Objection: Death Is the Ultimate Healing for the Christian, So Healing Prayers Are Sometimes Answered by Someone’s Death

This is probably taught in some Giving False Comfort 101 class in seminaries around the world, given how much this tired old line gets repeated.  The idea is that when a Christian dies, he is completely healed, so he DOES get his healing after all when people were praying for his healing.

But this argument is ridiculous for at least three reasons.

First, if we assume that “healing prayers” are not prayed with the intention of someone dying to get healed, it is silly to claim that prayers for healing that were clearly intended to stop the person from dying were answered by having the person die.  That is clearly a case of unanswered prayer, not God’s answer to prayer.

I suppose that in some cases someone might actually pray for the death of a spouse because the person secretly has eyes for someone else or just doesn’t like that spouse.  That indicates another problem that the person really needs to sort out with God!  But in the vast majority of cases, the people praying are praying that death will be delayed, not hastened.

The usual “twist” is that God supposedly heard your prayer, but chose to “answer” it in a different way from what you had in mind.  That is just plain lame.  If you prayed for someone to live and the person died, God did not answer your prayer AT ALL.  I realize that I will never get to teach Giving False Comfort 101 because I say such things, but I have to stick with the Word rather than trying to please men.

Second, the objection is factually false!  Death does NOT produce healing for a Christian’s body!  When you go to be with Jesus in this age, you are “absent from the body and present with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:8).  Your body is NOT healed at that time!  You aren’t even IN your body at that time!  Otherwise, you couldn’t be absent from it!  Can you see that?  The deceased person does not have a healed body, or any body at all of the type we are used to.

When Jesus returns, your old body will be transformed into a new immortal body, and you will be reunited with “your body” at that time.  Your new body will not be subject to sickness, pain or death.  Your new body will be incapable of getting healed because it will be incapable of getting sick in the first place!  It would be too much of a stretch for me to say that your body, which would have already been oxidized slowly in the ground or oxidized quickly by cremation, is “healed” in any meaningful sense.  It will be replaced (or changed), not healed.  So no “healing” occurs even at that point.

Third, death is described as an enemy – the last enemy that will be defeated (1 Corinthians 15:26).  God does not answer prayers by deliberately handing you over to your enemy!  That would be no better than having David pray for victory in battle, then having God “answer” his prayer by handing him over to the Philistines to get killed, thus securing “victory” because David would never face Philistines again after he was gone.

I don’t belittle the fact that a deceased Christian is in a better place where there is no sickness or crying or pain.  But his decease was most certainly not God’s “answer” to prayers for healing!