Objection: Gifts of Healings Can Refer to Extraordinary Medical Skill

This is no better than the parallel argument I’ve also heard that tongues are extraordinary abilities to learn languages.  Extraordinary indeed; the night before I wrote this section, I spoke some words in a Native American language that I’ve never learned, and one of the few hundred people on earth who still speak that language was present and understood what I said.  (On another occasion, someone else who didn’t know that man’s language prayed in his language, and he started believing in tongues that day!)  While someone may indeed have a natural endowment to learn languages, the gift of tongues allows the speaker to supernaturally speak in a language he never learned!

We can see from various instructions in 1 Corinthians 14 that when you speak in tongues, your mind does not understand what you’re saying.  Thus, it is absolutely certain that “tongues” refer to supernatural utterance and not languages people learned, in which case their understandings “would be fruitful” as far as what they were saying.  This thought will come into play in an important way below as we discuss gifts of healings.

1 Corinthians 12:7 says that the manifestation of the Spirit is given to each person for the profit of all just before “gifts of healings” are listed in 1 Corinthians 12:9.  So like tongues, this is a spiritual endowment for believers, not a natural gifting.  An unbeliever might have unusual medical skill.  This could be a God-given talent, but that is different from a spiritual gift.  A doctor can use his gift at will, but spiritual gifts only function as the Spirit wills (1 Corinthians 12:11).

1 Corinthians 12:28-30 lists job functions that God has set in the church, among them “miracles” and “gifts of healings.”  This is very obviously talking about something unique to the Church, while extraordinary medical skill exists both in and outside the Body of Christ.  An unbeliever can become a doctor without God “setting” him into that position within the Body of Christ.

While doctors are good and we are certainly not against them as believers, they usually practice medicine in offices and hospitals, not in church in the middle of services!  We see instructions given at length in 1 Corinthians 14 about the proper use of tongues, interpretation and prophecy in church services (and by implication other “revelation gifts,” as Paul talks about what to do if something is revealed to a prophet during a service in 1 Corinthians 14:30).  Gifts of healings are in the same list as tongues, interpretation and prophecy, so they are clearly related to a function of Christ’s Church (whether inside or outside of a formal church building), not some secular ability.

Since we have already demonstrated that tongues are supernatural above, and tongues are in the same list of manifestations of the Spirit as gifts of healings, it would be unscholarly and unreasonable to insist that “gifts of healings” are something natural when the other things in the list are clearly supernatural.

So Paul could not have referred to extraordinary medical skill in this chapter.