Fire On Your Head

A common reason I’ve heard that justifies not believing for miracles or divine healing, is the idea that “God wills some to be sick” or there’s some “divine purpose” behind someone’s disease or infirmity.

“I prayed, and the sickness never went away, so I guess it’s God’s will for me to be sick.”

Whatever it is people choose to believe affects what they will seek God for and how they will live their spiritual lives. Beliefs can produce total victory or total defeat–the choice is always up to us as to if we will believe God at His Word or not.

Allow me to take a whole entry to show you a SCRIPTURAL example of God’s will being done despite what the circumstances initially showed. But hold on tight, because as usual, I’m going to make sure to challenge commonly held assumptions while doing so.

The texts for our consideration are found in Matthew 17:14-21, Mark 9:14-29, Luke 9:37-43a. Each account details the time when a man brought his epileptic boy to the disciples and they were unable to heal him.

To glean from and paraphrase using all three accounts, the situation goes something like this: Jesus comes down from the mountain after His transfiguration. Mark records that the disciples were in a relatively heated argument or as the Greek literally means a “joint investigation”. In other words, the scribes and the disciples were trying to figure out how come the disciples were unable to cast the demon out of this man’s boy.

It should be noted before going any further, that in Matthew 10, and Luke 9:1-6 Jesus had already sent out the disciples in His name to preach and heal and cast out demons—and demonstrate the kingdom of the One who sent them in His name. So the disciples have already been endued with authority to do such things, such as the case here with his man’s son, only now they are unable to for some reason. And at this point chronologically in each Gospel account this is recorded in, they’ve already done such deliverances and healings themselves, through the power of God in them. They are experienced on some level and have seen results already, so the question that comes up is why no result this time?

Two spiritual matters are brought to light in this story, and usually only one of the two is focused on: this passage is usually shown to teach how certain demons can only be cast out of people by prayer and fasting. I will challenge that assumption in a moment. But we tend to forget what Jesus told this man, and what He told his disciples privately later:

“But if you can do anything, have compassion on us and help us.”  And Jesus said to him “If you can!  All things are possible for one who believes.”  Immediately the father of the child cried out and said, “I believe; help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:22-24)

Belief & unbelief and faith & lack of it are a key component of the issue here.

I’ve always wondered if Jesus was being slightly sarcastic when he said “If you can!” in response to this man’s plea. IF this man knew more about Jesus before bringing his son to the disciples, he probably would know Jesus CAN, but probably the lack of ability on the part of Jesus’ disciples made him second-guess if Jesus could also. As Matthew Henry states in his commentary on this passage “Thus Christ suffers in his honour by the difficulties and follies of his disciples.” And so it still is to this day.

Jesus rebukes the demon, and it comes out of the boy. Everyone glorifies God, and Jesus enters the house He was on his way to, and the disciples then come up to Him and ask Him why they were unable to cast it out. All of you have heard and remember that He tells them “this kind can only go out by prayer and fasting.” However, if you’ve got a good Bible, there will be a note there at the end of Mark 9:29, and some translations of your Bibles will not even have verse 21 in Matthew 17 (which also states the same thing).

I get told all the time when talking about certain subjects “not to build doctrines on just one verse”, and people say that to me about speaking & praying in tongues (never mind that topic for the moment, and never mind they build their cessationist doctrines on one verse and a lot of assumptions, but anyway) for just one example. Some go so far as to “correct me” if I ever use the end of Mark 16 to say what believers are capable of because “it’s not in the original text”. If I can’t use “one” verse or passage to prove a point, neither can doctrines about this one verse be established when it’s convenient either—people can’t have it both ways when it suits their personal doctrines. But let’s look at what IS in our Bibles. Matthew’s Gospel records another component as to why they were unable to cast out the demon:

Because of your little faith. For truly, I say to you, if you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you.” (Matthew 17:20)

Why does any of this even matter?

Oh boy, the mud is about to hit the fan now! If you ever want to make someone feel insulted, just imply that they lack faith in or for something. Even if you don’t say it, people somehow pick up on it and assume that if you’re saying people can have more faith for things, that that necessitates people already sometimes don’t have enough faith. Well, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Try not to be offended about it if you feel I’m talking about you, because I am. This applies to all of us for at least two reasons.

1) Faith is measurable.

All believers have a “seed”–if you will–of faith, but each of us water it and feed it at our own pace, our own amount, on our own frequency. Some people move mighty mountains, while others buckle under pressure if they don’t know how they’ll pay their $30 credit card bill that month. Frankly, NOT everybody has the same amount of faith! I don’t care if it’s politically incorrect or rude to say so!

However, I personally will never step on somebody for not believing as hard for something as I do, any more than I’d kick a baby for not walking yet. The Bible says of Jesus “a bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not quench” (Matt.12:20). We need to be patient as believers with each other and not get frustrated with someone just because they aren’t where you’re at yet. Build them up. Edify them INTO what you’re showing them, don’t just prove them wrong and think that settles it. You may already notice my style of blog writing is that I don’t prove something to be a problem without offering what I think is a solution, or that I don’t try disproving something just to prove something wrong alone in itself, without trying to invite the reader INTO what I’m sharing. We should show others ways to increase their faith, but not jump on them for not being there yet and put blame and guilt on them.

Maybe it’s possible, after all the things the disciples had already done in their ministry with Jesus, they had not yet seen something this severe and were not ready to handle it? Is it possible maybe that they weren’t mature enough in their faith yet to handle this particular deliverance properly? Who knows, I’m just speculating and any other assumption from the text is just that—speculation. But Jesus DID tell them they had “little faith”. If I were to say to someone–no, if I were to insinuate or simply IMPLY they were unable to obtain results in something because of little faith, I’d never hear the end of it from people about how arrogant I am. But this is an honest explanation Jesus gives.

I’ve rejected before the popular Christianese saying “if you only have faith the size of a mustard seed, you can move mountains”. That is obviously not what this passage is teaching. Jesus can’t be talking here of the size of a mustard seed if he just told his disciples the reason they couldn’t do something was because the size of “their faith seed” was too small! We learn from other passages where the kingdom of God is described as a mustard seed, that it starts off small, but then grows and dominates the garden (Luke 13: 18-19)—that is something worthy of consideration. Maybe it’s likely our “faith” is something that grows and increases in time if it possesses the very characteristics of the example used to describe it—a mustard seed. Check out a previous article for further study on “mustard seed faith” for more about that.

2) This passage also shows that just because healing didn’t happen (initially anyway) doesn’t mean it was God’s will for someone to stay sick.

Not only did the disciples not accomplish something they were given authority to do (but as we established, lacked faith to carry out), Jesus Himself goes ahead and does it. This passage is not just a teaching on Jesus teaching his disciples a lesson about something—this shows Jesus is perfectly capable of healing and performing the miraculous out of His compassion, and His desire to heal is not always demonstrated properly just because of our inabilities to accomplish what He has ordained and authorized us to do.

Would it bother some people to admit that healing is NOT automatic? This seems to be the favorite evangelical/cessationist argument to use on charismatics: “why don’t you use your gift of healing to heal so and so?” I dare to say that healing hardly ever happens and operates without faith being involved on someone’s part—whether it be the healer or the “healee”—usually the healer though, because you’ll never find Jesus refusing to heal someone b/c their faith is too small to BE healed, but He does rebuke His disciples for their faith being too small TO heal others.

I hear people say all the time “well why doesn’t Benny Hinn or so and so or those charismatics go into hospitals and heal all the sick people?”  When someone says this particular statement or a derivative of it, I like to say “good idea, why don’t you do it sometime since it bothers you and you’ve noticed it’s not being done enough? God clearly put that on your heart for a reason, maybe He wants you to do it?”

It’s easy to be armchair critics and point out what others aren’t doing when we’re doing nothing ourselves, and overlook what IS being accomplished by certain other ministries, but anyway. The only person really demonstrating “automatic” healing in the Bible is Jesus–if you could call it “automatic” healing. But even Jesus Himself prayed more than once for someone for healing before they got it on their way to see the priest, they were healed (Luke 17:12-16). Let’s not make up functions for how God operates that aren’t actually in Scripture, or if they are–not to overlook other examples of healing also. Sure there were some who would touch the fringe of His garment and be healed (Matt 14:35-36, Mark 6:56), and the woman who touched His garment got healed of a blood discharge instantly upon touching him (Matt 9:20-22, Mark 5:25-34), but that’s not the only way healing was transferred in Jesus’ ministry. In the future I intend on posting an entry detailing examples of healings in the Gospels not being immediate. My motivation for doing so is to give hope and encourage people not to give up so easily when it doesn’t happen right away, but to persevere. (such as the blind man who saw people as trees at first, Mark 8:22-25). There were even incidences where lepers came to Him, and Scripture records that.

I can sum up for you why some people see healing when they lay hands on the sick and others don’t.  And it’s not just faith; it’s tenacity.  Some people persist, like Jacob did for the blessing.  Some of us just give up too quickly if we don’t get results right away and not only give up, but build doctrines out of our failures like “it wasn’t God’s time” or “God doesn’t will to heal all.“

I’ve heard people reject the ministry of David Hogan, a missionary to Mexico for almost 30 years and has seen dead raisings in his ministry, because “they don’t like his attitude.” I think his “attitude” is why I trust him–it further evidences the fact it’s God working through him and it’s not man’s own ability. But I mention him because many people associate his ministry in Mexico with dead raisings and other supernatural miracles. Sure, in talking about him there almost becomes folklore and mythology in that Chuck Norris kind of way. But people forget the conditions and circumstances He lives in are FAR from what any of us even talking about him could relate to–like people have to bury their own dead, and not everyone can afford proper burials or for their loved ones to be taken to morgues and things like such. This is a man who’s been beaten within inches of his life, stabbed, shot, etc.. He’s doing hard work none of us could even relate to.

There’s places he goes where people just don’t have funerals and life insurance coverage and things like that. But specifically, people forget that the first time Hogan prayed for someone to be raised up, it didn’t happen. Nor the second time, or the third. This happened MANY times before seeing the first one rise up. And on the occasion he saw his first dead raising, he had prayed by the body for 14 hours solid before the results came–how many of us can even spend ONE hour in personal prayer?

I know you would do it differently if you were David Hogan, of course!

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, circumstances can destroy any sound doctrine, and most doctrines in the church are built around failure instead of the Word of God. But how many of us are willing to persist when we lay our hands on someone and they don’t immediately show results? How many of you reading will keep going for it, or will you let your “sensibilities” tell you it’s foolish or that your evangelical peers will think you’re a flake if you speak too much about it or go “too out there” with this stuff? Having our theological “if God wants them healed He will heal them Himself” ducks in a row more often than not is an excuse for inaction.

Are you afraid if you go up to that person in a wheelchair you might look stupid? Trust me, you will look stupid, so quit worrying about it. I remember being in Charlotte, North Carolina a couple of years back, and was at Concord Mills Mall with some FIRE students. I chickened out the first two times I saw someone in a wheelchair. I made those same excuses to myself as everybody else does. But then it grated on me–”well, no guts, no glory“. The third person I saw, I went up to him, and he said no. Dang. I really was in the zone too! Then it dawned on me, what’s the worst that could happen? They say no if you ask? Or they don’t immediately get up if they do let you pray for them?

Allow me to finish with this and share other thoughts some other time, some other entry: What if, in order to get the breakthrough, God told you first to pray for a thousand people who would not be healed, before you started seeing healings regularly? If you have a brain, you’ll lay your hands on everything that lets you until you’ve reached number 1000! Then, go back to the first person and pray for them now that it’s working.

“Steve, God will not allow many people to operate in healing, because it will cause people to fall into pride”. Right, like you’ve never been in pride before! And God would keep somebody sick in order to avoid having you fall into pride? THAT is pride already!

Trust me, there is NO reason for anyone not to go for it we just make all the excuses in the world out of fear of failure, fear of rejection on the part of the person we seek to heal. Fear of taking responsibility for a miracle God enabled believers to do.

You’ll never know now will you if you don’t go for it…

Check out a really thorough teaching on faith and growing in it that I preached in Holland at a FIRE Summer School one year if you want to dwell more on these themes:
Download mp3 (right click and save)