Big Healing Book - Healing and Miracles Are Not for This Current Dispensation

Objection: Healing and Miracles Are Not for This Current Dispensation

This requires a belief that we are in a different “dispensation” than the one that applied to the “Early Church.” Yet since those days, there have been no new covenants, no new doctrines, and no change in the way that God deals with men. We are in the same “dispensation” now as the people in the book of Acts, whether we take advantage of it or not. The Bible nowhere indicates that miracles would cease “when the last apostle died,” as is commonly said today.

Those who make this argument somehow believe that God changed the way that He dealt with men after the “last apostle” died. Supposedly, the signs and wonders were to convince men that Jesus was the Messiah, but now we supposedly don’t need these proofs because we have the New Testament. The usual “proof-text” quoted in connection with this is 1 Corinthians 13:8-10: “Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when the perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.” This is often used to “prove” that the manifestations of the Spirit are not for today. The false assumption is that the completion of the New Testament was when the perfect came.

Well, let’s see what else will happen when the perfect comes. See verse 12: “For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” Do you know everything now? Is everything clear to you? If so, I’d like to meet you, because I’ve never met anyone who knows everything as well as God knows him. If we do not know even as we also are known, the perfect has not come yet. And if the perfect has not yet come, prophecies, tongues, words of knowledge, miracles, healings, and so on, are still for us today.

Also, please note Paul’s words in verse 12: “Now I know in part, but then shall I know even as also I am known.” Paul said he would know fully when the perfect had come! (He was known perfectly by God, so to “know even as he was known” means to know perfectly.) Although Paul wrote a little under a third of the New Testament (based on words), even he did not know perfectly! If Paul’s writings of the New Testament were the “perfect” coming, Paul should have known most things, if not everything, since he wrote so much of it! So Paul said that even he knew imperfectly.

Because Paul said that he would know fully when the perfect came in verse 12, we cannot set the date of the “perfect” coming with the settling of the New Testament canon, which did not take place during Paul’s lifetime! That alone proves that Paul could not have meant the completion of the New Testament and agreement upon its constituent books. Paul had to have been referring to a future time in glory and not his present lifetime. Just think about this for a minute. If Paul could know everything when then New Testament was completed, He would have been in heaven a while without knowing everything, but suddenly, when the New Testament was completed on the earth, he instantly knew everything! That’s ridiculous. This matter alone completely settles this issue!

The fact that Paul did not know fully doesn’t mean that anything he wrote is wrong. It just means that there are things that he didn’t know that we won’t know until the perfect comes. Paul talks of a man who went to heaven and heard things that it is not lawful for a man to utter. We don’t know what things these are, so we can’t know perfectly in this lifetime. If we could, we would know these things that are not lawful for a man to utter, too. But how can you know them if no one can say them?

A man with some Greek skills stated that Paul could not have been talking about Christ’s coming because “the perfect” is a neuter construction instead of a masculine one. He said that if Christ had been the subject, a masculine construction would have been used. I agree with that, but disagree that Christ is the subject. The subject is “the perfect” or perfect things, not Christ Himself, and “the perfect” would also be correctly written as a neuter construction in Greek. You cannot prove any distinction from it.

The Corinthians obviously did not believe that the moving of the Spirit would pass away before Christ returned, as 1 Corinthians 1:7 reads, “So that ye come behind in no gift; waiting for the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ:” If miracles were to pass away before Christ’s return, Paul would have had to revise his language to, “Ye should have abandoned spiritual gifts because ye believe that the coming of Christ is nigh, for we know that the gifts will cease before He returneth.”

The Bible never states that anything would change when the “last apostle” died. That is a pure fabrication of men, the sort that the Pharisees made up, that makes the Word of God void by man’s tradition. We are in the same Church Age today as the people in the book of Acts!

To say that divine healing is not for today is to slice the Great Commission in half. The Great Commission becomes only “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.” The part about “They shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover” becomes the Great Omission. This means that Jesus wants you to preach to the unsaved under tougher conditions than the apostles, since you won’t have any signs following you. It takes more faith to believe that the Great Commission could be bisected than it does to believe for healing!

If divine healing is not for today, how will you explain the many documented healings that are still going on today? Incurable diseases are still being healed through faith in Jesus Christ. How are these sick people being healed if this is not available today? How are they getting from God something that He no longer offers in this dispensation? (The objector’s usual explanation is that SATAN is doing the miracles today.)

It is just plain wrong to assert that miracles stopped with the last apostle. There are accounts of large numbers of healings and people being raised from the dead from the time of Christ up through the 400’s, and from the 1700’s on. (You may even find some cases between those times if you delve into church history more than I have done.) It is a simple fact that they did not stop with the apostles in Acts. The history books alone disprove this claim. Besides, the last apostle isn’t dead yet, because God is still commissioning apostles today, although not in the sense of the 12 original Apostles of the Lamb, a group to which even the miracle-working Paul did not belong.

Some believe that God isn’t commissioning any apostles today because the ones in Scripture saw Jesus and most people today have not seen Him. They cite the requirement for Judas’s replacement to be someone who was with Jesus from the beginning. That only referred to a position within the Twelve Apostles of the Lamb. Paul was not with Jesus from the beginning but he is clearly identified as an apostle, even though he will never be one of the Twelve Apostles of the Lamb. All twelve of those positions are filled forever.

If you don’t believe that God still commissions apostles, consider this passage:

Ephesians 4:11-13:
And he gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers;
For the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ:
Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ:

Since their goals have not been accomplished yet, they are still necessary. Paul mentions other apostles who were not in the original 12 either. There are still apostles today as well as the other 4 “ministry offices” mentioned here. (Some people prefer to say 3 others, since the wording indicates to them that pastors and teachers are the same people, though there were certain “prophets and teachers” in the church in Acts 13:1, which would seem to indicate that teachers are a separate office. Still others like to invent new ministry offices that aren’t in the Bible, such as “intercessor,” “psalmist,” “minstrel,” and so on, that are really “helps” ministries, not ministry gift offices.)

I read a secular historian’s account of the things that happened during the Great Awakening in New England. Everywhere, people were contracting a new “disease” called “the jerks” – shaking uncontrollably and usually falling over when the gospel was preached with power by heaven-commissioned evangelists. This historian noted that the most violent opponents of the gospel were often the first to contract this condition! Psychologists invented explanations for it, but it was the power of God!

To say that healing is not for our day is to accuse both God and Jesus of changing – something that neither can do (Malachi 3:6, Hebrews 13:8, James 1:17). God has always been willing to heal His people, and Jesus did only the will of God on the earth. If they have not changed, their ability and willingness to heal have not changed.

Many of the healings in the New Testament occurred because of a person’s faith, not because of special manifestations of the Spirit. For proof, read the discussion, According to YOUR FAITH Be It unto You!, Galatians 3:5-6 says that God does miracles through the hearing of faith. If healing and miracles are not for today, we must conclude that faith is not for today, since faith produces healing and miracles.

Jesus said in Matthew 7:21-23 that men could cast out devils and do works in His name without even knowing Him personally! There is no indication that this statement applies only to a certain generation back then.

Is it not a miracle that a spiritually dead person whose nature it is to sin could instantly become a spiritually alive person whose nature it is to believe? If that is a miracle, either being born again passed away with the last apostle or the completion of the Bible, or miracles are demonstrably for today.

Yet another problem with claiming that miracles and healings ceased when the last apostle died is that God calls people to miracle and healing ministries who are not apostles!

1 Corinthians 12:28:
And God hath set some in the church, first apostles, secondarily prophets, thirdly teachers, after that miracles, then gifts of healings, helps, governments, diversities of tongues.

Also, Paul said some of the Corinthians flowed in “working of miracles” and “gifts of healings” (1 Corinthians 12:8-11) and they were clearly not all apostles!

The claim that we are in a different, harder-to-be-healed-in dispensation is absolutely unsupported by Scripture and is clearly contradicted by it.

Was the Early Church "Transitioning?”

Another statement that attempts to defend the indefensible is that the book of Acts records "the transition between the Old Covenant and the New Covenant."

First, Jesus' blood was shed to inaugurate the New Covenant and the Holy Spirit was given in Acts 2:1-4. At that point, the New Covenant was in full effect. Everything the Church did after that was done under the same New Covenant we enjoy today. No subsequent event in Scripture ever marked a "transition" from what the apostles had to what we have now. Any claim that there was such a "transition" is beyond the Bible. They weren't gradually transitioning into the New Covenant; they were walking in the fullness of it as we should do also.

Second, if the believers in Acts could do things because they were in a special transition period, we live in a worse age than they did! That is also contrary to Scripture, in which each successive covenant through the ages brought better things than the one before it. If we have a worse arrangement than they had in Acts, we should all be jealous of them and wish that we could be alive during their "transition" so that we could enjoy better power and benefits than we have now.

Third, the Holy Spirit was poured out on the believers and they did what they did by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is no different today than He ever was. We don't have a weaker version of Him! There is no reasonable way to conclude that we should have less ability today when we have the same Holy Spirit who did the works through the Church in the book of Acts!

Certainly, the Church grew and sorted out some issues in Acts, but those believers were only discovering the covenant they already had, not making a transition between different covenants. Back in Isaiah's day, Israel could learn some things they didn't know before through Isaiah's prophecies, but the increased knowledge was not a change of covenant. They were still under the same Law that applied back when Moses gave it.

Someone will probably argue that the New Covenant wasn't complete until we had the entire New Testament to explain it, but that is clearly not true. The New Covenant was in full effect before the New Testament was complete; the New Testament just explained the fullness of the New Covenant that we already had! God clearly did not change the covenant every time a new New Testament book was written.

Some related objections are found in the links below.