Objection: Many Who Are “in Faith” for Their Healing Die Anyway
Trivially, all of those who are in faith for their healing die anyway – sooner or later! You just don’t have to be sick before you die.
A corrected restatement of this objection is, “Many who say they are in faith for their healing die anyway.” The sad fact is that most people have no idea what being in faith really means. They may live more sanctified lives than a faith-filled person with no love walk, but if they do not understand faith, they cannot get “in faith.” It is presumptuous to say that you know that someone else was in faith. Are you telling God and the rest of us that faith doesn’t work? That would be news to God and to Jesus. Do you know claim to know everything about other people’s hearts? Well, some people do, and you get stories like this:
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THE AUNTIE FAITH STORY
by Fay Thayter
If anyone ever knew how to believe God, it was Auntie Faith. No finer saint ever walked this sod. She was as pure as the driven snow and she had a heart of gold. She was a mighty woman of prayer who could pray for hours at a time. She was trusting God to heal her of cancer, but she got worse and worse. But even at the hospice house, she maintained her fine Christian character and sense of humor until the morphine made her incoherent. Don’t you tell me that Auntie Faith didn’t know how to believe God – she saw many prayers for other people answered over the years. The only reason she didn’t get healed must be that God had a reason for allowing her to stay sick and die. After all, He could have stopped it from happening because He’s all-powerful, but He chose not to. Are you telling me that she had a lack of faith, so it was HER FAULT that she died? Huh? HUH??? Are you going to tell me to my face that she did something wrong in her believing? Don’t insult me with such horrible accusations about my Auntie Faith. She was the most consecrated Christian in town. Her tragic death is just something we’ll never understand. Every time you preach that faith stuff around me, you’re insulting Auntie Faith and making her look like she’s guilty of unbelief or something. Stay away from me with that finger-pointing, nasty teaching that people who died of sickness didn’t have enough faith!
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Perhaps a summary of this story is, “Auntie Faith died and her niece is MAD AT GOD for not stopping it from happening!” Many Christians are exactly where Auntie Faith’s niece stands. They’re MAD AT GOD because He “allowed” a fine person to die while He “allowed” far crummier persons to live on. If you haven’t met such a person yet, you probably will. Especially if you preach divine healing!
However, God is never the guilty party. If you are MAD AT GOD, you are ALWAYS in the wrong because God is good. There is never a legitimate reason to be mad at Him. If you’re mad, you don’t understand how things really work.
Faith works. If you are in faith, you get healed. If you were to die from a sickness, it would mean that you were not properly exercising faith. That’s blunt, that’s direct, that offends a lot of people, and it will probably get you onto some cult-watch lists if you become better known. It’s still the truth. We sometimes compromise the gospel just to soothe people who have suffered a loss. We assure them that the baby dying was somehow God’s mysterious will. We assure them that the young father who died, leaving his widow to care for four small children, was supposed to die because it was just his time to go. When we do this, we are no better than the scoundrel who preaches at a funeral that the sinner with the good works is surely in glory now. (This won’t offend the unsaved relatives.) I’m no diplomat (I’m sure you've noticed), but if you don’t come up with something else to say, you are guilty of denying the gospel. That would probably send dozens more people to hell when they believe that they can be religious but unsaved like Uncle Henry and still go to heaven based on good works! I wouldn’t want that blood on my hands! Likewise, you are setting the stage for unbelief and sooner funerals for more people by preaching at a funeral that an untimely death was the will of God. I can’t necessarily tell you what to say, but I can definitely tell you what NOT to say! You can’t deny the gospel to spare people’s feelings! You just have to pray for nice, wise, diplomatic words that don’t contradict what your Lord taught.
I witnessed to a relative on many occasions, and as far as I know, he died and went to hell. Should I then stop preaching the good news that people can be saved from an eternity in the lake of fire because “it didn't work for him” even though he was generally someone you’d consider to be a morally upstanding person?
People get scared by people who have stories about those who “tried it and failed.” If only the church world would be so quick to broadcast successes in divine healing as it is to broadcast failures! I have talked to people who have “tried” to get baptized with the Holy Spirit and failed. Do we stop believing in the Spirit baptism because they failed? No! Once these people are instructed from the Scriptures, they can get baptized with the Holy Spirit, too.
Are there people who say that they have “tried it and failed” for one reason or another? Yes. Are there people who insisted that they were in faith for their healing who died anyway? Yes. Some people “tried” to stay out of adultery and failed. Some people “tried” to walk in love and failed. That doesn’t make it impossible for you to avoid adultery and avoid walking out of love.
The closing argument in the above article about teaching that a person who dies didn’t have enough faith is somewhat of a “straw man” argument – many faith teachers would NOT say that she didn’t have enough faith, so the article is attacking a position that many of us would not really take to begin with. Auntie Faith, like everyone else, DID have the measure of faith (Romans 12:3) and Jesus was the Author and Finisher of it (Hebrews 12:2). Blaming her death on a “lack of faith” is at best technically inaccurate. After all, even mustard-seed-size faith could move a mountain, so “faith size” cannot be the real issue. Evidently, she did not USE her faith properly, and if she were like most Christians, she would not have known enough to point her faith in the right direction based on the Word.
People all over the world can testify that faith for healing works. You can find people who say it doesn’t, and I can find people who know it does and are living proofs of it. You cannot base your doctrine on anyone’s success or failure. You can base it only on the Word of God. Does God say it’s so, or doesn’t He? You have to be convinced for yourself. Once you are, it won’t move you if “a “thousand fall at your side, ten thousand at your right hand.” You will know that you can walk in health.
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