A healthy theology of healing
Five by woodleywonderworks
Have you ever looked at an old photograph of yourself and been struck by how much younger you look in the photo? Welcome to the club. It’s called the ageing process.
The apostle Paul talked about it in 2 Corinthians 4:16 when he told his readers that “We do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day.”
Ultimately this “wasting away” of our bodies reminds us that they are mortal and will not sustain our souls on this planet beyond a mere fraction of its history. Only God is immortal, or as the writer to the Hebrews puts it, “Man is destined to die.” (Heb 9:27)
On the other hand, have you ever stopped to think about the way in which your body constantly replenishes itself, bringing healing and wholeness to itself wherever there is decay?
In the next hour alone your body will shed some 600,000 skin cells, but you won’t notice because simultaneously it will also produce 600,000 more.
This may sound like a busy hour’s work, but it’s nothing compared to what is happening in your blood vessels every second. Every single second of your life 2,000,000 red blood cells return to your bone marrow to die, and they are replaced every second by another 2,000,000 red blood cells which will make a quarter of a million round trips of your body before they also return to the bone marrow to die. No wonder you sometimes feel a bit tired!
We also see our bodies working even harder each time we are ill. Colds get better – with or without Lemsip and Lockets – if we simply give our body enough time to recover. Broken bones mend. Cut fingers heal. Although our bodies cannot deal with every sickness without medical intervention, it is obvious that our bodies have an inbuilt capacity, given them by their Designer, which works tirelessly to heal what is sick and mend what is broken. God has decreed that our bodies are mortal, but He is still very committed to promoting healing and wholeness in them as an expression of His character.
As Christians, we are not confused by this paradox. The atheist learns no spiritual lesson from the opposing principles of both healing and decline in his body. Without firm hope beyond the grave, he either laments or ignores his mortality whilst trying to halt the decline as long as possible before death inevitably comes. We know as Christians, however, that these two opposing forces of physical healing and decline are at the very heart of the Gospel. When God created the world He saw that it was “very good” (Gen 1:31), but when Adam disobeyed the Lord’s command that “You must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die” (Gen 2:17) he brought about the Fall and its very bad consequences. Paul explains that “Sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin” (Rom 5:12), and Moses makes it clear that sickness was part of the curse which came through sin (Deut 28:21-22&59-61). This makes sense of Peter’s teaching that Jesus was undoing the work of the Fall in his earthly ministry when he came “healing all who were under the power of the devil” (Acts 10:38), and explains why Scripture teaches that it is often (but not always) linked to demonic activity (Mt 9:32-33, Lk 13:11&16).1 Sickness is not just a biological and medical phenomenon, but also a spiritual one related to the devil’s work in the world (Acts 10:38). Healing is therefore part of God’s work in the world, as personified in Jesus Christ, who became a human being with a mortal body in order to “destroy the devil’s work” (1Jn 3:8).
Given the clear biblical teaching about the two principles of human mortality and divine healing, no Christian seriously denies either one of them in their entirety. Even the most die-hard cessationist still expects to get better when he catches the ‘flu, and if necessary goes to the doctor to help his body in its work of recuperation. Even the most fiery Pentecostal faith-healer does not seriously expect his congregation to experience so much healing from God that they will never actually die.
The question is not whether the Bible and experience teach that there are two principles of mortality and healing at work in our bodies, but how much we can expect God to heal our mortal bodies right now. Since Jesus taught that healing was a primary sign that His Kingdom had come (Mt 10:7-8, Mk 1:15&27, Lk 9:2,9:11&10:9), the answer to this question is part of the bigger question of how much has the Kingdom of God already come? In this much bigger question lies a healthy theology of healing.
Most Christians agree that the Kingdom of God has come through the first coming of Jesus Christ. Jesus said “If I drive out demons by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God has come upon you” (Mt 12:28). He quietened John the Baptist’s doubts over whether he truly was the promised Messianic King by reminding him that through him “The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised” (Mt 11:5).
Most Christians also agree that the Kingdom of God has not yet fully come and will not fully come until the Second Coming of Jesus Christ (Lk 19:11-12). The apostle John saw that it was only after the Second Coming that the angels would fully proclaim that “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ” (Rev 11:15), and he also saw that it was only after the Second Coming that the old order of things would be ended and sickness would become a distant memory rather than a daily reality. He tells us that “I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.’ He who was seated on the throne said, ‘I am making everything new!’” (Rev 21:1-5a). We do not yet possess the resurrection bodies which Jesus has won for us through his work of salvation, but we eagerly await them through the groans and trials of this life (1Cor 15:39-53, Phil 3:21, Rom 8:23, Acts 14:22), knowing that at the Second Coming of Jesus we will be raised to life to enjoy the complete fullness of the Kingdom of God.
Most Christians agree still further that we have a role to play as Christians in turning the now-but not-yet Kingdom of God into reality on earth today. Jesus, after all, told us to ask the Father “Let your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (Mt 6:10).
Therefore since almost all Christians agree that, in Jesus Christ, the promised Kingdom has come (Gen 49:10, Jer 23:5-6, Eze 21:25-27), a healthy theology of healing answers the question of just how much the Kingdom of God came through his First Coming and how much we should resign ourselves to sickness in the here and now as part of our groaning for his speedy Second Coming. Put simply, we can say that if the Kingdom of God has come much then I can have much expectation of being healed, but if the Kingdom of God has come little then I can have little expectation of being healed (Lk 10:9).
This paper will therefore examine each of the four main Christian answers to the question of how much the Kingdom of God has already come in Jesus Christ, and will conclude by showing how a biblical answer to this question provides us with the framework for a healthy theology of healing. This will then provide us with four crucial areas in which we need to grow in our own personal ministries if we are to bring the healing of God to our own generation as an expression of the Kingdom rule, here and now, of the Great King Jesus Christ.
FOUR VIEWS OF HOW MUCH WE CAN EXPECT GOD TO HEAL
With so many differing Christian viewpoints on healing, it is very difficult to summarise them into four groups without over-simplifying the spectrum of opinions. Even so, if we are aware that the four views actually represent a wider discussion, then it makes the task much more manageable. 2
VIEWPOINT #1: “THE CLASSIC LIBERAL VIEW”
This viewpoint agrees with the other three views that the BC era was a time of waiting for the Kingdom of God, and that the era after the Second Coming will see the Kingdom in all its fullness (see fig.1 below). However, the liberal theologians in the last century and a half have been so affected by the seismic shift in the Western worldview which was ushered in by the ‘Enlightenment’ and by Darwin’s ‘Origin of the Species’ that they struggle to accept the idea of God ever intervening in the world to perform a healing miracle – either inside or outside of Scripture – and they therefore question whether He even healed miraculously through Jesus, let alone promises to do so through us.
Their position can be best summarised as “Although God has the power to heal and this is a sign of His coming Kingdom, He does not heal people miraculously today and has probably never done so because He respects the natural laws of the universe.” They would see the Kingdom largely as ‘not yet’, and have little expectation of any miraculous healing this side of the Second Coming of Jesus.
Fig.1 – “The Classic Liberal Theology of Healing”
The liberal writer Rudolph Bultmann writes in his book ‘Jesus Christ and Mythology’ that “Modern man acknowledges as reality only such phenomena or events as are comprehensible within the framework of the rational order of the universe. He does not acknowledge miracles because they do not fit into this lawful order.” 3 Langdon B. Gilkey describes the biblical accounts of the miracles in Exodus as “the acts Hebrews believed God might have done and the words he might have said had he done and said them – but of course we recognise that he did not.” 4 This tragic viewpoint owes far more to 20th-Century rationalism than it does to any of the contents of the Bible. In fact, it so denies the reliability of the gospel accounts that Bultmann eventually admits that when examining the Easter events he feels that “an historical fact which involves a resurrection from the dead is utterly inconceivable.” 5 Such a desire to subject the words of Scripture to the arrogant claims of the modern Western worldview effectively presents Jesus as so bereft of kingly power that we are left wondering how they would even believe that the Second Coming and the full inauguration of the Kingdom of God would truly bring the kind of healing they dismiss as so fanciful.
This liberal theology of healing extols western science and dismisses the historical facts of Jesus’ earthly ministry. It is decidedly unhealthy, so let’s try another.
Footnotes
- 1 Several verses link sickness not only to demonic activity but specifically to sin which opens up a door for demons and sickness. The clearest verses are Jas 5:14-16 and 1Cor 11:27-31, although Jesus warns us in Jn 9:1-3 that we must not over emphasise the link between sin and sickness. Sin may open a door for sickness, but Job’s sickness was demonic in origin yet came in spite of him being the most righteous man on earth! (Job 1:3-7)
- 2 For example, even though it is helpful to refer to a ‘classic Pentecostal view’, it is over-simplifying the case to imply that all Pentecostals therefore hold to this view. Gordon Fee is a Pentecostal whose book ‘The Disease of the Health and Wealth Gospel’ (USA, 1979) argues against the classic Pentecostal view that ‘healing is in the atonement’. Fee was very disenchanted by many Pentecostal preachers whom he felt abused this teaching with their man-centred and hedonistic messages of ‘health and wealth’ through the cross of Jesus.
- 3 Rudolph Bultmann ‘Jesus Christ and Mythology’, p37-38, (USA 1958)
- 4 Quoted from an article by Langon B Gilkey in ‘The Journal of Religion’ (Vol 41, No 3, July 1961, University of Chicago Press, p194-205) entitled ‘Cosmology, Ontology, and the Travail of Biblical Language’
- 5 Rudolph Bultmann ‘Jesus Christ and Mythology’, p84 (USA 1958)
- 6 Richard B Gaffin in his co-authored book ‘Are Miraculous Gifts for Today? Four Views’, (USA 1996)
- 7 It is important that we do not misunderstand the phrase cessationism to mean a belief that divine healing itself has ceased, but only the charismatic gifts of healing as outlined in 1 Corinthians 12 and described in operation in the book of Acts. Perhaps one of the clearest insights into what cessationists actually believe is afforded by Walter Chantry in his book ‘Signs of the Apostles’ (USA, 1973) in which he explains that “There is no Biblical reason to limit God to performing miracles at certain seasons only. No doubt God is yet executing unusual feats of power…It is plain that God’s working of wonders cannot be limited to ages past. ‘Charismatic’ enthusiasts, however, are not merely claiming that God is doing miracles in the twentieth century. They are asserting that some twentieth century men have power to perform miracles…The question of our inquiry is not ‘Should God be working miracles today?’ It is rather, ‘Should men be doing miracles on behalf of God?’…Serious students of God’s Word must deny that miracles are being performed today by men who are filled with God’s Spirit” (p8-9 & p116). The issue for Chantry and other cessationists is that if men and women today have been given the same gifts of healing as the NT apostles, then somehow the finality and supremacy of the New Testament Scriptures will be compromised.
- 8 Cessationism grew out of a fear that Pentecostal miracles were creating a ‘cult of man’ in which Christians placed more value on what was taught by an anointed man or woman of God than on the words of the Bible. Walter Chantry writes in ‘Signs of the Apostles’ (USA, 1973, p23) that “Great numbers believe the opinions of those who perform wonders because their ‘gifts’ indicate that they are ‘filled with the Spirit’. The implication of such logic is clear. How can anyone question the doctrines of miracle workers?...‘Can a man be teaching false doctrine when he does such mighty things?’ ask the captivated.” We would share the concern that charismatic gifts should not be understood as an endorsement of all that a person teaches (1 Cor 1:7,12:9&15:1214, Gal 3:5&1:6-7), but we understand that the primary purpose of the charismatic gifts was not to authenticate the New Testament canon and therefore we do not see the same need to fight the gifts as many alarmed cessationists (1Cor 12:7&14:26).
- 9 The best verse I have seen used to argue this point is 2Cor 12:12 from the NIV which reads that “the things that mark an apostle – signs, wonders and miracles – were done among you with great perseverance.” The argument is that Paul is teaching here that miracles were essentially signs to authenticate true apostles. Unfortunately for those who seize upon this verse as a proof-text, the NIV translates Paul’s Greek in a misleading way. The dative nouns “signs, wonders and miracles” simply cannot be placed grammatically alongside the nominative noun “the things that mark” an apostle. What Paul actually says literally in Greek is that “the signs of a true apostle were performed among you with all perseverance, [accompanied] by signs, wonders and miracles.” He is not arguing that miracles authenticate apostles but that his life of suffering in order to plant churches is the sign of a true apostle, and that miracles were one of the key ways in which he planted churches. Not only does this spurious appeal to the misleading NIV translation weaken rather than strengthen the cessationist cause, but on the contrary by drawing our attention to this verse the cessationists remind us once again how we had better not give up on stepping out for miracles of healing if ever we want to see great churches planted in our own generation.
- 10 Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones underlines how arrogant and foolish it is to assume that now the canon of Scripture has been completed that we need the authenticating sign of miracles less than 1st-Century Christians. He points out that this argument “means that you and I, who have the Scriptures open before us, know much more than the apostle Paul of God’s truth…It means that we are altogether superior…even to the apostles themselves, including the apostle Paul! It means that we are now in a position in which…‘we know, even as also we are known’ by God…Indeed, there is only one word to describe such a view, it is nonsense.” ‘Prove All Things’, p32-33, (published in the UK in 1985)
- 11 Charles Haddon Spurgeon, who cannot strictly speaking be called a ‘cessationist’ because he died before the birth of Pentecostalism ushered in both a rediscovery of the charismatic gifts of healing and the cessationist movement which rejected them, claimed that “The miracles were the great bell of the universe which was rung in order to call the attention of all men all over the world to the fact that the gospel feast was spread; we do not need the bell now.” (The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit Vol 23 p471). The first part of this statement is certainly backed up by Rom 15:18-19, which links the rapid growth of the 1stcentury Church to signs and wonders, but there is less evidence for the second part of the statement that the Kingdom is now advancing so rapidly that miracles are no longer needed. On the contrary, the experience of those who preach the Gospel in Muslim or Hindu nations, and even our own limited experience in the UK, is that when God rings the “bell” today non-Christians become much more open to receiving the “gospel feast.” It would appear that the “bell” still has a great part left to play!
- 12 Mk 6:5 tells us that Jesus “could not do any miracles” on one visit to Nazareth, but it goes on to qualify this with “except lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them.” Clearly for Jesus a bad ministry time was not failing to see people healed when they came to him in faith, but seeing fewer people coming to him in faith for healing than he hoped. Similarly, when Luke 5:17 tells us that on a particular occasion “the power of the Lord was present for him to heal the sick”, the phrase comes with no evidence that there were other times when the power of the Lord was not present for healing, but rather appears to stress that this one occasion was particularly fruitful.
- 13 DA Carson ‘Showing the Spirit’, p166, (USA 1987)
- 14 John Calvin’s ‘Commentary on 1 Corinthians’, p305. Although Calvin does not refer to Amos 8:11-12, this is a good defence of his position. If the Lord withheld the charismatic gift of prophecy from His People because of their sin, rebellion and unbelief, then we can assume that He also withholds the charismatic gift of healing from His People because of their sin, rebellion and unbelief. The problem with assuming that our lack of experience equates to God’s lack of willingness is that it tries to foist all of the blame for our lack of experience onto God, and therefore abdicates our responsibility to repent and to respond to the Word of God with faith.
- 15 John Wimber ‘Power Evangelism’, p160, (USA 1985)
- 16 John Wimber ‘Power Evangelism’, p151-166, (USA 1985). Wimber’s overview of church history includes amongst many others miraculous healings in the time of Augustine in the early 5th century, in the time of Francis of Assisi in the early 13th century, and in the ministry of Martin Luther in the 16th century. Only a crass prejudice against finding any miraculous healing in church history could dismiss the consistent testimonies of all these people of high spiritual calibre as myth or superstition
- 17 Jesus put the failure of the Twelve on one occasion to see healing down to their unbelief rather than to any unwillingness on God’s part, and promptly healed the sick person to demonstrate that God had been willing to heal him all along (Mt 17:16-18)! We need to be careful that we do not dismiss the arguments of cessationists out of hand because of their bad experiences, but we cannot ignore the fact that experience affects everyone’s theology of healing. Benjamin B Warfield, the founding father of cessationism, suffered tragedy on his honeymoon in August 1876 when his wife Annie was struck by lightning, resulting in paralysis for the rest of her life. The fact that Warfield spent all 39 years of his married life juggling the twin roles of theologian and carer, without seeing any answer to his prayers and fasting for healing, must have had a significant impact upon his theology.
- 18 John G.Lake ‘Adventures in God’, p55, written in the USA in the 1920s.
- 19 Oral Roberts in ‘Abundant Life Magazine’, Sept 1976 edition.
- 20 Kenneth Hagin ‘Healing Belongs to Us’, p32.
- 21 Kenneth Hagin ‘Exceedingly Growing Faith’, p10.
- 22 Taken from DA Carson’s commentary ‘When Jesus Confronts the World: An Exposition of Matthew 8-10 (USA, 1987)
- 23 Wayne Grudem ‘Systematic Theology’, p1063, (USA, 1994), my underlining.
24 The Hebrew of Is 53:5 (*0(13#(,6”+0.71(”&/‘2$4/by his stripes there is healing for us) is technically an imperfect verb which
suggests ongoing action rather than a perfect verb of completed action. The crux of this argument comes not from the Hebrew text but from the fact that when Peter quotes this verse in 1Pe 2:24 he follows the Septuagint reading which places the action in the aorist/past tense (by his stripes you have been healed).- 25 Lex Loizides has told this story several times at the ‘Front Edge’ events he has organised in Africa, Europe and India to equip Newfrontiers leaders to minister in gifts of healing.
- 26 Henry Knight, writing in ‘The Journal of Pentecostal Theology’, expresses his concerns that based on the teaching of some Pentecostals “Faith is essentially trusting in God’s promises in Scripture rather than trusting in God. Indeed, the believer is assured of healing because, given the spiritual laws and scriptural promises, a faithful God has no choice in the matter” (1993, p69).
- 27 See p37 & pp146-165 of John Wimber’s book ‘Power Healing’ (USA, 1986).
- 28 This link between Moses’ piece of wood in Ex 15:25 and the cross of Jesus is not just the result of commentators’ tendency to spiritualise Old Testament passages. Even within the New Testament, we find that the writers take the word cu l on/wood/tree which appears in that verse in the Septuagint, and they use it to refer to the cross of Jesus. See any of Acts 5:30,10:39&13:29 or Gal 3:13 & 1Pe 2:24. The counter-argument is that the New Testament use of the word cu l on/wood/tree refers back to Deut 21:23, but even if we were to accept this supposition then we are still looking at an Old Testament verse which talks about the curse (eg of sickness) only being able to be removed because someone (ie Jesus) hung on a tree for us.
- 29 Kenneth Copeland quoted in the ‘Calvary Contender’, 15th Sept 1989 edition.
- 30 Wimber tells a moving account of David Watson’s death in spite of his faith for healing on pp147-149 of his book ‘Power Healing’ (USA, 1986).
- 31 One of the best examples of our need to admit humbly that we do not fully understand how God works out His promises in Scripture is perhaps the promises which He made to King David in 1 Chronicles 17. God promised David that one of his descendants would rule on his throne over the kingdom of Israel forever (v7-14), but the outworking of this promise has involved the nation state of Israel ceasing to exist from 70AD to 1948AD and there actually being no Davidic King ruling over Israel or even Judah since 586BC! God is entirely faithful to His promise, and has made David’s great descendant Jesus into the great King of kings who rules over the whole universe, but this much more glorious outworking of the promise is far greater than David fully grasped even in his most inspired Messianic psalms. We must leave room for God to fulfil His promises in a way which is incomprehensibly better than our best interpretations on the basis of our own logic.
- 32 The Septuagint translation of Num 33:55 refers to people who troubled the People of God as a s ko l oy /thorn in their bodies. We cannot prove that Paul has this verse in mind, but the fact that he also calls it an a ) gge l oj/angel/messenger of Satan is certainly personal language. We cannot state categorically that this isn’t an example of sickness, but we certainly cannot state with any credibility whatsoever that it categorically is.
- 33 The closest example I can find in Scripture which comes anywhere close to this would be in Jn 11:3-6 where Jesus delays going to heal Lazarus – in fact delays so long that he dies in the meantime. Technically this is not an example of someone requesting healing, since Mary and Martha merely tell Jesus that “The one you love is sick”, and do not specifically ask for healing. However, this example is worthy of further attention, and this paper deals with it in more detail on p16.
- 34 Francis MacNutt in his book simply entitled ‘Healing’ (USA, 1974).
- 35 This quotation comes from Henry Knight’s critique of the Pentecostal position in ‘The Journal of Pentecostal Theology 1993’ entitled ‘God’s Faithfulness and God’s Freedom’ (p69) – as if they were somehow in opposition to one another.
- 36 See footnote number 33
- 37 Mahesh Chavda ‘Only Love Can Make a Miracle’, p84&86, (USA, 1990).
- 38 Jesus’ healing ministry was not motivated primarily by his desire to prove he was the Messiah, or even primarily by his desire to usher in the Kingdom of God. It was primarily motivated by the compassionate character of God who reveals Himself as Yahweh-Rophe, The-Lord-Who-Heals. Francis MacNutt writes very helpful in his book ‘Healing’ on p110 (USA, 1974) that “Jesus did not heal people to prove that He was God; he healed them because He was God.”
- 39 John G. Lake ‘Adventures in God’, p50-51.
- 40 We should not be surprised that this is the main battleground. If we argue that God is willing to help the sick but unable to do so, then we doubt His strength. However, if we argue that He is able to help the sick but unwilling to do so, then we doubt His love. Neither of these views is likely to bring healing because “Without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he is the rewarder of those who earnestly seek him” (Heb 11:6).
- 41 John Wimber shares this testimony as one of turning points in his ministry in his book ‘Power Evangelism’ (USA, 1985)
- 42Kathryn Kuhlman (1907-76) always refused to be drawn publicly on the question of why God does not always heal. The quotation comes from Jamie Buckingham’s book ‘A Glimpse Into Glory’, p35, (USA 1983)
- 43 Lex Loizides sharing his testimony at the Newfrontiers ‘Front Edge’ Conference at King’s Church Catford in May 2007
- 44 As ministers of healing, we press through disappointments to focus on what God is doing through us rather than on what He has not done. If only three out of ten are healed then we are still advancing the Kingdom of Heaven and we are still seeing supernatural miracles which bear testimony to God’s glory a third of the time! However, we do need to give an answer to those whom we have not received the healing we pray for. I personally tend to say something along the lines of “Three different things can happen to people when they receive prayer for healing. Some are healed straightaway which is wonderful. Some do not sense their healing straightaway but discover later that something decisive happened when they were prayed for and that their symptoms change shortly afterwards – this may well be the case for you. Others do not get healed straightaway but are healed the next time someone prays for them, so if this is the case for you then keep pressing into God in faith because He wants to heal you.” One of the best explanations I have heard from another Newfrontiers evangelist was simply to say “I find that some people are healed when I pray for them and some people are not, but when I look at Scripture I see that Jesus healed everyone. I know that there is still quite a gulf between me ministering healing and Jesus doing so, so I assume that as I get closer to Jesus that more and more people will be healed.” A key principle is to keep the burden of responsibility on you as the minister rather than laying a ‘side-plate of guilt’ on the sick person. Jesus rebuked the disciples for not being able to heal people, but he did not rebuke the sick people for not being healed, even when he might have had grounds to do so (Mt 17:14-21).
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