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The Gift of Healing
BD28-01© Berean Memorial Church of Irving, Texas, Inc. (1971)
In our study thus far, we have learned that some spiritual
gifts are temporary. They were designed for us in the New Testament church only. These
were to supply divine revelation until the New Testament
Scriptures were written. They were also
authenticate God’s messengers and the message which they
brought. We found that in the nature of certain spiritual gifts, and of the fact that they have not appeared over the
years historically, we have in this an indication that some gifts were temporary.
Satan today is very active in encouraging Christians to seek
his counterfeits of the spectacular type of temporary fits. So
we’ve looked at a certain number of these gifts thus far. Certain temporary
gifts that we looked at were the apostle, the prophet, the word of wisdom,
the word of knowledge, the gift of discerning spirits, and the gift of miracles. The temporary gift of healing is a type of
miracle gift, and it is the one that is in great prominence today,
along with tongues. So, Oral Roberts and Kathryn Kuhlman have acquired a dignity that has been unheard of in
Pentecostalists before. The healing lines lining up for
these healers are bigger than ever, and the offerings are too.
Jesus Christ Himself healed comparatively few people, of all
those who lived in his day, because His ministry was not to alleviate
the sufferings of humanity, but to provide a solution for the old sin nature which
caused these sufferings in the first place. So
the healings that He performed were simply to authenticate, again,
Himself as the messiah and His message. The
healings and the people who were healed were not the important thing. That
miracle action was incidental to the point of His proving who He was.
It is natural, when we are ill, to pursue whatever source we
can for healing of the physical body. But
in desperate circumstances, people will seek out not only God but
also the miracle healer. The sources of all physical suffering is sin. We know
this from Romans 5:12 because we have had Adam’s sin imputed
to us. So, we have an old sin nature, and so we
suffer, and we have physical breakdowns. But
the gift of healing does not exist today as an operational bonafide
spiritual gift in the New Testament sense of the word.
So, we’re going to look at the gift of healing this morning,
and if you can turn 1 Corinthians 12:9. “To
another the gift of healings (plural) by the same spirit.” We
have it mentioned again in verse 28. We have it in verse 30. The word
“healing” simply means a spiritual
gift which refers to the ability to correct physical ailments. The
gift of physical healing is a specialized
type of miracle gift. The plural indicates a variety of expressions. The
possessor is able to exercise this gift when he’s filled with
the Spirit. So, it’s a tremendous effective expression of the fact that God is working.
I remind you again that with all spiritual gifts, the person
who possesses this gift (and this is true of the gift of healing) is
able to use this gift anytime (under the condition of being filled with the
Spirit), anywhere, on anybody with 100% success. This
gift in its successful use is not dependent on the faith of the
patient. We have the incident in Acts 3:1-8
where Peter and John came up to the temple and found the man who sat
there crippled from his birth. He asked them for an offering. They told him
they didn’t have silver and gold, but what they had they would give him. They
told him, “in the name of Jesus” to rise
up and walk. This man wasn’t looking for healing. He
didn’t have any convictions
that they could heal him, but instantaneously he was healed. The
Scriptures say he went away leaping and
running and jumping, indicating that his ankle bones were really completely healed.
Today the healers cover their tracks by saying that you must
have faith to be healed. The healers,
for those who come down the line and the results are not produced,
cover their tracks by saying, “Well that’s because you
didn’t believe God. You didn’t have faith. You
didn’t believe that God was able to heal,” and so on.
So, the exercise of the gift of healing, as it was used in
the New Testament, is something we have to understand. Before
the completion of the Scriptures in
about 96 AD, and the authentication of Christianity and its message,
healing was a bonafide gift. The gift of healing
was temporary because it was a miracle sign, so it was phased in and
phased out after it served its purpose. This gift,
once New Testament Scripture was completed, was phased out.
We have an interesting example in the case of the apostle
Paul, who had (among the many other gifts that he had), we discover
that he also had the gift of healing. In Acts
19:11-12, “And God wrought special miracles by the hands of
Paul, so that from his body were brought unto the sick handkerchiefs or aprons, and the
diseases departed from them. And the evil spirits went out of them.”
Here was the apostle Paul, and we see here in verse 11 that
he had the power to perform miracles, and then an example of that power
in verse 12 is the gift of healing. It was a miracle gift. It’s
important to remember that healing is a miracle gift, and therefore we would expect the
miracle of healing to phase in and then to phase out again, as miracles always
have done in human history. Miracles have never
consistently, year after year after year, persisted in human experience. God,
when He worked supernaturally through miracles, has the purpose of authenticating. When
he does that, the miracle ceased.
Now here’s the apostle Paul, if a piece of cloth was touched
by him and then taken to the sick person, the person was healed. If
he was possessed by a demon spirit, the demon spirit was driven out of him. Now
of course you can immediately see where the radio preachers get this
idea. When they ask you to send in an offering so
that you can be sent a prayer cloth which you can lay upon the portion
of your body which is sick. And if you do send
in for it, the place where you should put it is on your head, because
at the moment, this is the sickest part. Now this is where they get the idea.
Now, with Paul, it worked. It was actually that simple, that a person of cloth from contact with
his body, with the miraculous power of healing, conveyed itself through
the agency of that piece of cloth. If they put it on a sick person, he was healed. If
they put it on a demon possessed person, he was cleansed. He was able to use this gift at will.
However, if you’ll turn to Philippians 2, the years passed
by in the ministry of the apostle Paul. In Philippians
2:27, we read Paul’s discussion of a situation with a
fellow worker, Epaphroditus, who became sick. As
a matter of fact, Epaphroditus was so sick that they thought that he
would not recover, and he was going to die. Philippians
2:27 says, “Epaphroditus was sick, near unto death, but God
had mercy on him, but not on him only, but on me also, lest I should
have sorrow upon sorrow.” The apostle
Paul says, “I am so grateful, and Epaphroditus has been a
tremendous servant that you Philippians sent to me, and I want you to know that I was very
concerned as he ministered to my needs, he fell sick, and it looked like he was
going to die. I’ve already had enough sorrows,
and I thank God that He did not take Epaphroditus’s life,
that he raised him up from this illness and saved me the sorrow of this believer’s
death, as well as my other problems.”
Now you would wonder immediately, “Paul, why didn’t you
just heal Epaphroditus instead of confronting yourself with the hazard of
this sorrow?” Well, obviously,
the reason that Paul didn’t do it was by this time the gift was being
phased out and Paul was not able to heal Epaphroditus. We
not only have this evidence from about 51 AD that the gift was being
phased out, and all Paul could do was pray (just as all you and I can do is to
pray that in the plan of God this person could be healed). That’s
all Paul could do, and Paul was grateful that it was in the plan of God that Epaphroditus should be healed.
But we also have, at the end of Paul’s life, another clear
cut evidence that Paul, who once could heal just from a piece of cloth
he had touched, that he could no longer exercise the gift of healing, because
its testimony, its sign purpose had been fulfilled, and the gift was being
phased out. We have this second evidence in 2 Timothy 4:20. “Erastus
abode at Corinth, but Trophimus have I left at Miletus sick.”
Here was another associate of the apostle Paul,
Trophimus. Paul is traveling with him. They get to
Miletus and Trophimus is sick, and what can Paul do? Paul
can’t wait. He has to go on. Instead of just healing Trophimus and saying,
“Let’s go,” he has to make arrangements
for him to be hospitalized at Miletus, and he has to leave Trophimus behind. Why? A
man who could touch a piece of cloth and heal people at a distance can no longer heal one of
his associates, because this book written at the very end of the ministry
of apostle Paul indicates that the gift had been phased out and Paul had
been caught up with the loss of the gift, along with all of the other
believers at the time.
Isaiah 53:5
The basis today of the claim for divine healing is usually
structured upon Isaiah 53:5. It says, “But
He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our
iniquities, the chastisement of our peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we are
healed.” If you were to go up to the average
Pentecostalist and say, “Now where do you get the idea that
healing gifts are in operation today when even the apostle Paul couldn’t heal
at the end of his ministry?” he would take you, among other scriptures, no
doubt to Isaiah 53:5. The words at the end of the verse “we
are healed,” are interpreted as meaning physical healing.
But as you read through this context, such as verse 4, you
discover that he is not talking about a physical illness, he is talking
in this context about a spiritual illness brought upon us by the old sin nature
which we possess. “Surely He hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. Yet we
did esteem Him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.” And
then he goes on, “he was wounded for our transgressions.” It’s
our sin that was the problem. “He was bruised for our
iniquities.” It is sin that is the issue in the context. It is sin from
which we were healed.
Now the word “healing,” while it does apply to physical
healing, it also applies, for example in Luke 4:18, to giving comfort
to a broken heart. That’s called healing. In Hebrews 4:13,
the same word “healing” is used in reference to correcting our conduct—getting our
conduct healed and straightened out. In Matthew 13:15,
the same word is used in reference to being brought to salvation.
Now here in Isaiah, he is speaking of the disease of the old
sin nature, in which the soul is healed by the suffering and the death
of Jesus Christ in our behalf. The Pentecostalist
says, “He died for our sins to bring us salvation, but Isaiah
tells us that He also died to bring us physical healing.” They
phrase it by saying, “Healing is in the atonement.” This
means to say that when you come to God
and you accept what Christ has provided for the old sin nature disease
in your soul, you’re spiritually healed. But
if you will also come to Him for your physical ills, that were also on the
cross, and you will be immediately healed physically. To
confirm this, they quote Matthew 8:17. Because Matthew
8:17 quotes Isaiah 53:4. Matthew 8:17 says, “That is might be
fulfilled which was spoken by Isaiah the prophet saying, ‘He
Himself took our infirmities and bore our sicknesses.” This
context, particular to verse 16, described how Jesus healed people
possessed of demons, cast the spirits out, and healed all that were
sick. Then verse 17 says, “that it might be
fulfilled which was spoken by Isaiah the prophet saying, ‘He
Himself took our infirmities and bore our sicknesses.”
Alright, now Isaiah says, “He took our infirmities. He
bore our sicknesses. Surely He had borne our griefs and carried
our sorrows.” When did Jesus Christ bear our physical problems? All the time that
He healed people was before the cross—before there ever was
any atonement, before there ever was any provision for salvation. That’s
when the verse in Isaiah was fulfilled. In Isaiah 53:4a,
the first part that Matthew quotes, and connects with the ministry of Christ
during the earthly healing ministry (connecting the two together), Jesus Christ
performed this healing work which Isaiah promised. He
did this before the atonement. This was not part
of His dying on the cross. It was done before He ever went to the
cross. So, it cannot be a result of the atonement.
This is bad exposition of scripture to take Matthew 8:17 and
say, “You see, Matthew 8:17, by this context, speaks about
Jesus Christ bringing healing which Isaiah promised would come. Then
it connects it with Isaiah 53:5 which speaks about our spiritual
healing. His healing work was done before the cross. It was not part
of the atonement. In that point He fulfilled
what Isaiah promised, but when you get to Isaiah 53:3, he’s
speaking about our transgressions, our iniquities, our sins, and our spiritual healing
that our old sin nature has made necessary for us. His
atonement solves the sin problem which caused the disease and thus
provides the basis ultimately for our perfect resurrection body. But
His healing work was done before.
On the basis of these scriptures, there is no way to say
that when Jesus Christ died on the cross, He died not only to give you
healing for your soul, but healing for your body. As
a matter of fact, if healing is in the atonement, you see what this
would mean concerning physical death? Now
that you are born again spiritually, now that you have come to
spiritual life, are you ever going to die again spiritually? Of
course not. Why not? Because spiritual healing was in the atonement.
Now if physical healing was in the atonement, and you have become
a Christian, and you accept that also, that also must be eternal. So
you would never die. There would never be a single Christian that
would die if healing were in the atonement. But it is not. The healing of
Christ came before He went to the cross.
So, it is God’s will that some Christians should not be
healed. This is another factor of the
healer concept today, that on the basis of these Isaiah passages, every
Christian should have perfect health. It
is not the will of God that any Christian should ever be sick. Of
course immediately you think about the
apostle Paul who prayed three times to have a certain physical ailment
removed, and God said, “No,” which contradicts that. God uses illness
to teach us, as He did to Paul, to depend on Him.
There is no scripture that declares that it is God’s will
for Christians never to be sick. The consequence of sin is physical suffering. It
will only be removed in the resurrection. Revelation
21:4 tells us that, “no more sorrows, no more tears, no more heartache.” All
of these things are removed and then we have perfect physical
status, but not before then. God is sovereign, and for some people it is in His plan that they should bear
illness. For others, it is in His plan that they should be healed.
Another claim is that some today possess the gift of
healing. Healing was a sign gift, as we
have indicated, in the infancy period of the church age before the New
Testament scriptures were completed. It was a
supernatural manifestation of the Holy Spirit to convince unbelievers
of the authority of the message and the messenger. These
purposes have been met, so the gift has ceased. And
yet, we have people today who say, “I
have the gift of healing.” They
will come to town, they will set up a tent, or they will rent a huge
auditorium, and they put out a sign that says that if you want to be healed of your
physical problems, Isaiah tells us that it is already in the atonement, and that
you should just come to the meeting and they will heal you.
But the New Testament healing took place without any
fanfare, without any faith necessarily on the part of the patient. The
New Testament healers who were in fellowship were able, at their option, to heal the lepers. Our
healers are not healing lepers. The New Testament
healers had their healings confirmed, such as the man at the gate who leaped and ran and
demonstrated, and it was a permanent healing. That’s another thing about New Testament healing. Many
of the healings that take place in healing tents today are not permanent. Under the spur of
the emotions, a person is moved to feeling better, and this is equated with
somebody being healed.
I’ve stood by healers while they’re telling people who are
having heart attacks that they have believed that their heart has just
been healed. And these people, just as sick
looking and as green and just as death looking as can be, while the
operator (the healer) is telling them, “I believe God. God can heal and
I believe your heart is now perfect.” Now this is blasphemy and this is ignorance
of the greatest kind.
There’s no healer today who will accept the challenge of
getting on a platform (and I don’t care how big his name is),
there is no healer in operation today anywhere in the world who will stand on a
platform and accept certain terminal fatal cases to be brought up on that platform,
of cancer, of tuberculosis, or something else, and have a competent group
of doctors say, “This person is going to die. He
has a terminal disease,” and then for the healer to perform his work,
and then have that same group of doctors to examine him and say,
“You have cured his disease.” There is not
healer in the world who will do that today.
There is no healer today who will stand up on a platform and
let you go up to him and open your mouth and say, “Look here. I
have these fillings. Please heal me.” You go and find
one and prove me wrong. Now if you were walking around in New
Testament times and you had a toothache, and I wouldn’t doubt
that there were some people who came up to the Lord Jesus and said, “Lord, I
have a toothache,” He was going to heal that tooth. The
Lord wasn’t going to give you some medication. He
wasn’t going to give you an aspirin. The
next morning you weren’t going to have that toothache. The
pain was going to be gone. And if you had
a tooth missing, and you went up to the Lord Jesus and said, “We have this beautiful crop
of corn, but I have this tooth missing. Every time we have a
crop of corn, I’d like to have them in,” He’d put them in. And He
wouldn’t put false ones on each side of the good ones. Now this is
really ludicrous. You have to have a certain type of mentality, really, if you know any doctrine at all, if you take
seriously a healer.
The Sources of Disease
Remember what the sources of disease are. They are, first of all, the result of the
fall in Eden. When we went into sin, all
of creation was affected, and that’s where disease came from. It
never comes from God. Secondly, the old
sin nature in the soul has now broken down the structure of our immaterial being, so that it
affects our material being, and we have diseases and illnesses of various kinds
from that. Then the third source of disease is Satan himself.
When it comes to the matter of the fall, this is expressed
in our physical breakdown. When it comes
to the old sin nature in our soul, this is express in psychosomatic
breakdowns. This comes from two Greek words. One
is “psuche,” which is the
word for “soul,” and “soma”
which is the word for body. “Psychosomatic”
means the soul (the immaterial, the mentality) affecting the body. And
psychosomatic illnesses are illnesses that are symptoms of illnesses
entirely produced by our minds.
I read recently that you can even have the symptoms of
pregnancy produced by a mental attitude. That
was almost unbelievable. But here is what the mind is able to do over the body. We
had a doctor who was visiting us recently
here at Berean, and after the service I talked to him. I asked,
“How many people do you get coming into your office who are not really
sick?” He said, “A fantastic number.” I
said, “What do you do? Give them a little pill made of sugar?”
He said, “That’s one technique. But
I can usually tell when they walk into my
office and they tell me what’s wrong with them. I can almost
always tell that there’s nothing wrong with them, and that
I’ve got a psychosomatic case on my hands. I
sit down and do the examining just to confirm it, and almost always
what I suspected at first confirms that there is nothing wrong with
them. So, I sit and talk with them and see what’s
bothering them. There’s usually
something on their mind that’s bothering them. I try to find
what’s bothering them, and try to get them to put it out
of their mind and take a different perspective toward.”
I thought, “That’s exactly it.” A
fantastic number, in our hypochondriac-oriented society, of people are running around with
psychosomatic illnesses, with nothing wrong with them at all in the world.
All of you parents experience this at one time or another. You have this kid
who has to go to school and he knows that today is the day for the big math exam. So,
suddenly as school bus time arrives, he gets a fantastic pain in his stomach. He
just doesn’t feel at all well. He explains to you that he feels terrifically sick and he
doesn’t feet that he should go to school today. You take his
temperature, and when you’re not looking, he huffs on it real
good, and holds it by the stove, and puts it back in his mouth. Pretty
soon he really seems quite sick, so you prop him up, and make him
comfortable, and turn on Captain Kangaroo, and ask if that would make
him feel better, and he assures you it would. Then pretty soon,
after the school bus leaves, he makes a considerable
recovery very quickly, and pretty soon he’s out in the
backyard playing. Now that’s called psychosomatic illness, and
you have to be a smart parent not to be “psychoed”
by his “sematics,” and to apply your “psycho” to his
“sematics” at the appropriate point in time. So
this old sin nature of ours creates psychosomatic illness. Then Satan causes
sickness, and doctors unfortunately don’t take that into account.
Reasons for Healing
Now what are the reasons people are healed by healers? Are
they healed? Yes, they walk into the tents and they walk
into the auditoriums, and there are changes made. Reason
number one is that God may sovereignly
plan to heal a patient in spite of the nonsense of the healers. God
sometimes plans to heal, and He does heal, in spite of what the healer is doing.
A second reason that people are healed (an explanation of
what actually takes place) is that the naturally body defenses and the
healing mechanism take their course. I’ve heard
it said that people often get well about as much in spite of the
doctors’ treatment as because of it. We have
natural functioning mechanisms of defense, and the body takes over and
makes us well. Now the healer may happen to come
in at a strategic point and do his little job, and convey the idea that he has healed you.
Sometimes people go to a doctor, and they’ve had an illness,
but they wait—they prolong. Their body mechanism
gets them over the hump. By the time they get to the doctor, the doctor says, “Well,
you’re already over the peak of this. Just take it easy
and ride it out now.” Now if the healer comes along at
about that time, he gets credit for something purportedly that he can do.
A third reason is the illusion that results from the mind
over the body so that symptoms are removed because the patient expects
healing. Some of you told me about
seeing the Johnny Carson show where Oral Roberts was on, and you know
that he made considerable stock out of his association with Billy Graham
because he is seeking a dignified position now. He
left the Pentecostal group and joined the liberal method church in
order to take a more dignified position in the religious world. Some
of you told me about his relating incident. Billy had gone to
India, and a lady had reached out and grabbed Dr. Graham because she thought he was
the healing man and she touched him. And immediately Oral Roberts said that Billy said, “It just
seemed to help her so tremendously, and she thanked him for having helped her.” Now
that sounds like psychosomatic to me. There wasn’t anything wrong with the
woman. She got the wrong healer but it didn’t make any difference. It
still worked out. It still works out as long as you stand up and say, “Touch me and I’ll heal
you.” If you get people psyched to that, and all they’ve got is something the mind created it in the first
place, the mind can undo it in the second place.
These are some of the reasons people are healed from these
illusions of illness that are created, that are not really there. Many
of the healings in Christian Science, Pentecostalism,
and the Roman Catholic Church are to be explained by this, in this category.
A fourth reason is that the healer works in deception with
an accomplice who pretends to have an illness. I won’t
burden you with stories. You can read all
kinds of books on this, of people who once used to be
in collusion with healers, and the practices that they would pull in
meetings, as they would go forward as pathetic twisted cripples. Then
at some appropriate strategic time, like
just before the offerings, they would get healed, and they would go
running out of the auditorium, breaking their crutches as they went. Some
of the healings you have are the frauds of people who were in collusion with the healers.
A fifth reason is neurotic people who for some reason
finally get stabilized so that their physical hang-ups leave them. If
you get rid of your neurotic attitudes, and you get a relaxed mental attitude, you’d be surprised at
how much better you’ll feel physically.
A sixth reason is that emotional expectation causes the
patient to feel better. The healing is not permanent. The problem is
not removed, but under the excitement of the moment, and the anticipation, people
have been able to do fantastic things as the adrenalin started flowing in their
bodies, and they felt better, and a purported healing took place.
A seventh reason is that healers avoid terminal cases. They
just avoid that in the healing line, and consequently, it makes them look very very successful with those that
they do deal with.
Number eight, and this is a major reason for what takes
place in the healing movements, is that Satan through demons cures the
patient. This however is followed by mental and emotional stresses. Again, there has
been plenty written on this by people who have been through this
themselves. They can tell you about
having gone to the healers, and having received healing from their
problem, but then found themselves torn up in their minds and torn up emotionally
until they thought they were on the verge of madness. When
they rejected the satanic influence that had been behind it, their
illness returned, even to the case of limbs being lengthened and
shortened. Satan can make a short limb long, and he can return it to its shortened sized.
Healings under Satan are of two kinds. One is white magic. White magic is
done in all sincerity by the healer. It’s done on the basis of false
doctrine, but it is done in sincerity. Because this
healer is doctrinally disoriented and pursuing a practice
that is opposed to the will of God, he exposes himself to demonic
manipulation. I am not saying that all
people like Oral Roberts and Kathryn Kuhlman are deliberate frauds. I
think they are probably very sincere, very sincere,
and very genuine people, but just as mistaken as they can be because
they are doctrinally disoriented. You don’t have
to talk to these people very long or read very much of their writings
to find that they hardly know up from down when it comes to sound doctrine. They
have this hang on this one thing, “I have a healing quality about me.”
In their sincerity, they’re exposed to satanic
manipulation. So, the demon works along with the healers. What does the
healer do? Under white magic, he quotes
Scripture, he prays to God, he lays hands on the patient, he anoints
him with oil, he invokes the name of Jesus, he repeats sacred liturgy, and he
commands the demons to leave and the illness to depart. Now
this is exactly what you will hear if you attend a healing
meeting. But you should understand what
you are in the presence of if there is healing taking place with white
magic being performed. Satan is quite happy to
convey the illusion that this gift exists, and he goes along with the
healer, because as long as he can keep people chasing temporary gifts, he will delay
the execution of Project Footstool upon himself. Many Christians are ensnared by these white magic techniques.
You know how it is with Christians. If a Christian
hears somebody pray, he says, “Oh, what a beautiful Christian.” He
hears somebody repeat a verse of Scripture, and he says, “Oh, what
a nice Christian.” He hears somebody praise the Lord or use some
sacred words, and he immediately projects that here is somebody in
contact with God. Satan uses this for white magic.
There is also black magic. Black magic is
similar in its results—identical, as a matter of
fact—to white magic, except that the healer openly appeals to Satan. This
is what the witch doctor does. He works with
demons and he works with Satan. He is openly
seeking the assistance of Satan. He goes into a
pact with Satan, and it is pure black magic. But
he brings about the same thing. This is why the
gibberish tongue-speaking takes place in primitive
societies today just like it does in Dallas. This
is why the healing takes place around a campfire in a primitive
society just like it does in a big auditorium in Dallas. There
is no difference. One is white magic and the other is black
magic. The results in either case can be very spectacular.
Along with this, in black magic particularly (and it has its
expression in white magic), is the use of fetishes—something
to protect against sickness. Did you ever carry the left
hind leg of a rabbit? That’s a good luck
charm. Did you know that? I actually used to walk around with the left
hind leg of a rabbit in my pocket. I’d
go crazy about a four-leafed clover and press it into my wallet. Those
are fetishes. They are good luck charms. When you ride
with people in their cars, they have those good luck charms hanging there (and some of them should).
This is all part of the black magic nonsense. It’s
calling upon supernatural demonic powers. The mascot—what’s the idea of a
mascot? It’s black magic. It’s something to give you a defense against
something that is happening to you. Usually it’s something bad you want to happen to the other team, so
you have a mascot out there.
Satan is a tremendous worker of the healing miracle. The
reports of the healings are usually so far distant that neither you nor I can generally check up on them. Satan
is a great deceiver. I want to get into this a little bit this
morning because the Bible is full of the fact that Satan is, number
one, a source of disease. He is the source of
Paul’s physical ailment in 2 Corinthians 12:7. This thorn in the
flesh which was so painful to Paul was permitted by
God to be imposed by Satan upon the apostle Paul to keep him dependent
upon the Lord. The sources of illness that Job suffered in Job 2:6-8--what happened to Job was because of the working
of Satan. He made Job sick. Satan uses demons to cause illness. In Matthew 12:22,
you have demons who cause blindness and dumbness. In Luke
13:11-13, 16, you have a crippled woman spoken of as a result of
demonic activity. In the Lord’s healing
ministry, Acts 10:38, it is described how He has removed demons from
people along with having their sickness removed. Likewise
with mental illness—the man who was the demoniac that we have
already looked at in Mark 5:5, 15, the result of demonic activity.
So, Satan, as the instrument of divine discipline, which is
what God permits him to be sometimes, actually imposes sickness upon
people. Satan loves to get a spiritually calloused believer. In Luke 22:31-32,
you have the story about how he is trying to get Peter because he
wanted to sift him as wheat. What Satan wanted to
do was to make Peter sick, to impose physical ailment upon him.
In the Corinthians church, you had the case of incest within
the congregation. The person who was
guilty of it was delivered to Satan in 1 Corinthians 5:5 for physical
illness to be imposed upon that individual. Hymenaeus
and Alexander in 1 Timothy 1:19-20 were delivered to Satan for
action upon their physical bodies.
Satan is a murderer. He can go actually that far in his imposition of destruction upon your
physical body. He can actually kill you, and he will, eagerly, except that God prevents him. He
has the power to impose death (Hebrews 2:14-15). It was he who killed Job’s children (Job
1:18-18). He was forbidden to kill Job, as a matter of fact (Job 2:6). He
motivated Cain to kill Abel (John 8:44). Satan is declared
a murderer from the beginning (1 John 3:12). God delivers Christians to Satan for the sin
unto death. When a Christian moves to
the point of being so totally calloused, and so rejected in making
confession of known sin, that he is now in the place of being brought under the
judgment of the sin unto death, God delivers him to Satan for execution (1
Corinthians 5:5, the man in the Corinthian church).
So, Satan is a source of disease. By this same token, Satan is a source of
healing. When demons who cause the
mental or the physical illness are removed, healing instantly results
(Matthew 9:32-33). By Satan’s command, the demons
simply leave. So, he aids the miracle healer today. Or, by regeneration, in
the command of God, the demon leaves and the person is healed. Remember
that not all supernatural phenomena are from God. Since Satan has
the power to inflict disease, he can remove it and fake a healing. We
have many historical examples of healings among pagan societies. The New Testament
world was filled with demon-energized healers and miracle workers. Please
remember that. There were a lot of people running around in
the New Testament world as healers among pagan groups. The
temple in Alexandria, Egypt reported multitudes of healings. A
night’s sleep in a temple in Greece was beneficial to thousands. It
cured them. There were other miracle workers in the first century, and one was even called a heathen
Christ because he was so spectacular.
So, Satan will fake miracles just as he will in the tribulation period. He’s
going to fake them then in order to gain converts (2 Thessalonians 2:9, Revelation
16:14). He fakes miracles today and it’s no strain. All of the
supernatural phenomena that we have are not from God, so don’t be deceived
every time somebody comes along and says, “Well my uncle went down and
he got healed.” It’s not a question of whether he was healed
or not. It’s not a question of whether or not this took place. It’s a
question of the healer’s action, of his sound doctrine, and of the
place of the gift of healing as a miracle gift in our day. The
only way you can decide that is on the basis of doctrine. Satan
is going to delude people in the tribulation just like he deludes them today.
So, we summarize. Nobody has the gift of the gift of healing today, any more than Paul did
at the end of his ministry. God does heal today as a result of our prayers, and sometimes in a very
spectacular way. God does not heal today through an agent healer. I hope you understand
that. I’ve had some complaints from people who thought I was saying that God does not perform miracles of
healing. He does and He can, but the point is there is nobody in this world, Oral Roberts or Kathryn Kuhlman
or anybody else, who can walk up and through the power of God create an
instantaneous healing for you. They can’t make your fractured bones heal on the spot. They
can’t. They can’t. They can’t. Nor can they fill your teeth or anything else. They
certainly can’t raise the dead.
Now Satan can’t do that either, but Satan can counterfeit a
whole lot of the healing miracles, and that’s exactly what he
does. The healers today are frauds of the self-deluded
type or deliberate deception. God healers in response to our prayers, but not in response to the laying
on of the hands of some healer.
What about those that God does not heal? What should you do? Run in
desperation to a healer? You will if you’re doctrinally
disoriented. But if you understand death, you will put it in perspective, and you will realize that death
is part of the plan of God. Death is entering a
new phase of your relationship to God. I’ll
guarantee you that while it is God’s plan for you to live,
you will live. And when it is in God’s plan that He has
finished with His ministry from you, you will go to any number of
healers or any number of doctors, and you will not live. Now,
use all the medical assistance you can to get well. Use
all of the power of prayer. But any healing you get from a healer today
is of demonic accomplishment, or a psychosomatic delusion. Sound
doctrine preserves us from pursuing this in the face of even death itself.
We have something a lot better. We have the Scriptures which tell us, “Fear
not, for I am with thee.” Cast your care upon Him. We just need to confess our
sins, and the results will follow. Running to healers in the face of a fatal illness is because you’re confused.
The healers grow wealthy doing this. If I were a healer today, do you know where I
would be operating, if I could control my old sin nature? I
wouldn’t be putting up tents and opening
auditoriums and running healing lines and passing out cards for people
to come through to be healed. The place where I
would be going would be through the hospitals. I’d
go right down the line and empty every hospital in Dallas, and put
every doctor out of work. I’m not particularly fond of hospitals to begin with, and I wouldn’t
mind doing that as it is. I would rather be healthy than
sick, as you would too. I’d go through
every hospital bed and I’d empty it. I
haven’t heard of a single healer who’s going around
doing that. For one reason, it’s hard to collect an
offering that way. Nobody is emptying the hospitals. They’re
working on the gullible, the desperately spiritually-disoriented people. But
if you really had the gift of healing, that’s what you would do too.
When God’s plan brings you to the point of dying, then go on
with Him. Doctrine sustains us in life, and it can only sustain you in death. Do
you remember Meshach, Shadrach, and Abednego? They knew
doctrine. When the king said, “Bow down and worship my image,” they said,
“Sorry, king, doctrine says no.” Expedience
says yes. Saving our heads says yes. Doctrine says no. We go with doctrine. We leave our
lives with God. And they came out of that fiery furnace
without even the smell and the odor of the burning upon them.
That’s the position that you and should take and that I
commend to you. We go with doctrine. Even in the face of serious
illness, we don’t go to healers, knowing that this gift is
non-existent from God today, and what appears to be its operation is entirely the
counterfeit of Satan, or of our own minds. Our healing
depends upon the sovereignty of God. So
use your prayer, and use your medical know-how, but take the attitude
of Meshach, Shadrach, and Abednego, and stay in the Lord’s service, and
stand by doctrine. That’s the course of healing
in our day for the enlightened believer.
John E. Danish, 1971
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