Objection: Some Healing Ministers and Their Families Have Gotten Sick

Let’s get it straight.  Some healing ministers have gotten more than sick; they have dropped dead of illness.  I can think of at least one internationally known healing minister who died because of illness, and our friends who object to healing can probably cite some more.

You cannot base doctrine on a man’s experience.  You base it solely on the Word of God.  Any other basis is insufficient.  Your favorite preachers still preach holiness in conduct even though they sin sometimes, don’t they?  Are we going to throw out the whole idea of holy living because of their mistakes?

When it comes to family members, everyone is responsible for believing for his own healing.  Just because someone's wife gets sick does not mean that the preacher is preaching untruth or is not in faith.  You can believe and receive for yourself.  Whether or not your relatives do so is between them and God.  It is not a reflection on you.

Some people raise a specific objection that a famous faith preacher’s daughter was deaf and he “could not heal her.”  Well, there have been some preachers’ children who have ended up being hooligans, at least for a while, and that is not a reflection on the preachers’ faith.  Would the objector say that they “could not save them?”  Everyone has a free will; you cannot blame one person’s actions on another.

One objector wrote that healing ministers are modern-day Pharisees, heaping a yoke upon us which even they themselves cannot lift.  I would beware of such generalizations, because there are healing ministers out there who don’t get sick.  The healing objectors only make a big deal out of the ones who DO.  Most healing ministers out there can give you their personal testimony of healings in their own bodies through faith in the very gospel they are preaching.  They can tell you first-hand that it works.

Rather than making a big deal out of healing ministers who get sick, why not make a bigger deal of the ones who receive divine healing through faith?  Why broadcast the failures instead of the successes?  If you keep pointing sinners to preachers who failed morally, those sinners will be led away from developing faith to be saved.  If you keep pointing the sick to preachers who fail to receive their healing, those sick people will be led away from developing faith to be healed.  That would be a shame.

If you are going to throw out doctrine because of the personal failings of the man preaching it, do not ever read the book of Psalms again, because much of it was written by a known adulterer and murderer.  And rip the book of Proverbs out of your Bible while you’re at it, because the man who wrote most of it didn’t follow his own advice and ended up turning from God and building heathen temples for his ridiculous number of wives!  Then there’s Moses, who was a murderer.  I guess we should throw out the first five books of the Bible, too, because Moses wrote them.

Then get rid of First and Second Peter, because Peter sided with the Judaizers and Paul had to set him straight.  Besides, Peter seemed to blow it every time he turned around in Jesus’ ministry anyway, to say nothing of the fact that he denied the Lord three times.  And forget the gospel of John, his three epistles and Revelation, because he forsook the Lord along with the rest of them when Jesus was led away to be crucified.  Matthew’s gospel must go for the same reason.  And because we assume that Mark’s gospel was written by the noted ministerial deserter John Mark, we’ll have to pitch Mark’s gospel too.

By now, you should get the point.  If we aren’t going to throw out the doctrine that God spoke through men in the Bible because of their personal failings, why should we throw out God’s doctrine when it comes through other fallible men?  The only question is, is it in the Bible or isn’t it?  The fact that some people get sick has nothing to do with it.  You don’t know anyone who doesn’t sin.  You still believe in victory over sin anyway, don’t you?  The fact that people sin does not prove that we don’t have victory over sin.    The fact that some people get sick does not prove that we don’t have victory over sickness.

If you have an issue with doctrine, you have to disprove it with Scripture, not experiences!  Experiences neither confirm nor disprove doctrine.