Objection: The Doctrine of Faith Healing Is Cruel to Parents Who Have Lost Children to Illness
This is similar to saying that the doctrine of salvation from hell is cruel to parents whose children have died without Christ and gone to suffer eternal punishment. The truth is not always comforting, but it beats lies. It beats saying that God kills little children or that God lets sinners go scot-free if they’re reasonably good, although either comment may temporarily soothe a grieving person. Ultimately, there is no soothing, because the person ends up with a compromised God whose word can no longer be trusted. Anyone who believes these disgusting falsehoods may open the door for Satan to do more damage. If you are going to cling to the idea that God took your child home for some sovereign reason, you might as well forget trying to believe for healing for the rest of your life. Your prayers will always be tainted with “ifs” because you will never know the will of God. You’ll never know if He’s going to make another “sovereign exception.” Maybe He’s going to “take” you or another relative next! Believing that God can fail to keep His Word and that He is to blame for your tragedies will strip you of your faith for anything. If you can’t trust God, you can’t pray and KNOW that you have received from Him.
Please hear the truth. God did not “take” that child. Sickness, which was NOT sent by God, did. God was not to blame.
Neither I nor any faith preacher I know advocates saying to grieving parents at a funeral, “This wouldn’t have happened if you had had enough faith!” Do that and you will give divine healing a bad name. The Bible says to grieve with those who grieve, not preach at those who grieve and make them feel bad. However, it also does not say to water down the gospel to comfort those who grieve. Healing was available, and the child did not need to die.
Let me repeat that as boldly as I can: THE CHILD DID NOT NEED TO DIE. HE COULD HAVE BEEN HEALED. For those who have dared me to make that statement, I just made it! Don’t go and preach it in people’s faces at funerals, but it is still the truth and you cannot compromise it. See the discussion, Descent into Stupidity for what happens if you go the other way and compromise God's Word to soothe the grieving parents.
I should clarify that I refer to young children in this discussion. When children get older, they need to believe for their own healing, and you cannot believe and receive it for them. When they are young, your faith can receive for them. Jesus exhorted the father of the demonized boy in Mark 9:17-29 to believe. He did not exhort the boy himself to believe.
You will have to decide for yourself what Jesus meant when He said that you can believe you receive what you ask for when you pray and get it. If this statement’s obvious meaning is true, we should all be doing it. If you don’t think that we can all do it, you will have to find an alternative explanation for Mark 11:24. If you don’t believe that Jesus meant that we could receive from God in faith when we pray, you must tell us what He really meant. The trouble is, I can’t figure out what else His plain words could possibly mean. If you can’t figure out another meaning, you must accept His words and reject any words that contradict them, including those of people who say that nothing could have been done about the child.
I am not saying that parents who lost a child were in a position where they could have prayed in faith to avoid the tragedy. The fact is, most people are nowhere near that point in their faith because they haven’t developed their faith by spending time in God’s Word. They did not stubbornly refuse to do something that they know they should have done. It was a case of inability to do it. However, if they had developed their faith, they could have done something. If you preach anything else, you may soothe the parents but contradict the words of Jesus! The fact that the disciples could not deliver a demon-possessed boy did not mean that they could not have done it. Jesus said explicitly that they could have done it! Recall that in the case of Mark 9:17-29, Jesus exhorted the father to believe! So it MUST have been possible, though it was evident that he was struggling with it at the time.
People will accuse you of “blaming” people for the death of children. Some people like to twist your words and accuse you of things. (They did it to Jesus, they did it to Paul, and they’ll do it to you if you preach divine healing. Get used to it.) If we really want to put the blame where it belongs, we should blame the DEVIL. The parents weren’t the ones who put the foul thing on the child that took his life.
If someone has had no time to study the Word and meditate upon what it says about healing, how could he believe for something major like that? It would be like “blaming” a second grader for not being able to do calculus. It is not a moral issue. It is an issue of growing in the faith, and that takes time. You have to grow spiritually just as you have to grow naturally before you are ready to do some things. Few people can avoid getting into unbelief when it comes to saving a child from a serious illness. If you run to the medicine cabinet every time a headache starts coming on, don’t be so sure that you would have believed for that child’s healing yourself!
So in one sense, there may not have been anything they could have done. In a more general sense, however, if the parents had gotten saved sooner and learned the Word sooner, they could have developed their faith more and done something. If this is not true, we must conclude that God’s promises are unreliable because there are unpredictable exceptions. I would never want to accuse God of being unreliable. I will never preach that not all things are possible to him who believes. I would rather upset a few people if necessary than upset the Holy Spirit by contradicting Jesus.
Opponents of divine healing will get in your face about how poor little Betsy Lou died. (I don’t know any Betsy Lou’s who have died, or any that haven’t for that matter, so I’m not picking on anyone in particular.) They dare you to say that Betsy Lou could have been healed. You might as well tell them the truth – little Betsy Lou could have been healed! If they have the right to bring up a particular name to try to intimidate you, you have a right to bring up the name in response. They will call you heartless for doing it, of course, while saying nothing about their heartlessness in dragging Betsy Lou into what should be a doctrinal discussion anyway, not a statement of someone’s experience. Experience never proves doctrine. If you want to talk experience, I know people who have raised their children from the dead! These people have never told me that the doctrine of divine healing is cruel to parents!
In fact, not preaching divine healing is cruel to parents with sick children! They need to hear the good news about healing!
I have received a number of angry letters from people asking me (tempting me is perhaps more accurate) to tell the grieving relatives that the problem was their lack of faith. Of course, I am not going to write such letters. What I and anyone else with any sense will do is continue to preach the “word of faith” by which faith for healing and other gospel benefits comes. (The issue is not technically a lack of faith in many cases, but rather unbelief or doubt – those issues are dealt with elsewhere in this book.) Eventually, people who hear the good news about healing and believe it may realize that an earlier tragedy in their life was avoidable. I will most certainly not side in with Satan and accuse God of having anything to do with any tragedy. Satan is the author of tragedy. His horrific future of non-stop punishment and suffering will be the most tragic end that any being in the universe has ever experienced.
Now that I know Jesus, I realize that most of my teenage years were wasted. I did not know Christ. (No one told me how to be born again, even though I live in the supposedly gospel-saturated United States.) My teenage years could have been far better if I had known the truth then, but I can’t have those years back. This is a similar experience to that of a bereaved parent hearing the gospel of healing and his authority in Christ and realizing that his child could have been healed. You can’t do anything about the past, but you can do something about the future. I am not wasting any more years. You do not have to lose another child to sickness.
No one came up to me and said, “You could have avoided all those bad experiences if you had just used your faith to believe the Gospel” – although that would have been a true statement! People preached the truth to me, I believed it, and I am now enjoying the benefits. Once I heard the truth, I figured the rest out on my own without anyone trying to make me feel bad about it. Yes, I could have had better. But the Bible says to forget those things that are behind and to reach forth to those things that are before – toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus. (See Philippians 3:13-14.)
The Bible contains accounts of those who received healing from the Lord on behalf of their young children. (There is no record of anyone receiving anything for a grown-up child; it’s up to adults to believe for themselves. In one exceptional case, someone got a healing for a household servant who was probably not a child.) In the one case where there was a failure to receive (the demonized boy that the disciples failed to help), Jesus said that unbelief was the problem. Then he healed the boy! This shows the danger of using experience to prove doctrine. Today’s doubt-mongers would surely have publicized the disciples’ failure to deliver the boy and cited it as proof that it is not God’s will to heal or deliver all. Jesus settled the issue of God’s will conclusively when He delivered the boy.
You gain nothing by condemning yourself or others for lack of faith. Such behavior only pleases Satan. However, preaching the GOOD NEWS that anyone can be healed through the name of Jesus Christ is not condemnation, even if it means that people realize that they could have lived better and that a child did not need to die. We’re all growing. Ten years from now, you will recognize situations that you could have handled better today if only you were more grounded in the Word. That’s part of life. It means you’re growing, which is a good thing! Instead of condemning yourself for where you’ve been, rejoice in the fact that you can grow and live better in the future than you have been living so far.