Part one of a three part series
by Mark McAndrew.
Over the past few months
the Prosperity Gospel keeps coming up. I've been talking about it over coffee,
on the phone, online, and in my classroom. So, here's my take:
I disagree with the statement:
"If you try your hardest to be healed, believe in God fully, and pray to
be healed, he will heal you."
I think God can heal
anyone at any time. And I believe God sometimes (perhaps even often) does heal
people today. But I do not believe he always heals people...even if they are
sincerely praying and asking for healing.
I think the verse from
Isaiah is true - "by his stripes we are healed." However, I think it
will only fully be applied in the resurrection, when we have perfectly healthy
bodies given to us. Until then, I do not think that there is a guarantee of
healing.
Let me give an example.
The most humble and godly person I've ever met is Jerry Ediger, who was my
Bible teacher in high school. He was paralyzed during a football game at age 17
and has been in a wheel chair for the last 28 years. Is the reason he
hasn't been healed in all this time really because he doesn't have enough
faith?
Also, and I'm not trying
to sound dramatic by saying this, but I had a friend from college die this past
year. His name was Jonathan. He was 23, 6 months younger than I am, and he died
from cancer. A year earlier (December 2009), he had some back pain and went to
get an MRI. They discovered five tumors in his body (one near each kidney, one
near his lungs, one near his heart, one in his lower back). He was diagnosed
with stage four cancer and immediately started chemo.
Our whole college began
praying for him in January, 2010. I saw him and prayed for his healing in
person, along with many others. I have little doubt that many of those prayers
were prayed sincerely and with faith that God could heal him. Well, the chemo
ended and he was feeling much better. The tumors had shrunk and he was
preparing to come back to school for Fall semester. That summer, and I tear up thinking
about it, the cancer returned with a vengeance.
He had lost his hair, was
horribly skinny and almost unrecognizable the last time I saw him. We talked in
the coffee shop on campus. He said the doctors were guessing he'd have maybe
two or three months to live. I hugged him. He loved Jesus. In fact, when I met
him three years earlier we became close friends and once even drove, just he
and I, to an out-of-state Christian conference for a week. He knew the Word
really well, and would get emotional talking about Jesus' death on the cross
for him. Anyways, all that to say he was a believer, he loved Jesus, and he was
prayed for by literally hundreds of Christians to be healed, and yet he passed
away last February.
Now, this is the point
where I get really upset at prosperity teaching. Prosperity teachers would tell
me friend, Jonathan, that the primary reason he wasn't getting better was
because he didn't have enough faith in promises like "By his stripes we
are healed" - and that if he just believed more in that promise, the
cancer would go away.
The problem is...that's
not true. We did believe and we did pray, and the cancer didn't go away. Now,
Jonathan didn't believe the prosperity 'word of faith' message, but if he had,
what would that have done to him as he was dying? He would have thought one of
two things: either I don't have enough faith or God doesn't keep his promises.
Both of those are not true and would have left him in more despair than he was
already in.
In the next two posts, I'd like
to look at a few passages that relate to this whole issue.
