Can We Believe for a Dead Person to Be Raised?

A dead person was brought back to life on quite a few occasions in Scripture.  Thus, it is natural to wonder about this.  After all, there is that command that Jesus gave to His disciples to “raise the dead” and because we’re promised long life, it might seem logical that a dead person should come back to live it out.

We can expect in general that there will be dead people raised today.  However, you cannot say in any specific case that God has an obligation to resurrect a certain dead person.  In other words, there are no Bible promises you can “claim” that obligate God to bring a certain dead person back to life.

A lot more Christians have made fools of themselves trying to bring back dead people than have ever raised someone from the dead.  Probably emotion has a lot to do with this.  If someone has suddenly lost a loved one, surely that person wants the loved one to be raised from the dead and hopes for a miracle.  But the prayer is one of desperation, not one of faith, since there is no particular Scripture that guarantees the right to do that.

However, raising the dead would fall under the category of (special) “faith” as found in 1 Corinthians 12:8-11.  It requires the gifts of the Spirit in operation to call back someone’s spirit into his body.  This kind of faith is not the general faith that you can use as a believer, but a special faith for something that is otherwise impossible to believe for.  There will probably have to be a simultaneous working of a miracle and/or healing.  Otherwise, the person would just drop dead again after being raised!  The gifts of the Spirit move as God wills, not as we will.  It is up to God when and where He wants to raise a dead person.

Even then, there is another problem.  Your faith cannot override someone else’s will.  If the person to be raised from the dead does not want to live, the person will just die again and you won’t be able to do anything about it.  I knew someone whose wife was raised from the dead but she didn’t want to stay here after having seen heaven.

When he dies, a Christian goes immediately into the presence of the Lord (2 Corinthians 5:8).  Once people get a glimpse of what heaven is like, they can lose their motivation to continue living on the earth in a hurry!  You can’t do anything if they realize that departing and being with Christ is far better and they decide that they don’t want to come back here.  Even Paul had trouble deciding what he wanted to do at one point.  Philippians 1:22-24: “But if I live in the flesh, this is the fruit of my labour: yet what I should choose I wot [know] not.  For I am in a strait betwixt two, having a desire to depart, and to be with Christ; which is far better: Nevertheless to abide in the flesh is more needful for you.”

One consistent pattern is that the dead people who were raised in Scripture were not aged folks who had lived out their lives.  A Christian who had run his race would not be motivated to come back.  A younger person might have more motivation if he realizes that God had more plans for him that were yet unfulfilled.

Now what about the command to raise the dead in Matthew 10:8?  It is certain that Jesus was not telling them to go to the local cemetery and “raise up” a congregation.  The raising of certain dead people was to be a sign to people that Jesus was who He said He was.  The Great Commission includes a blanket statement about healing the sick but it does not include one about raising the dead.  In other occasions when Jesus sent people out, He did not include a command to raise the dead, although there was always a command to heal the sick.  The authority given to them in Matthew 10:1 did not include the raising of the dead, but it did include the healing of the sick.

Therefore, we can lay hands on the sick in faith, with or without feeling any urge to do so.  We cannot lay hands on the dead in faith without a special directive from the Holy Spirit.  You might reason that there is no downside risk because the person won’t get any deader if you lay hands on him and nothing happens.  However, you risk potential embarrassment in front of others and a cause for them to stumble.  Also, you don’t want to practice being in presumption beyond what the Word allows you to do in faith.

I know several people who have raised a dead person.  I’m married to one of them.  We were caring for a certain person in the church that we were pastoring and that person just stopped breathing and “went” in front of us.  My wife went over and said firmly, “Not on my watch!” and commanded her to come back to life, and she did.  In this case, as is the case sometimes, the “gift of faith” rose up immediately.  Unless you know the Lord is in it, though, you need to pray and find out if He wants you to raise the person.  If He does, He’ll let you know.  If He doesn’t, don’t try it without Him out of desperation or pressure from the family.  I know someone else who raised her own blue stillborn child back to life, and someone else who raised someone who died in the middle of his service.  In a farily well-known incident, a dead baby was raised in front of a crowd of people.  I knew someone else who raised several dead people during his ministry.  So this DOES happen today, but it’s the exception, not the rule.  The local funeral homes need not worry that the local Christians will put them out of business.

As for God’s promise of long life, two things apply.  First, the person may have been engaging in practices that can lead to premature death, both in the natural and in the spiritual realm.  No one who died from his own foolishness was ever raised from the dead in the Bible.  Second, it was the person’s responsibility to believe for long life.  You can’t “believe you receive” on behalf of another person.  Therefore, claiming Psalm 91 and similar Scriptures on the dead person’s behalf is futile.

The exception would be your child, grandchild, etc., as the Lord will let you exercise authority on his behalf due to the generational blessing that is on that child because you are a believer.

Because the gifts of the Spirit are for today, there will be dead people raised in our day.  These gifts operate as the Spirit wills, not as we will, so we cannot “make” the Holy Spirit raise a particular individual from the dead.  If He does move on someone to raise the dead person, thank God!

However, if we could all believe for any dead person to be raised, you could live on the earth forever because we’d just raise you from the dead when you died.  When you later died again, we’d just raise you again, and so on.  We clearly do not have the right to live on the earth forever in our current mortal bodies, so there cannot be a blanket promise in Scripture that says that you can always raise the dead!

False Raisings of the Dead?

In some cases, a “dead” person who was raised may merely have been unconscious.   You would not be the first to think that an unconscious person was actually raised from the dead.

Mark 9:26-27:
And the spirit cried, and rent him sore, and came out of him: and he was as one dead; insomuch that many said, He is dead.
But Jesus took him by the hand, and lifted him up; and he arose.

The many who said that the boy was dead would have assumed that Jesus raised the boy from the dead, but it doesn’t appear that He actually did.

Most of the “raising the dead” cases I’ve heard of involve someone who died but very shortly afterward came back.  I suppose one test you could apply to distinguish someone who died from someone who was just unconscious is whether he had left his body and seen heaven or hell.  (This assumes that the person is coherent enough to talk afterward.)  While I suppose you couldn’t rule out hallucinations, claiming to have been in heaven or hell would be a good indicator that the person really was dead.  I only brought up the hallucination aspect because some people have “died” and reported things that we know contradict the Bible.  A couple authors claim to have seen a Mormon (Latter-Day Sinners) version of heaven.  Of course, they may be fabrications (like the Book of Mormon itself) instead of actual hallucinations.  But in any event, we have to judge all alleged experiences using the Word.

Another good test would be whether a doctor wrote out a death certificate!  A friend who is now with the Lord had not one but TWO death certificates written out with his name on them before being prayed back to life both times!

If someone is not breathing and has no heartbeat, the person is clinically dead, but doctors (or Christians) can sometimes bring such a person back before the person is irreversibly brain-dead.  That was the case for the person my wife raised up.  So bringing such a person back can count as raising the dead, as long as you understand that a doctor could also “raise the dead person” if he has the right equipment and/or training and can respond within minutes.  However, there are ALSO cases of brain-dead people being raised from the dead, including one notable case in Africa where a man had already been chemically embalmed!  (Now that’s DEAD!)

While raising a dead person would be a good source of notoriety, I’d want to be as sure as I could that the person was really dead instead of unconscious before saying anything.