Big Healing Book - God Is Not a Vending Machine

Objection: God Is Not a Vending Machine

Seriously now, when is the last time you actually read a statement by a faith teacher that said that God is a vending machine and that you should use Him as such? I have yet to see in print anything like the following: “God is a vending machine. Just put in your healing formulas and get healing out.” Of course God is not a vending machine. But He is bound by His covenant. If you believe that you receive your already-paid-for healing, God would have to break His covenant to not allow that healing to manifest in your body. That is because God bases His dealings with man on His covenant. It is not because He is a vending machine. A vending machine could break or just eat your money without giving you anything or keep spitting bills back out at you without accepting them, but God can NEVER fail, making Him far BETTER than a vending machine!

The only reason people why make this objection is that they do not understand that healing is a covenant right. They think that you are demanding something from God when you pray to receive healing. Nothing could be further from the truth. You are not demanding anything. You are receiving something. You demand something that is not yet offered to you. You receive something that is already offered to you. Jesus made healing available to you by bearing your sicknesses in His body. There is no need for you to bear something that He bore for you. He suffered sickness so that you do not have to suffer sickness.

Some object that a vending machine lets you live any old way, so we should not think that God will just “vend” what you want regardless of your walk with Him. But as you will see elsewhere in this book, unless you are in some kind of serious, willful, unrepentant disobedience, God will not bar you from accessing the blessings that He already granted you in Christ. These blessings are based on grace, not works, a fact understood by relatively few Christian churches at this writing. If God only gave us what our works strictly deserve, we’d all be in hell and there would be no such thing as grace.

God is far better than a vending machine for another reason. A vending machine does not care whether you get a candy bar or not. It just gives you one if you pay for it and hit the right button. God, on the other hand, wants to see you walk in your healing. He gave you His Spirit so that you could know the things that He freely gave you (1 Corinthians 2:12). God does not want you to be in the dark about any of your covenant rights. He is actively involved in trying to help you understand His way of receiving healing by faith. He wants you to prosper and be in health (3 John 2).

There is another important difference between God and a vending machine. With a vending machine, you have to put in some of the money you worked for before you get anything out. With God, you are receiving something for free that Jesus worked for so that you could have it. So the Bible example of a God-style vending machine would be one where the price of all items (to you, at least) is zero – just select what you want and get it! Your faith does not have to put any money in – faith just presses the buttons to get what God already offers for free.