Can the Truth Be Spread with Lies?

The question, plainly

Christians have always prayed for the sick, and so they should. God can heal anyone, any time, with or without doctors. That is not in question here. The question is about something newer: healing that is promised in advance, performed on a stage, and paid for by the audience, where people who stay sick are told their faith was too weak.

There is an opposite mistake too: saying God never heals and prayer for the sick is pointless. No Christian church has ever taught that, and this page does not either.

What the Bible actually records

Count every individual healing in the whole Bible, from Genesis to Acts, and you get about forty. Most happened “immediately.” About ten did not: Naaman had to wash seven times; ten lepers were healed “as they went”; one blind man first saw “men as trees, walking” and needed a second touch.

Three things are true of every one of them. None was partial and announced anyway. None wore off. And none was scheduled, advertised or guaranteed in advance. Plenty of sick people asked Jesus for help, some of them very loudly, and he welcomed it. But nobody could book a healing, promise one, or sell one.

They are also rare. Nearly three-quarters of them happen in about thirty years: the ministry of Jesus and the first apostles. Whole centuries, including the reigns of David and Solomon, record none at all. Jesus himself said: “many lepers were in Israel in the time of Eliseus the prophet; and none of them was cleansed, saving Naaman the Syrian” (Luke 4:27).

The faithful who were not healed

If healing were promised to everyone with enough faith, the apostles would have been the healthiest people in the New Testament. Instead:

• Paul prayed three times for his “thorn in the flesh” to go. God said: “My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9).
• Timothy had frequent illnesses. Paul told him to take a little wine for his stomach, a remedy of the day (1 Timothy 5:23).
• Trophimus: “Trophimus have I left at Miletum sick” (2 Timothy 4:20).
• Elisha, the Old Testament’s greatest healer, “was fallen sick of his sickness whereof he died” (2 Kings 13:14).

Nobody blames their faith. When the disciples asked whose sin made a man blind, Jesus said: “Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents” (John 9:3). And in the one Gospel story where a healing failed, it was the disciples who could not do it; the boy’s father said “help thou mine unbelief,” and Jesus healed the boy anyway (Mark 9).

What about “with his stripes we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5)? Matthew says that verse was fulfilled when Jesus healed the sick one evening in Capernaum (Matthew 8:16–17). Peter uses it about sin (1 Peter 2:24). Paul says our bodies will be fully healed at the resurrection (Romans 8:23). Nobody in the New Testament uses it to promise that every Christian can be healed now.

Try it: whose faith?

People are often told they were not healed because they did not believe enough. For each of these Bible healings, whose faith does the text mention?

What happened when healing was checked

Prayer trials. Several large medical studies tested whether heart patients who were prayed for did better. They did not. In the biggest (1,802 patients, 2006), patients who were told they were being prayed for actually had slightly more complications than the others. A review of ten trials with over 7,600 patients found no difference.

Lourdes. The Catholic shrine has had doctors examine healing claims since 1883. Of more than 7,000 reported cures since 1858, it has recognised 72 as unexplained, complete and lasting.

A surgeon’s follow-up. In the early 1970s Dr William Nolen took the names of 23 people announced as healed at a famous healing service, and checked on them later. None had been cured of a physical disease. One woman told she was healed of spinal cancer took off her back brace and ran across the stage. Her spine collapsed the next day, and she died four months later.

People really do feel better at these meetings. Pain fades with adrenaline and excitement; many illnesses come and go by themselves; and the people chosen for the stage are chosen off stage. That is why the check afterwards matters.

Try it: the “word of knowledge”

A speaker says, “God is showing me someone here with back pain.” How many people in the room could stand up? Move the slider and pick a “word.”

A hundred years of promised healing

John Alexander Dowie (1847–1907) taught that Christians should never use doctors or medicine. In Chicago in 1895 he faced about a hundred charges after deaths in his “healing homes.” He built his own town, Zion, Illinois, with no doctors or pharmacies allowed, and in 1901 called himself the prophet Elijah. The town went broke, his own church removed him in 1906, and he died after a stroke in 1907.

The healing evangelists who came after him differed a lot, but a pattern repeats: healing promised, performed on stage, never followed up, failures blamed on the sick, lots of money, and scandal. One of William Branham’s own campaign workers later said the share of healings that “stood up after investigation was embarrassingly low.” Jack Coe told the parents of a three-year-old with polio to take off his leg braces; the boy was not healed, and Coe died of polio himself in 1956.

The cost. A 1998 medical study found 172 children in the US who died over twenty years because their parents chose faith healing over doctors. For 140 of them, ordinary treatment works more than nine times out of ten.

But people got saved…

This is the hardest question. Suppose the healings were exaggerated, but someone came to Christ at the meeting. Wasn’t it worth it?

The Bible answers directly. Paul heard people say “Let us do evil, that good may come,” and called it slander (Romans 3:8). He said that if we claim God did something he did not do, we are “false witnesses of God” (1 Corinthians 15:15). Around AD 420, when someone suggested Christians pretend to be heretics in order to expose them, Augustine refused: “How then by a lie shall I rightly be able to prosecute lies?”

God can bring good out of anything. That is his business, not a method for us. And a faked healing does damage beyond the room: if healings can be staged, a sceptic will ask why the resurrection could not be staged too.

Try it: check a healing claim you’ve heard

Think of a healing story you heard in a meeting, on television or from a friend. Answer eight questions. Nothing you choose is saved or sent anywhere.

The point, one more time

Read the full dossier, with sources → Simple English →