. This is the Gospel writer himself doing what this whole page is doing: holding an old prophetic word beside the living Jesus and saying, see — the same thread. The line he quotes (from Isaiah 53) carries the whole atonement-healing weight, and there is a sibling room that sits with by his stripes in full. Here, only this: the healings were not Jesus improvising kindness. They were Scripture coming true in real time. Body practice: hold your open Bible (or your phone) in both hands for a moment and feel its weight — the promise and the keeping of it, both in one book — and say, what was sung, He came and did.

Why the same word twice is not a coincidence

A doubter could say the matching word is a fluke — that all is just a word both writers happened to reach for. But the thread runs through more than two passages. The prophets and psalmists kept naming God as the healer who acts, and the Gospels keep showing the action arriving. These verses are the ones that tie the knot.

7. Psalm 107:20

“He sent his word, and healed them, and delivered them from their destructions.”

He sent his word, and healed them. Sit on that, because the Gospel of John opens by telling you what — Who — the Word is: “the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.” The psalm says God’s healing came by His word being sent. The Gospel says the Word was sent in the flesh and went about healing. The thread is almost too neat to be accidental: the healing word of Psalm 107 has a face in the Gospels. When you pray for healing “through His word,” you are not invoking a magic phrase; you are leaning on the Person the word became. Body practice: pick the one verse-word you most need tonight and say it once, slowly, as a thing sent to you — not a sentence you are generating by effort, but a word arriving from outside you, into the room, on purpose.

8. Malachi 4:2

“But unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings; and ye shall go forth, and grow up as calves of the stall.”

The very last page of the Old Testament, the last promise before four hundred silent years, points forward to a coming One with healing in his wings. The church has always read the Sun of righteousness as Christ — the promise at the close of the old book pointing straight at the man who would open the new one. The thread does not just run from psalm to Gospel; it runs across the whole seam of the Bible, the last prophet pointing at the first chapter of the healer’s life. Healing in his wings — it was coming, named, before it arrived. Body practice: picture morning light coming up over something cold — the way warmth arrives slowly, then all at once — and let one slow in-breath be the light reaching you. The promise was arising long before you needed it; it is not improvised for your emergency.

9. Acts 10:38

“How God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with power: who went about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed of the devil; for God was with him.”

This is the apostles, after the resurrection, looking back and summing up Jesus’ whole working life in one line — and the word all is still there: healing all that were oppressed. The summary written in hindsight uses the same total word the psalm used in promise. Across centuries, across both Testaments, the word does not shrink. From David’s song to Peter’s sermon, the reach is reported as all. Body practice: say the phrase who went about doing good, and healing slowly, and let it be a portrait of His character rather than a claim on a timetable — this is simply what He is like; this is the shape of Him.

10. Hosea 6:1

“Come, and let us return unto the LORD: for he hath torn, and he will heal us; he hath smitten, and he will bind us up.”

The prophet does not pretend the tearing away. He hath torn… he hath smitten — Hosea names the hard reality honestly, and then sets the healing beside it, not instead of it. This is the thread refusing to be cheap. The God who heals is not a God who pretends nothing is broken; He is the One who binds up after and through the breaking. If your faith has been embarrassed by glib healing-talk, Hosea is your verse: it is grown-up enough to say torn and heal in the same breath. Body practice: name, plainly, the true hard thing — this is torn — and only then add the second clause, and He will bind it up. Say both. The honesty of the first clause is what makes the second one trustworthy.

The Person the psalm was singing about

Here is the heart of the page. The reason the all in Psalm 103 can be trusted now — by you, tonight, for your particular body — is not that the poetry is moving. It is that the poetry had a Person behind it all along, and the Person came, and has not left. These verses are why the thread holds.

11. Hebrews 13:8

“Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever.”

The doubt says that was then. This verse is the whole answer in nine words. The Jesus who walked Galilee healing all manner of disease is the same — not a memory, not a closed chapter. Yesterday (the road), to day (your kitchen, your ward), for ever. The thread does not stop at the end of the Gospels and leave you on the wrong side of it. The One the psalm sang about is present-tense. Body practice: say the three words slowly — yesterday, to day, for ever — and on to day, put your hand on the actual surface in front of you, the table or the bedrail, anchoring the word to the real room you are in right now.

12. Luke 4:40

“…all they that had any sick with divers diseases brought them unto him; and he laid his hands on every one of them, and healed them.”

Every one of them. The crowd’s all never became a blur in which one body was lost — He healed them one at a time, hands laid on every one. This is what the psalm’s all looks like up close: not a wholesale sweep that might miss the edges, but a Person attending to each individual face. Divers diseases — the varied, the assorted, the whole mixed crowd of troubles. The all of the psalm is not impersonal. It is every one, one by one. Body practice: rest a hand on your own shoulder, the weight of a single deliberate touch, and receive every one of them as me, by name, one at a time — not lost in a multitude.

13. Matthew 11:28

“Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”

The thread’s all turns, here, into an invitation — and it is the same total word. All ye that labour. If carrying a long illness is not labour, and a frightened heart not heavy laden, I do not know what is. Notice He does not say come and be cured; He says come… and I will give you rest — which is the more honest promise, and the one that holds whether or not the body is healed today. The Person the psalm sang about is, first, a Person who says come. Body practice: unclench your hands and turn the palms up in your lap — the posture of being given something rather than achieving it — and say only the first two words as your whole prayer: I come.

14. John 1:14

“And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory…) full of grace and truth.”

This is the verse that closes the thread from Psalm 107. He sent his word, and healed them, sang the psalm — and the Word was made flesh, says John. The healing word of the Old Testament is not an abstraction or a force; it became a Person with a face, who dwelt among us. When you pray Scripture over a body, you are not reciting a spell. You are speaking to the One the word became. And He is full of grace and truth — grace, so there is no shame in your asking; truth, so He will not flatter you with a promise He has not made. Body practice: say the Word was made flesh and let it mean, tonight, the One I am praying to is not far off in a book — He came close enough to be touched. Breathe out long on dwelt among us.

15. 1 Peter 2:24

“Who his own self bare our sins in his body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed.”

Peter takes the same Isaiah line Matthew quoted over the healings (verse 6 above) and carries it all the way to the cross — by whose stripes ye were healed. This is where the thread is tied off for good: the Person who healed all manner of disease on the road is the same Person who bare our sins in his body on the tree. The healing in the Gospels and the healing won at the cross are one work of one Saviour. The atonement-healing room sits with this verse in its full weight; here I want only the knot it ties — the healer and the crucified are the same self. Body practice: hold one open hand, palm up, and rest the other hand gently over it — the wounded hand and the held hand, the same image — and say, the One who heals is the One who was wounded for me. He knows the inside of pain.

When the “all” has not, in your body, meant a cure

This is the section a triumphalist page leaves out, and the one the word all most needs — so I will not skip it. Some of you have prayed who healeth all thy diseases over a name that did not lift. You followed the thread, and the all did not, in your flesh, become a cure. If all could only ever mean the physical removal of every disease, then this beautiful thread would turn into an accusation against you. It will not, because the Person at the end of the thread will not let it. Here is the all held honestly — wide enough to include the still-sick.

16. 2 Corinthians 12:8–9

“For this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me. And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness…”

Paul preached the healing Christ, raised the dead, and asked three times, in real and mighty faith, for his own thorn to depart. It stayed. And the answer was not you didn’t follow the thread hard enough — it was my grace is sufficient. If the all of Psalm 103 did not remove Paul’s thorn, then your unhealed body is not the proof of a thin faith or a broken thread. The word all speaks to His power and character, not to a guaranteed outcome, and never to your performance. Body practice: open both hands, palms up, and pray it honestly: Lord, I am still asking You to heal this — and if the answer is “my grace is sufficient,” let me find that it truly is. Hold the asking and the trusting in the same open hands.

17. Psalm 103:13–16

“Like as a father pitieth his children, so the LORD pitieth them that fear him. For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust… As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth.”

Return to the very psalm we began with — because the same psalm that sings who healeth all thy diseases also says, a few lines on, he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust, and that our days are as grass. David held both in one song: the sweeping all, and the honest dust. The psalm itself does not pretend the body is permanent. So when you set the all beside the dust, you are not contradicting the psalm; you are reading it whole, the way David wrote it. The God who heals also tenderly knows you are mortal — and pitieth you like a father, in the frailty, not only out of it. Body practice: let one hand rest open and one hand close gently — the all and the dust, held together — and breathe out on the word pitieth. You are not asked to choose between the promise and your mortality. The psalm holds both, and so may you.

18. Isaiah 43:2

“When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee… when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned; neither shall the flame kindle upon thee.”

Every preposition is through, never around. For the disease that the all has not yet lifted, this is the truer reach of the thread: not always exemption from the water, but a companioning along it — I will be with thee — and the promise that it shall not overflow thee. The all of God’s care is wide enough to cover the fire you are still standing in, even before it covers the cure you are still asking for. Body practice: name the water or fire you are presently in — not asking yet for it to be removed, only saying: You are with me, here, in this. In-breath: with me. Out-breath: in this.

19. Revelation 21:4

“And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.”

Here is where the word all finally keeps every inch of itself. The thread that began in a kitchen with a psalm does not end at a hospital door; it ends here, with no more death, neither… any more pain. For some of us, the complete answer to who healeth all thy diseases is kept — with perfect faithfulness — for the far side of this verse. That is not a downgrade of the promise. It is the promise reaching all the way to where it cannot fail. The same Jesus who healed all manner of disease on the road is the One who wipes all tears at the end. The all is the same word, kept twice. Body practice: lay a hand lightly over your closed eyes and breathe out slowly, picturing the gesture of the verse — a hand wiping the tears away. Every disease has an end. This is where the thread is tied off, and it does not fray.

20. Psalm 73:26

“My flesh and my heart faileth: but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever.”

The honest one to end on. It does not pretend the flesh cannot fail — it says plainly that it faileth. But it holds the but: a strength deeper than the flesh, a portion for ever no disease can reach. When you have followed the whole thread — psalm to Gospel to cross to the last chapter — this is its deepest reading: even if a disease takes the outer thing, the truest you is held in a place illness has no jurisdiction. That part of you is already, permanently, inside the all. Body practice: hand over your chest, say it slowly: My flesh may fail — but the strength of my heart, and my portion, is God, for ever. Let for ever be longer in your mouth than fail.

How to pray the psalm and the Person together

You do not have to feel certain to do this, and you do not have to choose between the song and the Saviour — the whole point of the thread is that they go together. This little practice is bodily and small: take the psalm’s promise in one hand and the living Person in the other, and pray them as the single thing they are. Here is the part with the breath and the hands in it.

  1. Begin where the psalm begins — forget not. Before you ask for anything, say the psalm’s own first instruction to your own soul: forget not all his benefits. Name one mercy you already have today. Praying out of remembering is steadier than praying out of panic.
  2. Exhale, long and slow, before you reach for the verse. Make the out-breath longer than the in-breath, and let your shoulders drop on the way down. Fear breathes high and shallow; lengthen it back down before a single word.
  3. Say the psalm’s promise out loud. Who healeth all thy diseases. Let it be a thing you read, arriving from outside you, not a feeling you have to generate from inside an empty tank.
  4. Then say the Gospel fact straight after it. Healing all manner of disease. In that order — promise first, fact second — so the proof is the word your mouth closes on. The song, then the Saviour who made it true.
  5. Pray to the Person, not at the illness. This is the whole difference between faith and a formula. You are not pulling a verbal lever on a disease to force it to obey; you are speaking to the One the Word became. “Lord Jesus, You are the One the psalm sang about. You healed all manner of disease, and You have not changed. I am asking You, plainly, to heal this.”
  6. Hold the outcome with open hands. Add the line that keeps it prayer and not superstition: “And if the answer is ‘my grace is sufficient,’ let me find that it truly is. I trust You with the outcome — healed in this life, or kept for the far side of Revelation.” Open your palms as you say it.
  7. Then keep your appointment. Praying the thread over a body and going to the doctor belong in the same pair of hands. Take the medicine, make the call, keep the date. Faith and the clinic are not rivals; very often His healing comes through the people treating you.

A note on the science

There is a measurable thing that happens in the body when you read a steadying passage slowly, and it is worth understanding precisely. When fear for a body takes hold — your own, or someone you love — the sympathetic nervous system, the “fight-or-flight” branch, switches on and tends to stay on: the breath shortens into the upper chest, the heart rate climbs, and the jaw and shoulders brace as though a threat were physically in the room. Reading a long, unhurried sentence aloud at a slow pace naturally lengthens and steadies the breath, and a slow, extended exhale — making the out-breath longer than the in-breath — gently stimulates the vagus nerve and shifts the body toward the parasympathetic, “rest-and-restore” branch; the heart rate settles on each exhale, and deliberately unclenching the hands and jaw feeds the same calming signal back the other way. This is, in part, why an old cadence read slowly can settle a frightened person. Now let me be exact about the limit of the claim, because precision is a form of honesty: this calms the nervous system. It does not treat, shrink, slow, or cure any disease, and nothing in this paragraph — no breath, no posture, no verse — should be read as acting on the illness itself. What the slow exhale does is quiet the internal alarm enough that you can be genuinely present — to the people treating you, to the next decision, to the verse you are praying — rather than drowned out by your own fear. The breath settles the body; what the prayer reaches is something the body cannot measure, and I will not pretend to measure it. See your doctor for anything medical.

—The body-science here reflects established neuroscience of the nervous system. What the science actually says about a settled body → · the research behind these pages

Take the whole thread with you

By the time the doubt comes back — and it tends to come back at 2am, when the all sounds most like mere poetry again — you will not have a Bible open to the right two pages. So I made you something small that keeps the thread in one place.

The Whole Thread is a free one-page printable. On one side, Psalm 103 with who healeth all thy diseases in its own full sentence; on the other, the Gospel lines where Jesus heals all manner of disease — the promise and the Person, laid side by side, so you can see with your own eyes that the all you doubted was lyrical got up and walked across Galilee. One sheet, no cost, made to be folded into a hospital bag, tucked inside a Bible at Psalm 103, or stuck where the 2am doubt finds you — so that on the night faith is too thin to generate, you can read the thread instead of having to feel it.

→ Get the free printable, The Whole Thread — no cost, yours to keep.

And if you want a place to walk this season one quiet page at a time — to write the verse that held you the morning the all still sounded like only a song, the small mercies you almost forgot, the questions you could not ask aloud, the dates and the prayers — our Stilling Waves devotional journal for seasons of healing was made for exactly the kitchen you are standing in. It asks boldly and surrenders gently. It will not rush you, and it will not shame you. It simply sits with you while you hold the promise and the Person in the same two hands.

→ See the Stilling Waves journal

Where to go from here

If following the thread steadied you a little, here are the nearest rooms in the house:

FAQ

What is the Bible verse where Jesus heals all diseases?
The clearest is Matthew 4:23 (echoed in Matthew 9:35): Jesus went about “healing all manner of sickness and all manner of disease among the people.” It deliberately mirrors the Old Testament promise of Psalm 103:3, which blesses the LORD “who healeth all thy diseases.” Read together, the psalm sings the promise and the Gospel shows it enacted — the same word, all, as both a song and a fact. Held honestly, this declares Jesus’ ability to heal anything; it is not a guarantee He removes every disease from every body in this life. This is reflection, not medical advice — keep your doctors.

Is “who healeth all thy diseases” about Jesus or about God the Father?
It is from Psalm 103:3, addressed to “the LORD” — God in the Old Testament. But the New Testament ties the promise to Jesus directly: Matthew records Him “healing all manner of disease” as a fulfilment of Scripture (Matthew 8:16–17), and John says the healing “word” of God “was made flesh” in Christ (John 1:14). So the line is about God the healer, and Jesus is God the healer come close enough to be touched. The promise and the Person are one thread, not two rival readings.

Does Psalm 103:3 mean God will heal my specific disease?
It means your disease is not the exception the word all forgot — it is inside the word, not outside it, and there is no illness too hard for the God the psalm praises and the Christ who enacted it. What it does not do is obligate God to a particular outcome on your timetable or make your faith the lever that forces it. He can heal anything; He does not always heal every body before the grave, and that is never a verdict on your faith. Ask Him plainly and boldly for this one — and hold the outcome with open hands, trusting that His nearness inside an unhealed thing is not a lesser mercy.

What if I’ve prayed “who healeth all thy diseases” and I’m still sick?
Then you are in faithful company, and the thread has not broken — and neither have you. Paul prayed three times in real faith and kept his thorn; the answer was “my grace is sufficient,” not “you believed the all wrong” (2 Corinthians 12:8–9). And remember the same Psalm 103 that sings all thy diseases also says, a few lines on, “he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust” (103:14) — David held the sweeping promise and his own mortality in one song, and so may you. The word all speaks to God’s power, not to a transaction you complete with enough intensity. Keep asking, keep your doctors, and let “I will be with thee” inside the fire (Isaiah 43:2) be a real answer. There is no shame here. The full keeping of the all is held, with perfect faithfulness, for the far side of Revelation 21:4.

Which verse should I start with if I want to pray the psalm and Jesus together?
Begin by reading Psalm 103:3 (“who healeth all thy diseases”) aloud, then read Matthew 4:23 (“healing all manner of disease”) straight after it — the promise first, the fact second, so the proof is the word your mouth closes on. Then pray it not at your illness but to the Person: “Lord Jesus, You are the One the psalm sang about, and You have not changed — I am asking You, plainly, to heal this.” Exhale slowly before you read, hold the outcome in open hands, and let one reading of the thread be enough for one night.

This article is a reflection on Scripture and prayer. It is not medical advice and does not diagnose, treat, or cure any condition. If you have received a diagnosis or are unwell, please see a qualified medical professional and continue any treatment they have given you. God can heal, and sometimes does; He does not always heal the body in this life, and His nearness in suffering is not a lesser answer. There is no shame in being unwell while loving God.