Objection: Teaching That Jesus Healed as an Anointed Man Is Heresy Because It Denies His Deity
Satan loves using this kind of language to scare people away from divine healing teaching. After all, if it is truly heresy that Jesus did not do miracles as God, you would be duty-bound to avoid me and anyone else like me lest you become a heretic and end up in hell. There are plenty of “heresy hunter” websites run by people who believe they have criticism ministries (they prefer the term discernment ministries) and seem to feel that their God-given purpose in life is to tear down certain ministers by name. They usually have a weak disclaimer that they really regret having to use names, but they just have to do it to protect the Body of Christ. (You will notice that this book does not accuse people who disagree with me of being heretics – a very serious charge. I am looking to counter their teaching, not tear down their ministries or ruin them personally. I don’t question the salvation of any of them who profess Christ. I just believe that they are misinformed.) There is usually a fuss thrown in over who has what kind of plane or lives in what kind of house, none of which has ANYTHING to do with someone’s doctrine being right or wrong. I don’t ask what car a critic of divine healing drives to figure out whether his doctrine is right.
The reasoning you see offered is that Jesus is God (Amen to that), so therefore He ministered as God when He walked the earth, and to claim otherwise denies that He is God and denies the Trinity, which would be heresy. To this day, I have yet to actually encounter a “word of faith” website that denies that Jesus was God when He walked the earth. I certainly believe that He was God when He walked the earth; I just don’t believe that He ministered as God, which is a different matter. I believe that Jesus was (and is today) 100% God and 100% man. (He is still Man today, in case you didn’t realize that, because there is one mediator between God and man, the Man Christ Jesus – 1 Timothy 2:5). I certainly don’t deny the Trinity and I’ve never met a “word of faith” preacher who does. People would do well to actually read the writings of the ministries that they tear down before going public with scary heresy charges.
When Jesus came as a Man, He laid aside His attributes that would have given Him an unfair advantage. (This is what Philippians 2:5-8 talks about.) He was not allowed to have all wisdom or all knowledge while walking the earth. In fact, if Jesus could have walked around exercising His power, wisdom and knowledge as God, He was NOT truly man because He never truly shared in mankind’s lot on the earth! That’s an interesting point that you might not have considered; these sites certainly haven’t. Also, God is immortal – He cannot die! If Jesus walked the earth with all His divine attributes operating rather than as a limited man, He could not have died on the cross, which would have ruined the whole plan of redemption!
If you believe that Jesus walked and ministered as deity, you will have a tough time explaining how God could grow in wisdom (Luke 2:52) or “become” strong in spirit (Luke 2:40) or even get physically tired (John 4:6). He WAS deity, but He had submitted Himself to human limitations. Otherwise, as deity, He would have been performing miracles from His youth, as He was just as much deity before He was anointed with the Holy Spirit. Make no mistake – He WAS God for His first 30 years, but He performed no miracles during that time. Also, if He ministered as deity, you would never be able to do “the works that He did and greater” (John 14:12) because you are not deity. This would make Jesus out to be a teller of lies, which is certainly not an attribute of deity, because He said that you would do the works that He did and greater! He did not have to act as God when He and His disciples were teleported to the shore of the Sea of Galilee during a storm (John 6:21), because Philip was not deity when He was teleported to Azotus (Acts 8:39-40). Believers in the book of Acts, who were not deity, did the works Jesus did. If they had to minister as deity to do those works, they could never have done them.
Jesus had to be “anointed with the Holy Ghost and with power” (Acts 10:38). This would not be true if He ministered as deity because God doesn’t need to be anointed by anyone – He does the anointing!
The truth is the opposite of this objection – if you say that Jesus did NOT minister as an anointed Man, you are denying His humanity!
So let’s make this clear one last time – Jesus walked as a MAN, but He always has been the second member of the Trinity. At no point was He ever otherwise, even when He was “made sin” for us. That doesn’t sound like heresy to me.
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