I had the pleasure to have a meal with an old friend who has broken from the traditional approach to missionary work abroad and has embraced the Acts church model of miracles and healings. It is amazing to listen to his wisdom and insights. I have interviewed him in a 4 part series for you. This first segment of the interview is his answer to my question: What do I need to do to grow in embracing miracles and healings ministry?
In this segment, he discusses the reason why theologically we as American Protestant Christians don’t believe or embrace miracles and healing ministry. He points out that God’s will is ALWAYS GOOD and ALWAYS wanting the sick and lame to be HEALED, but God’s will is not always accomplished through us. We get, yet another, glimpse into what it means to usher into this dark world the Kingdom of God. As my friend is fond of saying: “Where the Kingdom of God is Cancer isn’t.”
I have entitled this segment: Should we be trying to perform miracles and healings?
As many of you know, I am a skeptic so I delve into this realm with a mega-dose of skepticism, but knowing my friend who was born and raised down the street from me in the same western mind set on this subject and hearing his wisdom and his own healthy skepticism, I am warming up to this AMAZING ministry!
We want to hear from YOU! What do YOU think about all this stuff? PLEASE share with us your thoughts/comments on his topic.
Hi, I am deaf ,and I totally believe that healing power is for the believers as you can see in Mark 16:17-18 Jesus told followers that is the sign of those who believe . I am still looking for this kind of people . If any of you know of some please let me know, thanks.
it may be semantics but i can see how the Calvinist can get tweaked. I agree with you that God’s will is clearly not done all the time…but does that mean that he is not sovereign?
It seems to me that God is bigger than we give Him credit for and that He chooses to loosen His clear ability to control everything at any time to allow free will. It seems to me that the Calvinist wants God to have complete control and His will all the time and the counter wants free will and God to give up control and His will when the reality is probably BOTH at the SAME time?! We see this frequent paradox of BOTH occurring at the same time (especially in John’s Gospel) in Scripture??!!!
We have free will; God has the ability to have complete control and His will be done ALL the time but God chooses to release His control and will to allow our freedom???
This discussion is rapidly going WAY over my tiny brain…Greg Boyd talks about this in his controversial open theism ideas…here is a brief explanation by Greg from his blog:
http://www.gregboyd.org/essays/essays-open-theism/response-to-critics
DJ Responds: The issue of ‘what is God’s will’? is obviously a massive consideration when it comes to the whole area of divine healing. How we answer this question (or maybe better how we wrestle with it) will determine how we live out Jesus’ commandment to heal the sick in Matt. 10. The conclusion that I have come to is that obviously God’s will is often not being done. Why would we be instructed to pray ‘thy will be done’ if it is always, automatically being done. When it comes to healing the sick, I simply don’t believe God’s will is being done. There are many different reasons why healings don’t happen without us having to narrow it down to some kind of causation – i.e. not enough faith, not enough prayer, God rejecting someone, etc. My experience is that God rarely gives us the answer to the ‘why’ questions. I have a theory as to why that is, but that is outside the scope of this particular discussion.
I think too that we must be careful when we try to distinguish between types of will for God – I am thinking here of people who would call something God’s “permissive” will vs. another type. God’s will is what God wants to do and it flows from His nature. God chose to create beings (angelic and human) who also have wills with a considerable amount of freedom. The complexity of the interaction between the free exercise of all of these potentially conflicting wills and their impact upon the world is nowhere more compellingly handled than in Gregory Boyd’s books, “God at War” and “Satan and the Problem of Evil”. He handles the question of how something can be God’s will and yet not happen brilliantly.
In closing, I would say that we have to be careful when we try to answer questions that the Bible doesn’t answer. For example, did Jesus pass by people and not heal them? We all probably agree that this was the case. However, the conclusion that “He chose not to heal” them is an argument from silence. Could it be that He wanted to heal them but was aware of factors that would have thwarted that from happening? There were many cases where it says that “all” were healed (do a search in the concordance for the word “all” in the Gospels). Why don’t we use those passages to inform us as to what God’s will is? Why would Jesus have commanded us to “heal the sick” when in reality He didn’t want to heal many (if not most) of the people we would seek to minister to? (I am simply here looking at the percentage of people we see healed currently which might be around 30%).
I think at the end of the day, we have been held captive to Augustinian and Calvinistic understandings of God’s sovereignty for far too long. God’s will is often not done and clearly there are millions of things happening that cannot be claimed to be things “under His control”. Even that expression, “God is in control” has been abused to no end. Are the hundreds (if not thousands) of girls and woman who have been sexually abused while I have been writing this comment an expression of God being in control? Why would the mature Apostle John have the audacity to write something so blasphemous as “the whole world is under the control of the evil one” in 1 John, if God was “in control” in the way that Augustinian/Calvinist theologians contend?
Could God have created a world in which He exercised ‘meticulous control’ of each and everything that happens? Absolutely. Did He? No, He didn’t. He chose rather to create a world wherein the potential for real love and real evil exist. That was worth the risk as C.S. Lewis contended.
Nobody would disagree that God can turn anything (including horrendous evil) around for His good purposes (and does all the time). However, to somehow conclude that because He is so outrageously good and creative to be able to pull that off means that He had something to do with the design of that evil, is simply untrue. One of my favorite expressions to tell people who have experienced (or who are currently in the midst of) something horrible is this: God had NOTHING to do with it!
Thanks for this interesting interview, Drew. I don’t agree that God’s will is to physically heal everyone. The logical conclusion from this is that people who are not healed physically are either not praying or are rejected by God. There is nothing to me in the bible that suggests this.
There is no doubt that Jesus encountered many who He chose not to heal. He still loved for this people and gave them the chance to accept Him. God has both moral will and deterministic will; the situation can therefore be in line with His moral will (e.g. heal the sick, as DJ quotes) without being within His deterministic will.
DJ is correct that the devil can twist all things and that cancer may be a manifestation of that. However, we can’t claim that those who are following God closely are out of His will if they get sick. Hearing the rest of the interview, I think DJ and I are on the same page saying that the tribulations come from the world and Satan; God can use them all for good though. I think we’re close to being in agreement?