Conclusion
Chapter seven
In Sickness and in Health
Erastus stayed on at Corinth, but I left Trophimus sick at Miletus.
—2 Timothy 4:20
In his The Disease of the Health and Wealth Gospels, Pentecostal scholar Gordon Fee critiques unbiblical approaches to healing and wealth. He nevertheless points out (correctly) that the case with healing is a bit different from the case of wealth. The New Testament does, after all, say a lot about people getting healed. We can still trust God as healer today.
Not least in the Western church, we usually need to be reminded of God’s grace and power to heal us more than we do of the reality of sickness. That was one reason I wrote Miracles Today, and I suspect that is one reason the Gospels expend a whole lot more space recounting healings than recounting sicknesses. But because people sometimes get the wrong idea or even feel guilty if they are physically afflicted, we also need reminders that we are still on the “not yet” side of the “already/not yet” of the kingdom. “Sick” or “disabled” Christian is not an oxymoron.
Who’s to Blame?
If we are going to cite Scripture to encourage our faith when praying for healing, we will naturally cite texts about healing. (We don’t ordinarily pray for God to make us sick, unless perhaps we’re unprepared for a midterm.) But unless we are also biblically aware that God does not heal everyone in this life, we can also run the risk of blaming the victim, as Job’s friends did. The victim could be ourselves or someone else.
When God doesn’t heal, or when a loved one passes, God is not guilty of negligence. Our lives were his gift to begin with, and every day we have is a gift from him. Protesting is a natural part of grief (e.g., Pss. 10:1; 44:23–24; 74:1); David is angry at God when God strikes a friend (2 Sam. 6:8; but compare Job 2:9–10). But we can also remember that God is not the one who introduced death to humanity (John 8:44; Rom. 5:12; 1 John 3:12). Jesus treated sickness as an enemy to be overcome (Acts 10:38; compare Heb. 2:14; 1 John 3:8), just as do health care workers. Jesus’s resurrection defeated death, but that “last enemy” remains until his return to resurrect us (1 Cor. 15:26). We might wish that the kingdom’s fullness had already arrived. But had God’s day of justice and restoration come sooner, those now living might neither have been born nor had opportunity to repent (compare 2 Pet. 3:9).
Bill Johnson is known for teaching people to strive in faith for God’s promises. At the same time, he recognizes that God remains God no matter what. He stood in faith for his wife’s healing, but when she passed, he resolved to mourn in hope. God is faithful and worthy of trust even when life is hard. God “doesn’t work for me,” he explained. “I work for him. He never owes me an explanation.” In the midst of the greatest pain, Johnson offered God the sacrifice of costly trust.1 Such an attitude expresses not mere faith that (God will do something); it expresses a relational trust in the God who merits our trust no matter what. (I turn to some biblical examples of nonhealing later in the chapter.)
God can also use our infirmities for his purposes. That’s not to suggest that we volunteer for such infirmities, but rather that when we face them, we welcome what God might do with them. Sometimes God glorifies himself through our healing (compare John 9:3). At other times God glorifies himself by showing what Christian faith and hope can mean in the midst of suffering. God has used Joni Eareckson Tada’s injury to change the world, not least in her role as a Christian disability advocate. Similarly, because of the remarkable accomplishments of Nick Vujicic, who was born without arms and legs, he is able to evangelize from his platform as a motivational speaker.
Doing Research with Attention Deficit
I haven’t earned the right to speak to such major health issues myself, but at least I can use my own lesser stories as illustrations without owing anybody else royalties. Of the first six times I lectured about miracles after my first miracles book came out, I was sick with one malady or another for five of them. For example, when I spoke for a Society of Vineyard Scholars conference, my left ear was so clogged that I could not hear through it. When I gave examples about miracles at the Special Divine Action conference at Oxford University, I had such a bad cold that I reluctantly even missed Alister McGrath’s important plenary session. Without denying the possibility that the enemy wanted me to shut up, I also believe that the Lord had something to teach me. Through these experiences the Lord kept reminding me that his power is perfected in weakness and that he can bring his message through very unimpressive vessels, including me.2
Longer-term, from childhood I had ADHD before that was a label (these days we have much more respectable labels such as “neurodiverse”). Several years ago I asked my friend Randy Clark, leader of Global Awakening, to lay hands on my head and pray for my brain to be fixed. He sort of did, but he also said something like, “Lord, please don’t let this prayer mess anything up in this useful brain.” As a kid, my ADHD made me want to drop out of elementary school (though my mom wouldn’t let me). Later, sitting still as an author felt like torture in the early years, requiring painful discipline to write books. (I enjoyed research, however, perhaps benefited by ADHD’s side effect of hyperfocus.)
It became dangerous, however, when my wife, Médine, and I were going to speak about ethnic reconciliation to seventeen hundred pastors in Côte d’Ivoire. A travel doctor put us on Lariam, an antimalaria prophylaxis, which, unknown to us, was contraindicated for nervous conditions. Médine got nightmares, but I ended up having a series of hellish panic attacks and continuous nervous anxiety. Because I didn’t yet know what a panic attack was, I panicked about the panic, creating a cascading cycle of terror. Prayer quieted my spirit periodically, but the panic attacks would eventually start up again. Continuous anxiety is hard on the heart.
Eventually this led to me being put on an expensive treatment regimen. In the process, I ended up on a treatment for my ADHD that ended a background anxiety I had experienced all my life. I had always tried to control it simply with diet and exercise. I hadn’t known that life could be any different, but the past decade on this medicine has been much more tranquil. (Having grandkids probably helped too.) I had long enjoyed learning and began experiencing spiritual joy after my conversion, but now I enjoyed ordinary life itself. In the long run, then, that crisis was for my benefit. But it wouldn’t have done much good had I not survived those first two years of crisis on the edge!
Miracles and Death
Faith teacher Kenneth Hagin notes that he has seen wonderful Christians die and they are now in heaven. “I would not speak despairingly of them at all, because they just didn’t know what faith is.”3 Healing, he argues, is “not a promise” but “a statement of fact.”4 While most of us could learn genuine principles about standing in faith, however, faith does not resolve all ailments. Our present bodies are not immortal, and Scripture itself provides examples when God did not heal his servants in this life.5
Whereas the reality of persecution for following Jesus pervades the New Testament, it does not need to say as much about (unhealed) sickness or death. There is no need to encourage our faith that these things happen; we’re all familiar with them from our ordinary experience. Although it is true Jesus healed all who came to him, it’s also obvious that none of them is alive today. Everyone in this age still dies—though because of Jesus we who trust him will ultimately share in his resurrection.
Raisings from the Dead—Sometimes
Elisha fell sick with the sickness from which he would die. . . . And while they were burying a man, they saw a band of raiders and they threw the man into Elisha’s grave. When the man touched Elisha’s bones, he came to life and stood up on his feet. (2 Kings 13:14, 21)
Although Elisha’s bones were so full of power that they resuscitated a corpse, Elisha himself died from sickness.
My earlier books on miracles recount the experience of Dr. Chauncey Crandall, a cardiologist in West Palm Beach. Emergency room physicians had labored for forty minutes to revive flatlined auto mechanic Jeff Markin, to no avail. Finally Crandall was summoned to certify that no more could be done. Markin was not just dead, Crandall told me, but very obviously dead; though Markin was a white person, his oxygen-starved face and hands had turned black.
After signing the death certificate, Crandall returned to his rounds, only to feel prompted by the Holy Spirit to go back and pray for Markin to have a second chance to know the Lord. Feeling little faith but determined to obey the Holy Spirit, Crandall returned and prayed for Markin while the nurse glared at him as if he were insane. Crandall then ordered Markin shocked with the paddle one more time, even though irreparable brain damage begins after six minutes without oxygen. After Crandall’s colleague shocked Markin once, his heartbeat immediately sprang to normal. Markin did come to know the Lord, without brain damage, and today Crandall and Markin sometimes share their testimony together.
But there is a crucial backstory to all this. Crandall had once prayed for someone else who died—his own son. Despite many prayers concerning his son’s leukemia, the son died, and no raising followed. At that point Crandall realized he could either lose faith or continue to trust God, and he resolved to do the latter. Thus on the day that God sent him to pray for Jeff Markin, he felt little faith—but he was obedient. God is worthy of our trust when he answers the way we want—and when he doesn’t.
During my summers in Nigeria I spent time with Dr. Leo Bawa. I had noticed that most of my African friends had witnessed at least a few miracles, so when I was writing my first book about miracles I asked Leo whether he had seen any. “Not many,” he admitted, so he sent me just seven pages of his recollections. Among these was an occasion when he was doing research in a village and neighbors brought to him their child, who had just died, asking him to pray. After a few hours of prayer, he handed their child back to them alive. Wondering whether perhaps Leo just prayed for everybody who was dead and once in a while the death was misdiagnosed, I asked how often he had prayed for God to raise the dead. “Only twice,” he replied. The other had been for his best friend, who stayed dead. God has not promised to raise on every occasion, though he honored his name by raising the child in the non-Christian village.
Staying Dead for Now
Even those with the greatest faith recognize that everyone in this age dies, unless the Lord’s coming interrupts that process. While I know healthy octogenarians and nonagenarians (disproportionately represented among those with healthy lifestyles), I have yet to meet a 150-year-old.
When we consider what God created us for before humanity’s fall into sin, and the eternal destiny that God has prepared for us, it seems clear that God’s ideal purpose for humanity is not sickness or death. We should work for his ideal, caring for our and others’ health.
But it’s also clear that God’s ideal is not always fulfilled in this world. The greatest heroes of the faith from the past are no longer with us; of Jesus’s first apostles, only one remained alive by the end of the first century. When the Bible speaks of sickness or death without healing, it seems to take for granted that this is the ordinary course of nature (e.g., 2 Kings 4:1; 13:14). The Bible takes for granted that death remains in this age; consider the repetition of “and he died” in the various generations of Genesis 5:5, 8, 11, 14, 17, 20, 27, 31, with only Enoch excluded.
Although God may allow some variables in response to prayer (Isa. 38), God is ultimately in charge of when his servants die. Thus God said to Moses, “The days when you will die are near” (Deut. 31:14; compare Gen. 47:29; 1 Sam. 26:10; 1 Kings 2:1). Indeed, those whom Jesus himself raised from the dead, some of whom were reported to live into the late first century,6 eventually died again.
Everett Cook, who used his retirement income to run the Pentecostal street mission where I once helped, confided in me there one day that the Lord told him that he was going to take him home within a year. Brother Cook and I used to prophesy to each other, and his prophecies were normally spot-on. Nevertheless, I tried to object. This time he cut me off. “The Lord told me to get things in order” (I now realize he was evoking 2 Kings 20:1 and Isa. 38:1). “I just wonder about some of the things he called me to do for him that I haven’t done yet.”
Sure enough, some months later doctors diagnosed him with cancer. Before he died he became so weak that he couldn’t speak, yet through signals in response to questions he indicated that he experienced no pain. It was, his wife explained, just God’s way of taking him home. “The things God told you to do that you haven’t done yet,” I told him at his bedside, “I and your many other mentees will carry on.” (For the principle, see 1 Kings 19:15–16; 2 Kings 8:13; 9:1–3.) He lifted his hands to praise God.
Most of those involved in the ministry of healing have accounts of times when God dramatically healed and accounts of times when he didn’t. Sometimes the latter also included uplifted hands at the end. Jack Deere, author of Why I Am Still Surprised by the Power of the Spirit 7 and a close mentee of John Wimber, shares one account of his anguish when, despite fasting and daily prayer, a close family friend passed away. The lack of healing devastated him, yet the friend’s faith to the end, expressed as she exerted her final strength to lift her hands to God, challenged him to deeper faith.8
Learning Healing and Its Limits the Hard Way
We rightly celebrate healing, but we can also celebrate God giving us special grace to persevere in cases where physical healing has not yet happened; that too is God’s blessing in this life. Early in my Christian life, I began learning to hear God’s voice. I celebrated the intimacy with the Lord that I experienced, which was deeper than any relationship I had had with anyone else. I sometimes saw people get healed or otherwise spiritually zapped when I prayed for them. But in time, for about a year, I became increasingly absorbed with a version of faith teaching that almost reduced healing to a formula. One day during my freshman year I was coughing so badly that I passed out in class and had to be carried back to my dorm room. To the dismay of the wise campus nurse, I insisted that I was healed, apart from “symptoms.” As she left the room after reproving me, I felt God say, “Would you go to a doctor if I wanted you to?”
Well, when he put it that way, what was I supposed to say? “Yes, Lord,” I responded. “But I don’t have any money. So please heal me or provide me the money.” He healed me on the spot, but I hadn’t learned my lesson. During my sophomore year, I had a case of bleeding hemorrhoids and passed out in the hallway en route to class. When I regained consciousness, I couldn’t see anything, but I could hear people say, “He’s started breathing again! He’s not purple anymore.” After maybe forty seconds my sight returned, but this time the school insisted on sending me to a doctor, and the bill was sent to my parents. My parents were not believers at the time, but I had boasted to them about God’s healing power. Now I was embarrassed.
Soon after that I was praying upstairs at the mission where I helped out. Addicted to my formulas, I protested, “God, how could you let this happen to me?” And then I uttered one of the worst blasphemies possible. “I thought you loved me!”—implying that maybe he didn’t. There was a moment of silence, and then a still small voice. “My child, I let this happen to you because I love you.” That was all he had to say, and instantly I understood. I had traded my intimacy with God for formulas. God works for our good, but he is not controlled by formulas.
A Brief History of Modern Healing and Foibles
In the 1700s and 1800s, most US Protestants believed that the afflicted should passively accept their condition rather than work against it.9 Many associated physical suffering with God’s blessing10—for example, seeking out an amputee who could provide prayer and spiritual counsel.11 By the 1870s, however, a reaction set in, as people realized that restoration of health was beneficial when it was available, whether through now-improved medical means or through spiritual means.12
For example, Jennie Smith wrote in 1876 about how she had learned to submit to God’s will and accept her sickness.13 By the next year, however, she was considering whether God might want her to exercise faith for healing.14 On Tuesday evening, April 23, 1878, her physician, her sister, some Methodist and Presbyterian ministers, and some others began praying with her, for two hours. She asked for God’s will again, felt strength, and then sat up. Finally, she stood up, for the first time in sixteen years. She walked around the room and remained whole thereafter. She became an evangelist preaching to men on the railroad until she died in 1924 at the age of eighty-two.15 The period includes many other testimonies of bedridden people being permanently healed once they began to pray for healing.16
Sometimes, however, the reaction against earlier passivity went too far, now rejecting medicine in favor of faith alone. Many medical treatments from an earlier period, such as siphoning blood from patients, were harmful; songwriter Fanny Crosby lost sight in infancy due to a quack physician. Nevertheless, medical knowledge advanced significantly in the late 1800s, after which resisting medical help more often had negative consequences. Faith missionary Rowland Bingham, founder of SIM, realized the weakness of his theology when he barely survived the sickness that killed his missionary colleagues. While he continued to pray for the sick, witnessing many healings, he recognized that prayer did not heal everyone.17 Methodist bishop William Taylor lamented the antimedicine view that cost the life of his assistant; while affirming that Christ’s death provided “for bodily as well as spiritual restoration,” he noted “that the work of physical redemption would not be completed until the resurrection.”18
Many early Christian Alliance (now Christian and Missionary Alliance) and Pentecostal missionaries died from malaria in Africa until the missionaries started accepting medicine.19 John Alexander Dowie had a significant ministry of healing, but some of his followers died after refusing medical treatment.20 When his own daughter accidentally burned to death, Dowie blamed this tragedy on her sin.21 While some attributed all lack of healing to inadequate faith,22 others who affirmed divine healing, such as A. J. Gordon and D. L. Moody, sought a more balanced approach, which eventually became the movement’s prevailing view.23 For example, R. Kelso Carter, who authored the famous hymn “Standing on the Promises” in 1886, initially rejected medicine and expected healing to come exclusively through prayer. After finally needing medical treatment, however, he publicly modified his position, allowing a greater element of mystery.24 While appreciating the spiritual commitment of those who died refusing medicine, Pentecostal leader Donald Gee questioned “their sound judgement.”25
As historian Paul King notes, history provides us many examples of balanced “faith teaching,” such as (to name only a few examples) George Mueller and Hudson Taylor in the nineteenth century, and Christian and Missionary Alliance missionary John MacMillan in the twentieth.26 Of course, as in Hebrews 11, heroes of faith include both those we honor by name and a multitude of others whose honor awaits the Lord’s return.
Today most Pentecostals and other renewalist Christians recognize that God often heals in this life but also that full healing awaits Jesus’s return.
God Answers—in Various Ways
God shows his faithful love, but he also likes to surprise us so we can’t confine him to our formulas or boxes. For years I had prayed for God to pour out the Spirit again at Asbury University and Asbury Theological Seminary. I held tight to God’s promise in Luke 11:13, which seems to be exemplified in outpourings of the Spirit after prayer in Acts (1:14; 4:31; 8:15). Still, I must confess to some mixed motives. I often would suggest, “God, I am preaching in chapel next week. That would be a really good time to pour out your Spirit.”
But when God did it in February 2023, he did it in an unexpected way that nobody could take credit for except him. The people near the center of it—such as the gospel choir and the humble Pastor Zach Meerkreebs—absolutely refused to take any credit. (Zach in fact initially thought that his sermon had bombed that day.) God’s holy presence inspired so much awe that none of us who sensed it dared boast of anything in his presence. It also turned out so much bigger than the merely local experience I had been praying for. God answers prayer, but he often likes to do it in ways that surprise us. That way he can remind us that yes, he hears us, but it is God acting and not the product of some special formula we used.
Peter Chin’s wife underwent needed chemotherapy for cancer, while God protected her unborn child from its negative effects. God “did not answer a single prayer in the way that I had asked,” he notes, “but instead gave me things so much deeper and richer.”27
When doctors diagnosed my son, David, with acute liver failure, I prayed for his healing with some confidence. A few months earlier, I had been among those praying for a blinded eye when it was instantly healed in front of us. But this time God answered prayer and encouraged my son’s faith in a different way. He was listed for a liver transplant one day, the next day they found a match, and two days later he had a new liver. The usual wait for a liver can run from a month to five or more years. His old liver was so decayed that doctors were amazed that his kidneys had not shut down and that other bodily systems had not been affected. They were even more astonished that he had run a 5K several days before the surgery. Unknown to him, the genetic defect that led to liver failure had been gradually destroying his liver all his life, but God preserved him until the condition could be diagnosed and a new liver would be ready for him.28
We continue to pray for him because of side effects from the post-transplant medicine, but we thank God and the researchers for the medical technology God used, technology that was not available just a few decades earlier.
How Come Africa Gets More Miracles?
When I ask my African friends why they see more miracles in Africa, they point out the greater need for miracles there. “You should thank God for the medical resources he has given you,” they point out, resources much less often available to them.
My godly African parents-in-law died from illnesses that probably could have been treated had they lived in the US. It was not that they lacked faith for healing. When my father-in-law, Papa Jacques, prayed simple prayers, many people were healed. When Médine and I were visiting Congo, periodically we would run into people even on the street who remembered being healed when Papa Jacques prayed for them.
But despite miracles sustaining many individuals in Africa, average longevity is considerably lower there than here. The availability of health care and health education makes a big difference. Christians in the West tend to live much longer than our African counterparts, with less frequent need for dramatic miracles. God does not do miracles merely to entertain us; he does them when they are needed. Jesus fed the five thousand, but afterward he told his disciples to collect the leftovers (John 6:12). They wouldn’t need a miracle for their next meal.
We can thank God for the eventual medical fruits of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scientific revolution. Most of the founders of modern science worked from Christian premises; the scientific revolution began because Christians who believed in an orderly God began inductively exploring nature, including the nature of the human body.29 Often medical technology today produces results that otherwise could be produced only by a miracle.
But economic limitations are so severe and supplies so limited that many doctors leave Africa; only those most committed to serving patients there stay. In 2018, the US had 25.7 doctors for every ten thousand people; the Democratic Republic of Congo had one for every ten thousand people (about 4 percent of the US figure). One should not assume that this situation is God’s ideal for his people. Estimates of self-identified Christians in the US are some 63 percent, with an estimated church attendance of about 30 percent. By contrast, some 95 percent of people in the Democratic Republic of Congo identify as Christians. Roughly a quarter of the nation is charismatic.30
In 2020, in some countries such as South Sudan or Nigeria, more than one mother died for every hundred live births, more than triple the rate in the US. In 2023, on average four infants died for every hundred live births in those countries, close to eight times the average in the US. The rate of infant mortality was even higher in some areas: In Somalia, it was more than eight per hundred. Beyond Africa, in Afghanistan, it was more than ten. Mothers in Africa and Asia do not love their babies less than North American mothers do. Many, however, have less access to resources.
Nonhealing in the Bible
And Ahijah wasn’t able to see, because his eyes were set because he was old. And the Lord said to Ahijah, “Look, Jeroboam’s wife is coming to seek a message from you about her son . . .” And when Ahijah heard the sound of her steps coming to the door, he said, “Come in, Jeroboam’s wife!” (1 Kings 14:4–6)
Whereas the Bible encourages our faith for healing by recounting many examples, it doesn’t need to tell us that some people stay sick or that most dead people aren’t raised; we know that from ordinary experience.31 We don’t need much encouragement to believe in sickness!
The only person whom the Bible explicitly mentions as healed from a skin disease in Elijah’s day was the Syrian Naaman (2 Kings 5:14), though there were Israelites with the same condition (7:3–10). Jesus specifies that Naaman was indeed the only one healed of that condition in that generation (Luke 4:27).
Sickness sometimes comes as judgment (Deut. 28:21–22, 27–28; 2 Chron. 26:20; Rev. 2:22; compare Pss. 38:3; 39:9–11), but sometimes comes, even lethally, to spare people from harsher judgment scheduled around them (1 Kings 14:12–13; compare Isa. 57:1–2; Rev. 9:6). Sometimes God uses sickness or physical weakness even to facilitate the preaching of the gospel, as in Paul’s own case:
You know that it was on account of a physical weakness that I first preached the good news to you. (Gal. 4:13)
There is no one-size-fits-all reason for sickness. (Though we know that quite often, spiritual factors aside, it relates to microorganisms!)
In the Bible, David became physically weak, declining with old age. Indeed, this once ambitiously polygamous king did not have any intimate relations with the young lady his attendants brought to keep him warm (1 Kings 1:1–4). Whereas Moses retained his strength and eyesight at the age of 120 (Deut. 34:7), the prophet Ahijah was physically blind in his old age—yet so spiritually sighted that he could reveal who had just come to his door (1 Kings 14:6). We learn in passing that the prophet Elisha died of a sickness (2 Kings 13:14), even though his bones remained so full of God’s power that a corpse thrown on top of his bones came back to life (2 Kings 13:21). Obviously, Elisha’s sickness is not a negative comment about God’s power in his life.
New Testament Examples
Although Jesus enacted God’s kingdom ideal by healing all who came to him, he also left instructions regarding those who would not be healed: “When you throw a party, invite those who are destitute, disabled, lame or blind” (Luke 14:13).
Jesus’s first missionaries not only faced hunger, thirst, travel, and imprisonment for his sake, but they sometimes incurred sickness as well (as noted earlier, Matt. 25:35–36 probably refers to missionaries). This has also been true for many groundbreaking apostolic ministries since then (using the broad definition of “apostolic” from chap. 2). Pioneering faith missionary Hudson Taylor, for example, witnessed miracles,32 but his bright and devoted eight-year-old daughter Gracie died of sickness, as did his youngest son.33 He eventually lost his devout, thirty-three-year-old wife, Maria, and her newborn to the same,34 and he endured breakdowns and sickness himself as well.35
Like Paul, Epaphroditus is an example of experiencing health challenges in the course of carrying out one’s mission. When Epaphroditus was sick close to the point of death after a difficult voyage, Paul did not say, “We claimed his health and he was instantly well.” Instead he celebrates, “God had mercy on him” (Phil. 2:27); by God’s grace, Epaphroditus recovered. (Gradual recovery is also God’s gift; compare Ps. 41:3.)
Paul left Trophimus sick at Miletus (2 Tim. 4:20) and does not feel the need to offer any theological justification or explanation to Timothy. Nor does he offer a rationale for not urging (further?) prayer for healing when he instructs Timothy to use healthier means than before to take care of his digestive issues (1 Tim. 5:23).
Do I think everybody Jesus ministered to got healed? Yes. (I think this includes those who came to him, but otherwise just a few persons, like the one man out of the many at the Pool of Bethesda in John 5:3, 5. Jesus was not emptying hospital wards.) Do I think everybody Paul prayed for got healed? It doesn’t look like it.
Job as a Good Example, Not a Bad One
Some advocates of greater faith (itself a good thing) have suggested that Job’s low expectations invited his troubles:
What I fear comes on me! (Job 3:25)36
They neglect to mention that he also lamented,
When I expected good, evil came. (Job 30:26 nasb)
Part of the point of the book of Job is that God permitted Satan to afflict Job even though Job
was blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil. (Job 1:1 nrsv)
His offerings on behalf of his children (1:5) were not acts of unbelief; the author recounts these to make clear that Job did everything right to avoid trouble and did not in any way deserve what happened to him. The book of Job is emphatic that despite what he suffered, Job did not sin (1:22; 2:10). Later in the book Job does say some theologically questionable things, but these are the words of one in despair (6:26). After setting Job straight, God reproves his accusers:
You have not spoken what is right about me, as my servant Job has. (Job 42:7)
Perhaps some seek fault in Job in hopes of discovering how to avoid sufferings like his for themselves: “You see [my] calamity, and are afraid” (6:21). Yet James declares,
We consider those blessed who remained steadfast. You have heard of the steadfastness of Job, and you have seen the purpose of the Lord, how the Lord is compassionate and merciful. (James 5:11 esv)
Kingdom Now and Not Yet
We do not receive every aspect of the kingdom now; what we have now is a foretaste, not the consummation. Canon Andrew White recounts some people being raised from the dead during his ministry in Iraq. Yet more than a thousand of his church members in Iraq were killed, many in random or sectarian violence but most simply for being Christian converts. As he points out in Faith Under Fire, “From the time of the resurrection of Christ to His second coming, God’s kingdom exists alongside the kingdom of darkness”37 (compare Matt. 13:29–30, 47–49; Rom. 9:22–23).
When John the Baptist faced impending death in Herod’s prison, he heard that Jesus was healing people. This was nice and obviously prophetic, but it wasn’t what God had shown John about the coming one. John’s expected kingdom bringer would baptize in the Holy Spirit and fire (Matt. 3:11; Luke 3:16), and John has not heard of any fire. So John sends messengers to Jesus to ask whether he really is the coming one, as John originally thought, or whether John has it wrong (Matt. 11:2–3; Luke 7:18–20).
John’s messengers see the healings, and Jesus makes their eyewitness experience part of his message: Blind people see, lame people walk, people with skin diseases are cleansed, deaf people hear, dead people are raised, and good news is preached to poor people (Matt. 11:5; Luke 7:21). Using these words, Jesus appeals to John’s knowledge of Scripture. The coming restoration, the time of the kingdom, would include such blessings: Blind people would see, deaf people would hear, lame people would walk (Isa. 35:5–6), and the Lord’s anointed would preach good news to poor people (Isa. 61:1).
The fullness of the kingdom will bring the expected total healing and restoration of God’s people and indeed of all creation (Isa. 35:1–2, 10; 61:4, 11; 65:17–19). In the meantime, though, Jesus was already doing kingdom works. Healing and bringing good news to the disenfranchised constitute a genuine foretaste of the kingdom. Jesus was saying, “Yes, John, I am the kingdom bringer.” But everything would be in its own time. The kingdom comes first like a tiny mustard seed before it becomes something massive (Matt. 13:31–32; Mark 4:31–32; Luke 13:19). It comes first like yeast concealed before it becomes the kingdom banquet (Matt. 13:33; Luke 13:21).
Likewise, Jesus warned his opponents that his widespread deliverance of the needy from evil spirits meant that the kingdom had come upon them (Matt. 12:28; Luke 11:20). The kingdom has invaded the world, and Satan is not able to supplant it, though he continues to rage until his final removal (Rev. 12:12).
After World War II, scholars began comparing this already/not yet character of the kingdom to the difference between D-Day and V-Day. Once the Normandy invasion succeeded (D-Day), the outcome of the war was clear; the Nazi regime’s defeat was just a matter of time. But battles continued until the final collapse of the Nazi regime (V-Day). We too live between the times of the spiritual D-Day and the final V-Day, continuing the war but now with full knowledge of the outcome. As South African Vineyard scholar Derek Morphew points out, “Whenever someone is healed, it bears witness to the fact that the kingdom is here. Whenever someone is not healed, it bears witness to the fact that the kingdom is not yet here.”38
We are not yet in the fullness of the kingdom, although that is what we strive for as we seek kingdom purposes in the present and work against this world’s evils. Nevertheless, the works of the kingdom in the present remind us that God has not forgotten his promise.
We may not individually receive every miracle that we would like, but anyone else’s miracle is also a gift to the rest of us. Any miracle is a kingdom foretaste and thus an encouragement to all of us to trust the future God has promised, when God will bring streams in the desert (Isa. 35:6) and renew the heavens and the earth (Isa. 65:17; Rev. 21:1). In that day, war will be no more (Isa. 2:4; Mic. 4:3). There will be no more sickness and no more suffering. Indeed, God
will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will not happen anymore. Nor will mourning or crying or pain be anymore, for the first things have passed away. (Rev. 21:4; compare 7:16–17; Isa. 25:8; 49:10)
The Lord God will dwell among us in fullness.
Healing Often but Not Always
Rolland and Heidi Baker and many of their Mozambican colleagues have been stoned and escaped various attempts on their lives as they have planted churches in Mozambique. Serving in areas with little medical help and much disease, they have also faced health challenges. Heidi had an infection so serious that doctors wanted to amputate her legs, but God healed her. Rolland was on his deathbed from long-term cerebral malaria, his memory gone and his kidneys failing, when God healed him completely in one day. But while they have experienced dramatic healing, they emphasize that there is no formula that will always yield healing. God heals sovereignly, and they seek to follow his leading.
Heidi reports that right after seeing a blind woman healed, her eyes visibly changing “from white to gray to brown,” she prayed for a blind man, expecting the same sort of miracle. He was not healed, though he came to faith and a Christian doctor who was visiting from abroad was able to remove the man’s related tumor. God miraculously and instantly healed other blind people at this time, but not everyone.39
In a 2012 interview with John Lathrop for Pneuma Review, Heidi Baker spoke of a blind girl named Albertina in the village of Mieze. Albertina was about twenty months old, and her eyes were completely white. In front of local villagers and foreign visitors, “Albertina’s eyes turned from white to gray and finally to beautiful dark brown. We sobbed as we watched her actually see her mother for the first time.”
But at the conclusion of that same interview, Heidi adds, “I hug lots of people every Sunday, people in wheelchairs who don’t get out of them. As many blind people as we see healed, we also have homes for blind people who aren’t healed. We have cottage industries for blind people. It’s all about God and giving His love to others. Love accomplishes God’s will even if a supernatural miracle doesn’t happen. The biggest miracle is love.”
Emphasizing the importance of missions, Dr. Helen Roseveare insists that if God calls you somewhere swept by disease, God will take care of you there. If you get the disease, God may use that to open doors for you to share with others who have it. “How’s that for success?” she asks. By the world’s standards, we are crazy—and by our standards, they are the crazy ones. If we truly believe that Jesus is the only savior, “we’ve only got this short life to get others to know the same truth.”40
God often heals, but sometimes we stay sick for a while; whether it’s short or long, that need not mean that something is wrong with us spiritually. William Wilberforce, for example, suffered much of his life, enduring ulcerative colitis and spinal curvature, yet he lobbied for decades for the abolition of slavery in the British Empire. On July 26, 1833, Wilberforce learned that the bill for abolishing slavery would pass; his greatest mission in this life accomplished, he died three days later at the age of seventy-three.41
Imprisoned for their faith in Iran, Maryam Rostampour and Marziyeh Amirizadeh shared Christ with their cellmates. They had experienced the Lord’s miraculous leading and protection. Nevertheless, they still endured severe sickness at times in prison, and this was part of what they endured for Christ.42
In Russia, Aida observed her brother becoming more alive even as cancer increasingly ravaged his body. He faced death with confidence in his destiny with Christ. It was this experience that brought Aida to trust in Christ for herself, after which she became an unwavering witness for Christ despite opposition.43
Conclusion
When we pray for healing, we can pray expectantly; Scripture appears to even suggest that, barring other factors, healing is the normal expectation (Ps. 103:3; James 5:15). God delights to bless his children (e.g., Ps. 37:4), so it is good to pray with expectant faith.44 The God who shows himself faithful in so many details of my life is surely to be trusted even when the world around us might seem, from our finite vantage point, to be out of control. As Jesus assures us, not a hair from our head falls to the ground without our Father’s care (Matt. 10:29–30; Luke 12:6–7).
Nevertheless, the “not yet” part of the already/not yet character of the kingdom maintains a tension. Biblical wisdom not only shows us that God normally blesses the righteous, the diligent, the hardworking, and so forth (e.g., Prov. 6:6–8; 10:4; 12:11, 24; 13:4, 11; 14:23; 21:5; 22:29; 28:19). It also shows us that, as in the case of Job, there are exceptions (compare Eccles. 7:15; 8:14; 9:13–16). The complementary perspective of Ecclesiastes is valid: Enjoy God’s gifts in this life (Eccles. 2:24; 3:13; 5:18; 8:15; 9:7–9). But that book’s perspective is limited to events of this life (compare Luke 12:19; 1 Cor. 15:32, drawing on Isa. 22:13). If there were no afterlife to finish distributing just rewards, then it would be true: The righteous and wicked share the same fate (Eccles. 9:1–3). Happily, we can look beyond our death to eternal hope because Jesus is risen.
1 Destiny Image, “Powerful Sermon”; see now also Johnson, Sting.
2 Jack Deere likewise mentions being sick at an entire conference on healing (Deere, Still Surprised, 118).
3 Hagin, What Faith Is, 12. He also admitted that people were healed without following his line of teaching, but he sometimes said that it was because they were spiritual babes and didn’t know any better (e.g., Hagin, Prayer Secrets, 10).
4 Hagin, What Faith Is, 7.
5 Hagin even expected people to have the ability to decide when to die (Hagin, Covenant, chap. 5): “So don’t stop at less than 70. If you are satisfied with 70, go on home. If you’re not satisfied, go on up to 80. When you get there, if you’re not satisfied, go on up to 90. If you get satisfied, then go on home.” But compare Deut. 31:14; 1 Sam. 26:10; 1 Kings 2:1; 1 Chron. 17:11.
6 Quadratus fragment 2.
7 Deere, Still Surprised.
8 Deere, Darkness, 201–3.
9 Curtis, Faith, 11–12, 26–50; Kidd, “Healing,” 165.
10 Curtis, Faith, 21.
11 Curtis, Faith, 41.
12 Curtis, Faith, 51–80.
13 Curtis, Faith, 1. Here I reuse my summary from Keener, Miracles, 1:391–92, 397–99.
14 Curtis, Faith, 4–5.
15 Curtis, Faith, 5. See also the early summary of her account in Gordon, “Ministry of Healing,” 241–43.
16 Opp, Lord for Body, 46–47, 196; Curtis, Faith, 81–82, 96–97; Alexander, Pentecostal Healing, 24–27.
17 Opp, Lord for Body, 129; Baxter, Healing, 99–100, 128–30.
18 Curtis, Faith, 194.
19 Curtis, Faith, 194; Hudson, “British Pentecostals,” 295; Anderson, “Signs and Blunders,” 207.
20 Opp, Lord for Body, 103–11, 115.
21 Baer, “Empowered Bodies,” 249.
22 Curtis, Faith, 88–90.
23 Curtis, Faith, 11, 88, 197, 199.
24 Curtis, Faith, 197–99.
25 Hudson, “British Pentecostals,” 297.
26 See King, Believer with Authority; King, Moving Mountains.
27 Chin, “Blindsided,” 62.
28 A songwriter, David composed the song “Dying,” about his experience of facing the likelihood of death in his twenties (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfxsC6IiwNA, accessed April 30, 2025).
29 See, e.g., Koestler, “Kepler and Psychology”; Lindberg and Numbers, Essays; Brooke, Science; Barbour, Religion and Science, 24–29, 64–65; Brooke, Reconstructing Nature; Livingstone, Hart, and Noll, Perspective; Frankenberry, Faith; Lindberg, Beginnings; Numbers, Galileo; Hunter, Boyle; Peterson, Flat Earth. See concisely the articles in Christian History 76, no. 4 (2002).
30 For the charismatic figure, see Mandryk, Operation World, 269. Pew Research Center in 2018 estimated the Christian population at 95.8 percent (cited in US Department of State, “2018 Report”).
31 I borrow many lines in this chapter, and especially this section, from Keener, Miracles Today, 217–21.
32 Taylor and Taylor, Secret, 118; more detail in Taylor and Taylor, Early Years.
33 Taylor and Taylor, Secret, 134–35, 167.
34 Taylor and Taylor, Secret, 173–75.
35 Taylor and Taylor, Secret, 182, 213.
36 Kenneth Copeland, “God’s Faith” (an audio recording). Victor Paul Wierwille, founder of The Way International cult, used the same argument in Studies, 16.
37 White, Faith Under Fire, 64. Many Spirit-filled believers emphasize this character of the kingdom (see, e.g., Vineyard USA, “Core Beliefs”).
38 Morphew, Breakthrough, 143 (as cited in Clark, “Inaugurated Kingdom,” 25).
39 Baker and Baker, Always Enough, 171–72.
40 Roseveare, “Cost of Loving Jesus.”
41 On Wilberforce, see, e.g., Tomkins, Wilberforce; Metaxas, Grace; compare Wolffe, Expansion.
42 See Voice of Martyrs, Hearts of Fire 2, 269–70, 274.
43 Voice of Martyrs, Hearts of Fire, 82 (Aida’s full story is 77–107).
44 Despite limited biblical precedent in Mark 14:36 (compare 1:40), I don’t think we need to preface all prayers with, “If it be your will . . .” God knows his will, and if something’s not his will, he doesn’t have to do it whether we concede that point or not! Jesus sometimes welcomes persistent faith that even tries to persuade him (e.g., Matt. 15:24–28).