Objection: Faith Teaching Reduces a Personal God to a Set of Formulas
Another way to word this would be, “Faith teaching purports that God has established certain spiritual laws and is obligated to abide by them.” Ironically, I would not be surprised to see some such objectors go out on the street and hand out salvation tracts that state that there are four spiritual laws that show you how to get to heaven! The Bible DOES lay out a number of spiritual laws such as the law of sowing and reaping, the law of sin and death, the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus, and so on.
If governments make laws, have we reduced the people who made them to a set of laws? No, there are lawgivers and then there are the laws they give. We would all agree in the natural that even the lawgivers must abide by their own laws, although they are not the laws.
Likewise, God has established principles that work. Many healing objectors have the notion, “He makes them; He can break them!” With natural laws, this is true – miracles are by definition actions contrary to normal natural laws. However, when it comes to His Word, God has exalted His Word above His name (Psalm 138:2) and forever settled it in heaven (Psalm 119:89). God cannot break His own Word by acting contrary to it. The fact that He is sovereign does not mean that He is an outlaw.
Wouldn’t it be awful if God decided that the law of lift will work on a case-by-case basis? If it did, some airplanes could fall out of the sky and others would make it to their destination. Who would want to fly if he wasn’t SURE that the law of lift would apply 100% of the time? In the spirit realm, God has established laws that we can count on even more. A natural law can be superseded by a miracle, but a spiritual law is absolute. When God says something, we can take it to the bank (even if we have to fly there).
The supposition that God can break His own SPIRITUAL laws in His sovereignty is a horribly dangerous error made by healing objectors. If you follow that path, you won’t be able to trust anything that God put in His Word – after all, He might sovereignly supersede it! So when He says that He “heals all your diseases” (Psalm 103:3), that’s taken by the objector to mean, “unless He has a sovereign reason to do otherwise.” This reduces all of God’s activity to His caprice, so there is no reason to believe that you will be saved just because you believe that God raised Jesus from the dead and you call Him Lord with your mouth. God might break His Word in His sovereignty and send you to hell anyway. No one will ever be able to pray the prayer of faith for anything because no one can know if God will keep His Word or make an exception to it. Sadly, there are churches that have believed for years that healing is in the atonement that have now officially started to backpedal on that issue – for the very reason that they were duped into thinking that God can make exceptions in His sovereignty!
Walking on God’s Word is surer than walking on granite. If God does not keep His Word at ALL times, He is a liar and He is just as unfit to rule the universe as Satan. The fact that God always keeps His Word does not reduce Him to a set of principles, but it means that the principles in His Word are inviolate and that you can act on them and get His promised results 100% of the time.
Faith preachers are often accused of being occultic and New Age-y because they supposedly just want to work formulas rather than relate to God personally. For example, if we command sickness to leave in the name of Jesus without praying about it, they think that we have just operated a formula and left God out of it, failing to realize that we believe that Jesus backs His name when we use it, as He said that He would. It is not the formula doing the healing but rather Jesus Himself. He goes to work after we do our part, which is to take authority in His name. So we’re not leaving Him out of anything. If you take the equally valid route of believing that you receive your healing when you pray, you can’t have left God out of it because you can’t pray to a formula any more than you could pray to the law of gravity.
The truth is that God is a personal God who has established principles (you can even use the word formulas instead if you like). For example, you can think about the Word and speak it a lot and prosper in everything you do and have good success, or you can veg out in front of your television all evening and not prosper in anything you do. God established the principles, but a wise person will live on the good side of His principles.
I would sooner believe that God runs the universe by certain laws that He has shown us than to believe that He has no absolute laws and so that you can never be sure of what He will do. When you realize that you can ALWAYS trust God to keep His Word, you gain MORE respect for Him, not less.