Arguments for Healing

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Francis MacNutt

• "Jesus’ passion was to heal: He treated sickness as a curse. Jesus suffered to an extraordinary degree, and He promised His followers that they would suffer, too. But the suffering we can expect is what will be inflicted upon us by a hostile and fallen world, not the kind of suffering that happens because we fall apart from within ourselves through spiritual, emotional and bodily sickness. Nowhere do we have a record of Jesus telling sick people who came to Him for healing that He was not going to heal them because their sickness was a blessing sent by His Father as a test of patience."
  - Francis MacNutt, The Healing Reawakening: Reclaiming Our Lost Inheritance, Baker Books, Grand Rapids, 2006 (see it in Google Books)

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John Piper

• Gifts of Healings and Workings of Miracles
• Signs and Wonders: Then and Now 

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John Stott

• “And if we have hesitations about some claims to ‘signs and wonders’ today, we must make sure that we have not confined both God and ourselves in the prison of Western, rationalistic unbelief.”
  - John Stott, The Message of Acts, InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, 1990. 100 (see it in Google Books).

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John Wimber (minute 23 to minute 30'30" on the sixth video in the John Wimber series linked to on the "Teaching by John Wimber" page of this blog)

• Denying miracles happen today requires:
• Denying church history
• The testimony of the Early Church Fathers
• The experiences documented in revival literature
• The contemporary reports of the miraculous
• Ignoring scripture
  Any attempt to defend a cessationist viewpoint (i.e., that miracles stopped once the New Testament writings were complete) from Scripture, Wimber says, is "almost laughable" because there is "so little [Scripture] that can be used to construe the idea."
• "Once someone has crossed the line and had the experience it alters their paradigm. Now let me say this in an unqualified way: experience alters theology. Just so you'll know how fanatical I am, all experience qualifies our theological paradigm and position. I know of no one who doesn't ultimately defend their theological position through experience. I've never dialogued with anyone in depth that didn't finally come to the point of saying, 'That is not my experience,' and thereby justify their position with it."
• "I believe that we must operate in the realm of the Spirit, with the Spirit unction and the Spirit manifestations continually, if we are to win this world for Christ."

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My Own Thinking

1. I can't think of a single verse that tells us not to carry on the acts of healing described in the New Testament.
2. The Bible says we are healed "by his stripes" (Isaiah 53:5). If we take that to be a reference to Jesus suffering—and this seems to be the most prevalent thinking—then it is implicit in this that God actually wants to heal us.
3. Jesus taught us to pray that God's will be done on earth as it is in heaven (Matthew 6:10). In heaven, no one is sick.
4. In their book, The Essential Guide to Healing, Bill Johnson and Randy Clark note that if we believe God sends sickness, going to a doctor would be equivalent to interfering with God's plan (page 126). I would further argue that even if we only see God as allowing sickness in order to "teach us something," the logical conclusion would be that we should never seek medical help. However, as we do seek medical help, what we actually end up saying by our actions is that the only kind of sicknesses that come from God (either by his sending or allowing them) are those sicknesses that medicine cannot heal—after all, he gave humanity the intellectual capability to create medicine, and we see that as God's provision against many sicknesses. So if God makes you ill, he does it to teach you something, but this lesson will either kill you or continue regardless of whether you learned the intended lesson. The first option strikes me as self defeating and the second as vindictive. True enough, our ways are not his ways (Isaiah 55:8-9), but where God uses punitive action in the Old Testament, it is either to remove sinners or to bring about repentance, and once either of those is achieved, he stops his action. So, if we say sickness is God's plan but we still go to the doctor, we our actions speak a belief in an unmerciful God who, despite his lack of mercy, has provided relief from lesser illnesses, or simply no belief in God at all.