Objection: God Has Never Healed an Amputee

This has become a favorite go-to argument against divine healing, and the statement is just plain false.  Peter “amputated” a man’s ear with his sword and God, through Jesus, healed that amputee.

Luke 22:50-51:
And one of them smote the servant of the high priest, and cut off his right ear.
And Jesus answered and said, Suffer ye thus far.  And he touched his ear, and healed him.

If God did it then, He can do it today.  God and Jesus have not changed, so their willingness to heal amputees cannot have changed either.  The issue is what we can believe, not what God can do.  He can do anything.

Mark 9:23:
Jesus said unto him, If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth.

If all things are possible, healing amputees is possible.  The fact that we haven’t seen it yet does not make it impossible.  I look forward to seeing this happen someday and proving the scoffers wrong.

Meanwhile, we have seen two cases at this writing where a person’s leg was about to be amputated where God healed the person just in time and the amputation was canceled.  For a person who has not yet had an amputation, that is the better way to go!  I know of two other cases where a person’s foot was turned into “hamburger” in an accident.  The doctors told one of them he would have to have the foot amputated, and he refused, stating that God was healing the foot.  God DID heal the foot and it ended up perfectly normal like the other one.  In the other case, the man was healed instantly after a “prayer cloth” our church had anointed was thrown at him (literally).  That man was discharged from the hospital that he had been airlifted to that night and he drove his mother home from the hospital!

I am aware of a story of an amputee getting a new leg centuries ago, but I cannot vouch for it personally.  Skeptics assert that the man just “hid” his leg and never had it amputated in the first place, then declared a miracle.  I honestly don’t know or care what really happened because I based my doctrine on the Bible, not on experience.

When Jesus healed the amputee, God had never healed an amputee before as far as we know.  That was not a valid reason that it couldn’t happen.  I’d never heard of anyone being texted back to life before it happened to someone in Missouri.  (The text just said, “Get up.”)  The same preacher who did that saw an eyeball form in an empty socket and the person was able to see.  There is no account of that particular thing happening in Scripture, but it’s happened in our day with at least one other preacher as well.

Never limit God just because you don’t know of any modern case of something.  And in the case of amputation, there already IS a precedent in the ministry of the One who said that we would do the works that He did and greater (John 14:12).