Descent into Stupidity
The following account is a guided tour into the Grand Canyon of Stupidity. Man’s religious mental reasoning will be our tour guide. Notice that the whole descent starts with one bad foundation – experience, which is then coupled with a well-meaning desire to comfort people. This should show you the danger of using anything but the Word as a foundation for doctrine as well as the danger of compromising what you believe to give false comfort to the bereaved or avoid criticism. And now, let the ignorance begin!
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Joe and Lisa just lost their little girl Carla to leukemia. They are fine Christians who attend a “faith church.” Joe and Lisa are shook up and don’t know why this happened to them. Now they are angry at God and at the preacher who told them that Christ provided healing for everyone. The pastor wants to console them and have them not be angry at God. So he makes them feel better by telling them it must be a rare exceptional case where it was God’s perfect plan in His sovereignty to take their little girl. He has to blame the results on God because the alternative – that any failure had to be at man’s end – is too painful to contemplate, especially because the pastor had laid hands on Carla for healing himself. Either he would look bad or he would be putting the “blame” on Joe and Lisa, which could get them really upset, which could cause them to leave the church. Joe and Lisa are still grieving, but at least all of them find “comfort” in the idea that this was all due to a decision that Heaven made. However, the pastor has just established that everything he was teaching about faith doesn’t necessarily work every time, just most of the time, so no one can ever be totally sure about healing anymore. The pastor compromised the Word to please man, and we’ll see that this takes things down a slippery slope in a hurry.
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So the church no longer teaches that God forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases (Psalm 103:3). Instead, they basically say that God forgives all your sins and heals almost all of your diseases, and it’s usually His will to do it, but He makes exceptions in His sovereignty because He’s God. They still say as a church that they “believe that divine healing is for today” because they believe that God does heal today in some cases. That ambiguous “faith” statement keeps the faith hard-liners happy for now.
Now Ned the Carpenter comes down with a serious heart condition. Ned would like to be healed, but he can’t be totally sure that God wants to heal him because there is always that slight chance he could be an exception like Carla, so he might have to stay sovereignly sick. Ned is not feeling any better after having hands laid on him, and he quickly concludes that he, too, is one of the exceptions. He stays sick and continues to worsen.
---THIS WAY DOWN--->
The pastor can’t make Ned feel bad either, and he doesn’t want to make himself feel bad, since after all he prayed for Ned in front of everybody last week. So he reasons that Ned was another sovereign exception. Obviously, he needs a nice pastoral answer to Ned that won’t make him feel bad for lacking faith. So the solution must be to lower people’s expectations. If they expect nothing, they’ll never be disappointed! Now he has some pesky verses that he will have to explain away, for example, the ones in James 5:14-15 about praying the prayer of faith for the sick. The trouble is that you can only pray the prayer of faith when you know the will of God with 100% certainty, because faith is being certain of what you don’t see. It is the assurance, not the hope-so, of things unseen (Hebrews 11:1). Now that the church has established that God can make exceptions in His sovereignty, the elders cannot pray the prayer of faith for ANY sick person, because there’s always that chance that the person could be a sovereign exception. The elders start playing it safe and praying for “endurance” rather than healing, and praying for God to guide the surgeons’ hands, and so on, just so that no one gets disappointed. They cheer up the sick with small talk and watch game shows or reality shows or possibly some lewd comedies (that one wonders how a Christian could watch) with them for a while before they leave. They now do everything except what God said to do – anoint them with oil in the name of the Lord and pray the prayer of faith so that the Lord raises them up! So what do they do with what is stated as an explicit command in James? They reason that James’s instruction was only intended for the “early church” (whatever that is, since there is no “early church dispensation” supportable by Scripture) before the gifts of healings “passed away with the last apostle.” They had some help on that one – it was easy to find people who supported that view on the internet.
<---CAUTION: STEEP GRADE AHEAD---
Now Doreen is having issues with her eyes, and she would like to believe that she can receive her healing when she prays. But she knows that God made sovereign exceptions for Carla and Ned, so she cannot be sure that God doesn’t have a mysterious reason for her to lose her eyesight. She would like to believe, but she can’t muster up a full assurance of her healing. And wouldn’t you know it, Doreen doesn’t get healed either. Her testimony is that she still loves God even though God won’t heal her. She takes solace in Christian songs and articles in which others sing and write about loving God when He doesn’t heal, too. Now she feels comforted even though she can’t work anymore because she can barely see.
No one at the church believes he receives when he prays anymore. They reason that they can’t do that unless it's God’s will, and since they can no longer be 100% sure that healing is God’s will for them, they figure that they will have to pray and ask God for a direct revelation that it is His will to heal a specific person before proceeding. And they never get such a direct revelation apart from the Word.
So now Garrett wants to be healed of a worsening asthma condition, so everyone prays to get a direct revelation of whether Garrett should be healed or Garrett should stay sovereignly sick. Trouble is, God doesn’t give out direct words like that because He gave us His general words in the Bible that apply to everyone. So there is no answer to the prayer for God’s input regarding Garrett (except for what is already settled in heaven in God’s Word). In the absence of a direct word, no one is sure what God wants for Garrett, so no one prays in faith. Garrett just trusts in God’s loving sovereignty and believes that He will “permit” whatever is best for him, though He wishes God would decide to heal him because he’s spending a fortune on puffers. Garrett stays sick, and the only comfort he gets comes from borrowing Doreen’s Christian CDs and magazines that talk about loving God when He doesn’t heal.
---DANGER: SHIFTING SAND ON TRAIL--->
Now Lucy isn’t getting healed of anemia and Jack isn’t getting healed of tinnitus and partial deafness. It appears that God’s “sovereign exceptions” occur more often than they thought. It seems that healing is the exception and staying sovereignly sick is the standard. There aren’t many people getting healed supernaturally anymore at the “faith church” – most of the people get prayed over and then have to go the hospital anyway and suffer difficult treatments and operations just like the sinners. So they reason that maybe these days God is more interested in giving surgeons wisdom than healing the sick directly. After all, God invented medicine, didn’t He? In ancient Israel, He had to cut them some breaks because that was before modern hospitals and before nationalized health care plans could take care of everything. So now miracles are taught as exceptional and sickness as normal, but they still “believe in miracles” because God could choose to do them. In fact, these days sin is pretty normal at the church, too, so maybe that’s the sovereign will of God. Oops, no, they know better than to judge God’s will on sin by the experience of those around them! Sin is wrong, but sickness is different – they know God’s will based on the experience of those around them.
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Ned dies and the preacher has to come up with a way to comfort the grieving family. So he tells people that God “took” Ned because He knew that some people would get saved at his funeral. They reason that it was obviously not God’s will to heal Ned, because if He had wanted to, He could have done it, being God Almighty.
Now Harold contracts Lyme disease. Not only does Harold not know any way to be sure that God isn’t making a sovereign exception for him, but now he fears that the God preached in that “faith church” might “call him home” next so that even more people can get saved at his funeral! Harold isn’t happy with the church or with God at this point, and his walk with the Lord starts to cool off. After all, it’s hard to get excited about Him anymore now that He doesn’t seem like He’s willing to help us all the time and because He’s now sacrificing Christians so that others can get saved. Gee, didn’t the Mayans do something like that? It was more exciting thinking that He loved us enough to heal us. Being sovereignly sick is a drag. But maybe they should condemn themselves when they want to be healed, since that is so selfish and me-oriented. What makes them think they’re better than Carla and Ned, who both loved the Lord a lot? Why should God heal Harold when Garrett is now confined to his bed and Doreen needs a service dog that occasionally gets into fights with the non-service dogs that people brazenly bring in to the big-box stores? After all, Garrett and Doreen have been Christians a lot longer and have served faithfully in the church for years.
---ROCKY BOTTOM---
No one at that church has any guarantee of divine healing anymore. After a while, they think cynically that most of those healing crusade guys are probably charlatans and frauds anyway. They’re glad they know better than to go to a healing crusade and expect healing in their bodies! When God doesn’t heal, they follow the advice of one writer and “bow before His mystery and majesty,” reverently worshiping The God Who Doesn’t Always Heal. They now know better than to accept that “simplified” gospel at the crusade that declares that healing is for everybody. That’s just insensitive – just think how that makes Joe, Lisa, Ned’s family, Doreen, Garrett, Lucy, Jack, and the rest of them feel! If God isn’t making sovereign exceptions, the failure has to be on man’s end. That’s an uncomfortable thought, and after all, they’re still trying to find some way to comfort all these people!
---ONE WAY OUT--->
The only way that church will ever get out of this canyon of unbelief is if the pastor will start reading and meditating on healing Scriptures rather than basing his theology on people’s experiences, and preach the Word instead of giving people false comfort that contradicts the Word. The people must find out what the Bible standard is and move up in that direction rather than settling for making their lives sad copies of someone else’s bad experience. If there is even ONE person God would make an exception for, NOBODY can pray the prayer of faith for healing. We’re not unsympathetic to people’s experiences, but you always base doctrine on the Bible, never on experiences, and never in an attempt to make someone feel better. That is, unless you like where this trail went.