Objection: If Faith Healers Were Real, One Would Have Won a Million-Dollar Prize Offered by a Renowned Skeptic for Proof of Supernatural Ability

Someone reading this objection might conclude that a great miracle could take place in a healing service, such as some of the things I cite in this book as an eyewitness, and the healing minister could go to this skeptic with medical documentation and collect a million dollars.  (The skeptic’s offer is no longer valid at this writing.)  That would certainly be nice!

I even thought that I might make a quick million by submitting my wife’s testimony that lots of people in her hometown could confirm.  She needed a machine to keep her alive for years, was given up to die multiple times by doctors, had “the lungs of an 80-year-old woman” and struggled to breathe.  Her doctor told her that the sooner she accepted that she was going to die, the better.  A pharmacist in town was witness to the hundreds of dollars of medications she needed monthly.  But Jesus healed her, and she has 100% normal, healthy lungs today.  The people in her town were shocked.  She had X-rays that proved her healing.  Time to start living the lifestyle of the rich and famous with that million bucks!  Well, maybe not.

You see, the “challenge” was never set up to allow such a thing to qualify in the first place.  Not only would the healing have to take place under the skeptic’s conditions and controlled environment, but there were some other onerous prerequisites like getting a letter from a recognized academic institution to assert your credentials to even qualify to take the challenge.  You also had to prove some degree of notoriety first, which would eliminate a lot of people from ever applying for the prize.  And anything that happened in your meeting was off-limits because that was your environment, not his – no past miracle qualified, even if you did have ironclad documentation from doctors and experts that a miracle occurred.  It had to be something done while the skeptic was watching – not exactly a good environment for the manifestations of the Holy Spirit to flow, as Jesus found at Nazareth.

In an ironic twist, this very same skeptic who purported to expose “liars” posing as healing ministers boasted that he once tried to prove his point by lying himself!  He went to a famous healing minister’s meeting and went up with a bogus testimony that a nonexistent body part around his knee had just been healed.  He even made up a fancy-sounding fake medical term, and got by a couple “screeners” with his phonymony.  He didn’t actually get the chance to share his phonymony (probably a good thing for him in light of Acts 5:1-11), but he had every intention of doing so in order to embarrass the preacher and “expose” him as a fraud.  However, he would have been exposing HIMSELF as a fraud in the process!  Can no one see the irony of alleging that someone is a liar when you are a liar yourself?  Would you trust a known liar to willingly hand over a million dollars in response to his challenge?  The fact that his “healing” was fake would not constitute proof that the other healings weren’t real anyway!  (I got healed for REAL in one of that same healing minister’s meetings.)

As discussed elsewhere, Jesus has never been in the business of “performing” miracles in front of skeptics to prove Himself.  When He was asked to do so, He didn’t.  We can’t go any farther than He did because we’d be going beyond the Word.  So we have no right to go “perform” a miracle to prove something to a skeptic either.  Besides, I’ve been down that road before, and the skeptic will just keep introducing more excuses to not believe that anything really happened (incompetent doctors making false diagnoses in the first place, swapped X-rays, and so on).  When someone really doesn’t want to believe, you’re not going to convince him of anything.  Jesus did not waste His time with such people.  Neither should you.