I believe that God heals. I believe that the Lord, in his mercy, can do wondrous miracles. I believe that a man or woman can be healed from the most frightening, hopeless illnesses. I don’t think its common, but I believe it happens. That being said, I don’t believe any one person has a gift for healing, or that there is such thing as a healing ministry that actually heals anyone on a regular or semi-regular basis. Furthermore, I think the extreme vast majority of all so-called faith healers who hold huge crusades and rallies are all charlatans, and I don’t believe anyone is ever healed at those things.
Much of the reason for this is theological. At this point I won’t name their collective names so as not to detract from the point, but when I survey all the big name and many smaller names who are in the game and claiming to perform amazing miracles, I am struck by the non-coincidence that none of these men are sound in the faith. Instead, what you have is a rag-tag collection of prosperity-gospel heretics who are fleecing the flock in exchange for some impartation of very bad theology . While everyone in this crowd has a different tweak on how they preach and emphasize the gospel of health and wealth, I would consider it a monstrous, demonic belief and the calling card of this particular brand of heretic.
In the scriptures, we see that whenever a miracle was done it was to support the message that was being preached, which invariably pointed to Christ and was always indirectly the repentance and the forgiveness of sins in the finished work of Christ. Heretics didn’t get to perform miracles. In the same way we don’t consider healings from witch doctors and shamans as being legitimate miracles from God, so likewise do should we disregard these faith-healing prosperity preachers, whose message is just as useful and sanctified as the shamans is. So whenever you hear some prosperity preacher telling you that you can get your miracle if you send him 10 bucks as a seed offering, or whatever, you know this is someone is in the process of slaughtering the sheep and who is not from God, and therefore does not have God’s power to do miracles through his name and through the shed blood of his Son.
But there is another, less theological and more practical point to consider. These men claim to have healed hundreds of thousands of people of every terrible, wasting, incurable illness and physical calamity known to man, but there is no proof. I’m not the first person to suggest this, but why not open up the crusade to journalists and other medical professionals? I’m going to pick on one person in this post, and that is Daniel King. Daniel King is a traveling evangelist/miracle worker who came out to speak to Fort McMurray a few years ago at the behest of a local church. When he’s not preaching convoluted messages about the gnostic secrets of Obed Edom, he has massive rallies where he claims that says he has healed thousands of people from ailments such as cancer, blindness, deafness, infertility, HIV and Aids, crippled legs, Down Syndrome, tumours, and every other affliction that a man could be burdened with.
So why not contact CNN, BBC, the New York Times, or some other major players in the industry and invite them out to the event? Invite them to bring their high definition cameras, recording equipment, broadband connection, and grant them an all- access pass to be on stage, back stage, or mingling with the crowds and being wherever they want to be. Let them come with their equipment, their manpower, their sceptics, and then promote the hell out of this thing. Run full-page ads in every newspaper for a month. Rent TV time to run ads during primetime television. Start an on-line media blitz using every social-media means you can muster.
And then start the revival.
And then start the healings.
You could invite the best and brightest of the scientific world to attend- men and women from the most renowned universities and think-tanks in the world. You could also invite the most hardened sceptics to observe and interact with the crowd and with those being healed. They could stream the entire thing, with commentary, to hundreds of millions of people around the world who could then witness these amazing miracles being done in the name of God.
After all, Jesus and the apostles did their miracles publicly. Their miracles were done to believers and non-believers, in the presence of believers and non-believers, and the reality of their healing was without dispute. In the scriptures, no one was questioning that the miracles had taken place. Instead the sceptics and unbelievers were left grappling for explanations as to how this could be done. Can Daniel King not do the same thing? The doctors could examine the people right before they go on stage, the journalists could talk to their friends and families and their own family physicians, and then Daniel King could do his thing and heal this person who has so much faith. Once healed, the doctors could examine the newly minted recipient of miracles. They could run some quick tests and see what physical transmogrification has taken place, confirm for the world that these indeed were all legitimate healing, and then after that they could stick around for a few days after to do follow up and make sure all the proof is in good order, which would then lend even more credibility to what has transpired.
Wouldn’t that blow the world up? Wouldn’t that set the world on fire for God? Invite the New Atheist out to the party and see what happens when the power of God and his miraculous healing falls on people in a way that has them disbelieving their own eyes. Wouldn’t that absolutely shake to the core the spiritual state of the world? They could put it up on YouTube and the Atheists, Agnostics, Muslim, Hindus, and every other non-Christian group out there would witness first hand the power of the true and living God, confronting them in a way that they could never deny, and opening the floodgates to give an unbelieving world something to believe in?
We could take this out of the context of secrecy and suspicion. Instead of telling people about some guy you know who know a guy who knows a missionary who raised someone from the dead somewhere “in Africa”, we could say “God is all powerful, and his son Jesus Christ proved he was God by being raised from the dead. And as a sign of his power and great might, we are going to perform some miracles, so you can see the power of the one true God, and these miracles will confirm our message and the gospel we preach, which is that whoever repentant of their sins and outs their faith in Christ will be saved.” and then in front of hundreds of millions of people- Daniel King can do what he does best- he can perform these miraculous acts of healing, in the same way and same vein as the thousands upon thousands he has claimed in the name of Jesus to have done.
What do you say, Daniel King and the rest of the faith healing gang? You’ve been quoting us John 14:12 for years, and saying that we can do greater things than Jesus. What on earth could possibly be stopping you from implementing this and reaching half the world for Christ in one, single, solitary day?
