Objection: Divine Healing Teaching is Gnosticism Because It Presumes Special Secret Knowledge Is Needed to Be Healed

I confess that I have sinned – I am not sin-free.  There, I have just proved to you that I am not a Gnostic, because Gnostics fit into the categories in 1 John 1:8 and 1 John 1:10, denying that they had any sin.  I fit the category of 1 John 1:9 instead – I just confessed (Greek word homologeo, to say the same thing) the same thing that God says by telling you that I have sinned.  So I am not one of those people with no truth in me like the Gnostics in 1 John 1 – I am one of those people who is cleansed from all unrighteousness by the blood of Jesus.  So I’m not a cultist, and neither is anyone else who is washed in the blood of Jesus.  Referring to divine healing teachers as cultists is an old and unfair scare tactic.

Some objectors will cede the point above and will not claim that people like me are the same as the Gnostics in John’s day and the misnamed “Christian Scientists” of our day.  Instead, they will just claim that we are “neo-Gnostics” because like the Gnostics, we have secrets without which you can’t enjoy life as you should.

Well, if anything about divine healing is a secret, I am doing everything I possibly can to get that secret out to the entire world.  That’s the whole purpose of this book!  I don’t want divine healing to be a secret.  It’s a secret only in the sense that it isn’t preached in many circles at all.  When it is preached, it is usually preached incorrectly in one way or another.  I am doing my part to fix that.

Another reason that this objection is silly is that it’s like saying, “Teaching that you can put down fleshly habits by walking in the Spirit is neo-Gnosticism because it involves knowledge that many people don’t have.  It must be cultish because it’s a secret – if it weren’t, a lot more people would be living in victory over the flesh.”  In my experience, not many people have a revelation of Galatians 5:16, which states the above concept for overcoming the flesh.  But that doesn’t make it cultish secret knowledge – it’s just Bible knowledge with which few people have renewed their minds.  The same could be set for a lot of other areas, if not most of them, given that so few people read their Bibles the way they should.