A Look at Healing #1

The question is, what do we think about the idea of healing by individuals holding that gift today? What are we to make of the so-called faith healers today? You've seen them on TV, so-called faith healers resuming to act in the name of God.

What to make of them biblically? Pastor Don Green will address that question on this edition of the Truth Pulpit as he continues in his ministry of teaching God's people God's Word. Hi, I'm Bill Wright, and we're continuing our series, The Holy Spirit Today, with part one of a message titled, A Look at Healing. Well, Don, there's a lot of misunderstanding about this, isn't there? Well, there really is, Bill.

And you know, my friend, it doesn't need to be that way. What so many in the church don't understand is that the healings that are claimed by TV faith healers today are nothing like true biblical miracles that occurred in the Bible. And also, people don't realize the serious dangers of being fascinated with signs and wonders. Scripture warns us against this. And so today we're going to open Scripture and try to lead you into a way that will give you understanding and protection in your spiritual life. Stay with us on the Truth Pulpit.

Thanks, Don. And friend, let's join our teacher now in the Truth Pulpit. Question. Is the Holy Spirit giving the gifts of tongues, prophecies, or miraculous signs to believers, to individual believers today?

The framing of that question is very important. Is the Holy Spirit giving the gifts of tongues, prophecy, or miraculous signs to individual believers today so that they can practice these things indiscriminately according to their own will? Well, there are two views in answer to that question. The doctrine of cessationism says that those gifts have ceased. Cessationism ceased, it's over, it's not happening anymore. Cessationism says that the Holy Spirit no longer bestows miraculous spiritual gifts in the present age to individual believers. In other words, this position says that the miraculous gifts have ceased. They were limited to the apostles who practiced them in order to verify the revelation that God was giving through them.

The signs say that the Holy Spirit gave them. The signs had a purpose, that purpose has been served, now that the purpose is over, the canon of Scripture is complete, the apostles are gone, that which attended their work has ceased. Cessationism. The other view you could say on this is called continuationism. Continuationism. And by contrast, those who hold to this position would teach that at least some of the miraculous gifts described in the Bible continue to be given into the church even today.

And then so this position says the miraculous gifts continue today. Cessationism, it's stopped. Continuationism, it says that it's continued.

Those just trying to define a couple of terms for you. Now, let me just state plainly, without qualification, without hesitation, that Truth Community Church holds to the cessationist position. We are a cessationist church, and we're going to explain that as we go along.

I just want to be clear and upfront with you about those things. Now when we talk about miraculous gifts, here's what we mean by a miracle. And it's surprisingly important to define the term miracle so that you know exactly what's being said, because the term is used far too loosely today. Things are described as miracles that can be explained by very natural means, and the word is used in a loose sense that is not at all helpful for understanding what Scripture is teaching on these important issues. By a miracle, I'm just defining terms here and then we'll get into Scripture in just a moment. By a miracle, we mean a manifestation of the power of God in the visible realm that authenticates divine revelation.

It is a manifestation of the power of God in the invisible realm that can be seen with the senses and verified by multiple witnesses. That's an oversimplification, but what I want to emphasize to you today is when we're using the term miracles, we're talking about that which is visible. We are not asking whether God heals sick people in answer to prayer. We believe that He does.

We believe that He does that according to His will. What we will also see later on is that sometimes healing is not God's will. Contrary to what prominent charismatic teachers will say is that it's always God's will to heal you, and if you're not healed, you're the problem. It's your lack of faith. God's not the problem. Oh, and so in addition to the physical suffering that these dear friends are going through, it is heaped upon them spiritual guilt that the reason they don't receive their healing is because there's something wrong with them, something lacking in their faith. The perversity of that deserves great condemnation, and one day these men will be held to an account by a holy God, but we're not asking whether God heals in answer to prayer.

Sometimes He does. My own beloved mother was diagnosed with stage four cancer six and a half years ago, and the doctor indicating very clearly that you shouldn't expect her to live more than six months. Well, it's six and a half years after praying for my mother.

The cancer is gone. She is in the best health that she's been in in the past 20 years or more, and we rejoice and we thank God for the physical healing that He brought to my mother, but I didn't heal her. It wasn't a miraculous, visible miracle where somebody came and laid hands on her, and it disappeared. Not like that.

It wasn't like that. God did a work on my mother and delivered her from that cancer, but it was not a miraculous healing in the sense that we're talking about here today, and so I mentioned that just to give you a sense of clarity of what we're talking about here. We pray for people to be healed, yes, but we pray so with a sense that they pray so with a sense of, Father, not my will but Thine be done, that God will answer that prayer according to His wisdom, according to His will, and so we bring that submissively not to command a healing with disregard to what God would do with it, and so that's all by way of introduction. The question is, what do we think about the idea of healing by individuals holding that gift today? What are we to make of the so-called faith healers today? What are we to make of them? And I'll try to restrain myself and not display all of the anger that I feel toward them in what I have to say to you today. Here's what we want to do.

I want to look at this in three steps here today. First of all, I want to look at the nature of biblical healing, the nature of biblical healing, just to touch on that, and then secondly to look at the limitations of biblical healing. You know, what do we find as we read Scripture, not just a few cherry-picked texts that questionably could support the idea of healing? What does the Bible say about its own people in biblical history and their illnesses and the practice of signs? And then thirdly, and this part will be very critical, the present danger of a fascination with signs, the present danger of a fascination with signs, and so that's what we're going to cover here today, and remembering that we defined a miracle as that which is done in the visible realm, okay?

That which is done in the visible realm, a manifestation of the power of God that has no other explanation. What's the nature of biblical healing? Turn to the Gospel of Mark chapter 3, and I'm only going to look at a couple of examples here just to make the point to help us make a contrast with what happens today in the realm of so-called healings. In Mark chapter 3, verse 1, it says that Jesus entered again into a synagogue, and a man was there whose hand was withered.

His hand was lame, it was crippled. And in verse 2, they were watching him to see if he would heal him on the Sabbath so that they might accuse him. And he said to the man with the withered hand, get up and come forward. And he said to them, is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the Sabbath, to save a life or to kill?

But they kept silent. And what did Jesus do then? In verse 5, he said, after looking around at them with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart, he said to the man, stretch out your hand. And he stretched it out, and his hand was restored. Beloved, this was a visible manifestation of the power of God in the presence of witnesses in an uncontrolled environment. Jesus spoke to the man whose hand was visibly withered that everyone could see. They were looking to see what Jesus was going to do, because they could see that his hand was withered. It was visible to all. And Jesus, by his spoken word, said, stretch out your hand.

And from the gnarly, contorted nature of his hand, whatever that looked like at the time, he stretched it out, and his hand was restored to full use, instantly, immediately, fully, in the presence of witnesses who could verify it with what they saw with their own physical senses. In a similar manner, addressing different limbs of the body, look at Acts chapter 3. Mark 3, Acts chapter 3. And as you know from reading the Scriptures for yourself, we could multiply examples from the ministry of Jesus, from the ministry of the apostles. We're just using two to set the stage.

We're not at all trying to be comprehensive in anything that we say here. In Acts chapter 3, verse 1, Peter and John were going up to the temple at the ninth hour, the hour of prayer. And a man who had been lame from his mother's womb, you see that? He was lame from his mother's womb, from birth, in a way that was visible and obvious to all and known to everyone. This wasn't a secret. This wasn't somebody brought in off the street who had been screened by handlers of the apostles before he ever got to them to make sure that something would not go wrong.

No, it wasn't like that. A man who had been lame from his mother's womb was being carried along, whom they used to set down every day at the gate of the temple, which is called beautiful, in order to beg alms of those who were entering the temple. This man was publicly known, had been publicly observed over a period of many, many years since his birth, and people saw him. They knew him. This was evident.

This was established public fact that this man was born lame and could not walk. And in verse 3, when he saw Peter and John, these are the apostles after the resurrection, after Jesus' ascension, after the coming of the Holy Spirit, and the apostles who were appointed by Jesus and who were going to be the vessels of his revelation to mankind, they were about to go into the temple, verse 3, and he began asking to receive alms. But Peter, along with John, fixed his gaze on him and said, look at us. And he began to give them his attention, expecting to receive something from them.

He got more than he was expecting. Verse 6, Peter said, I do not possess silver and gold, but what I do have, I give to you. In the name of Jesus Christ the Nazarene, walk. And seizing him by the right hand, he raised him up, and immediately, notice that, immediately, his feet and his ankles were strengthened. And with a leap, he stood upright and began to walk, and he entered the temple with them, walking and leaping and praising God. And all the people saw him walking and praising God, and they were taking note of him as being the one who used to sit at the beautiful gate of the temple to beg alms, and they were filled with wonder and amazement at what had happened.

Beloved, do you see it? This man could not walk, and he was lame from birth. He never walked. Everybody knew that. Everybody had seen that. And by the spoken word of the apostles, they commanded him, you stand up and walk, and immediately he stood up and walked in the presence of many witnesses in a way that was utterly undeniable. They could not deny that he had been lame from birth because they had known that all of their lives, and what happened in front of them also could not be denied. That selfsame man, in a moment, at the word of the command of the apostles, suddenly had an ability that he had never had before, visibly verifiable by multiple witnesses. And so, what we see from those two examples is that the biblical gift, the biblical gift of healing, produced immediate, complete, and undeniable recovery by the spoken word of the healer, of things that were visible, things dealing with human limbs, in the two examples that we chose. Now, beloved, today's so-called faith healers are not doing anything like that, which tells you that whatever they're doing is not the biblical gift practiced by Jesus and the apostles. What do today's so-called faith healers do when they stop asking for money long enough to do it?

They specialize in invisible ailments, like headaches, or back pains, or internal matters that are not subject to visible proof. They screen people before they ever get up to the platform. They never allow visibly deformed and crippled people. I'm using that word crippled. I realize that may not be politically correct now, but I don't mean it in anything other than a descriptive way. They never let people like that up. When they encounter them, they are never able to command a limb to straighten out so that a man who is like this suddenly has the full use of his arm, and to do it in an uncontrolled environment that they do not have complete control over. What do they do?

They work in closed environments that they control with lights, and music, and emotional manipulation, and group dynamics, where they build up a sense of expectation through artificial means, and then call people forward and start waving their hand over them, and with handlers that are behind people so that they fall down and they don't hurt themselves. Supposedly a manifestation of the power of the Holy Spirit. Are you kidding me?

Are you kidding me? First of all, there's nothing like that in Scripture. There's no commands of anything like that to do ministry like that in Scripture, but think about this. Think about this. You're supposedly under the power of the Holy Spirit, but you've got to have somebody behind them to catch them. What, the Spirit can't lower them down gently so that they don't suffer a concussion when they hit their head? And beloved, I've said this multiple times, but it's fitting to say it again.

These things are undeniable. None of them, none of them go to children's hospitals and empty the wards. None of them, none of them go to families that are suffering, looking at their loved ones on their deathbed and raise that person up to physical life and send them home restored to health. They don't do that.

And beloved, let me tell you something. If they could do it, they would do it. You know why? Because look at the fortune that they make with the cheap imitation. If they could do the real thing, think of the exponentially even greater fortune that they could make if they could do the real thing live on camera and bring forth people that are known to be permanently handicapped.

No, no, no. The difference, the difference between the biblical gift of healing and what is practiced today is undeniable, and I want to tell you that God established that distinction so that there would be a clear demarcation between the truth of His Word, the truth revealed through the apostles, and to make it possible for us to distinguish the counterfeit that is offered in its place today. They do not do it because they cannot do it. And if they could do it, they would do it because they would make even greater fortunes. So instead, they practice counterfeits in the name of Christ. People say, well, do these people know that they're deceiving?

Or, you know, the answer to that question in one sense doesn't matter, beloved. Whether they are actively deceiving or they are practicing deception, our point for today is to recognize the distinction between what Scripture describes and what happens today. Now, I realize that they'll make these unverifiable hearsay claims, well, you should hear what's going on in Tanzania, or you should hear what's going on in other places. My third cousin by marriage told me about something that his brother-in-law saw, as if that's some kind of refutation of the point.

No, go into an environment that you don't control. Do a visible miracle on somebody that is known publicly to suffer in this way without music, without lights, without asking for money, and then maybe we can talk. But that's never going to happen because they don't have the biblical gift of healing. As we said, we believe that God can and does heal today, but that He does so by His will often in response to prayer rather than giving the gift of healing to a particular man who is able to exercise that at his unfettered discretion.

The distinction between those two is vast. Now, and so we do not accept the claims of these charismatic teachers to have the gift of biblical healing. We just look at the facts and say you are not doing what Scripture describes here. Maybe you are redefining terms and saying that we are doing healing, but by healing we mean these invisible things in this environment, but that's not the biblical gift. That's not the biblical healing that we see described that was so miraculous that it was utterly undeniable by everybody who saw them and produced amazement and permanent, immediate healing. If I read one more account of somebody who was supposedly healed but it came back five days later, I'm really going to lose my composure because this is a counterfeit. This is not biblical.

This is something else. You say, well, what are we to make of these things? Well, let's just say, just very briefly, there is great, great power in the power of suggestion to desperate people. Why is there a documented known term called placebo effect? People receive something that has no medicinal qualities to it, whatever, but it seems to make them better. Why is that when they take the pill that it makes them better? It's because the mere suggestion shows that it worked on their mind and helped them, but there was nothing chemical about the treatment or anything like that that produced a result.

It was a sugar pill or whatever. And in like manner, we should not underestimate the power of suggestion and the fact that looking at it from the other way, I finally got my mind to kick in on what I was trying to talk about, a placebo effect producing change just by the power of suggestion. Well, we all know the term psychosomatic illness. People have a sense of being ill that's just a product generated by their mind. And so we should not underestimate the power of the mind to generate things that produce changes in headaches or pains or things like that. And so there is a lot of power of suggestion, a group dynamics going on in these mass meetings that Benny Hinn and other charlatans conduct.

I saw recently an account of a son who was severely disabled, confined to a wheelchair, limbs contorted, and she just followed the Benny Hinn Crusades around driving this disabled son thousands of miles to just go from event to event, tragic, sad. And it's incidents like that that make this so vital for us to deal honestly with, to not be gullible. This is a little bit of a crass way to put it, but it communicates, and that's what I'm trying to do today. You know, the message on these things as we look around and we see this happening around us, the message for us is don't be a sucker. Don't be a sucker.

Don't be gullible. Look at scripture. True biblical miracles leave no doubt as to their authenticity, and God uses them according to His will. Next time, Pastor Don Green will look at the limitations of biblical healings as well as the dangers of an over fascination with signs. Tune in then as we continue our series, The Holy Spirit Today, here on The Truth Pulpit.

Right now though, Don's back here in studio with some closing words. My friend, if you enjoy these broadcasts, I am sure that you would enjoy the live stream of our church services from Truth Community Church. We meet Sunday morning at 9 a.m. Eastern time and Tuesday evening at 7 o'clock. You'll find the live stream link prominently displayed at the top of our website, thetruthpulpit.com. And you know, if you do join us like that, drop us a note at the website to let us know. Even your brief note helps us know that our resources are reaching friends who want to grow in God's Word. Thank you, and may Christ be with you. Just visit thetruthpulpit.com, where you can also learn more about podcasts and free CDs of Don's teaching. Again, that's thetruthpulpit.com. I'm Bill Wright, inviting you back next time as Don continues teaching God's people, God's Word, here on The Truth Pulpit.