01.02. Five Kinds of Divine Healing
Chapter 2 FIVE KINDS OF DIVINE HEALING.
If we give really serious thought to the subject, we are compelled to admit that all healing comes directly or indirectly from God. There could be none at all without his work or works. It is a happening or result connected in every instance with some kind of manifestation or exercise of divine power.
There have been sudden recoveries, so called, that have apparently taken place under the manipulations of the veriest cranks and humbugs, as well as those which are beheld under the influence and work of certain ecclesiastical bodies, where really and actually there had been no disease or sickness. The complaint existed solely in the imagination. But under some kind of appeal or surrounding, a mental revolution took place, the fancied ailment of course disappeared, and there stood before the community an apparent marvelous and sudden cure. And yet no real healing had taken place, for there had been no actual malady to operate on.
Evidently then, the delivery from an imaginary physical affliction, however pleasant the mental consequence may be, is in all truth no virtual case of healing. Genuine healing must and can only proceed from God. A second thought we advance is that God heals in more ways than he gets credit for. Not only the world but the friends and followers of the Lord rob him of much of his glory and power as well as his wisdom and goodness, when they restrict him to one mode of bestowing health and recovery upon the afflicted human body. By such a conclusion as well as doctrine, they purloin from the Divine Being four-fifths of the praise that is due him for this great blessing, for God has no less than five ways of healing the body!
Furthermore, as the Almighty One has seen fit to restore more people by four of the methods alluded to, than by the one which is so urged upon mankind by some of the smaller ecclesiastical bodies, we see that instead of four-fifths it would be nearer the truth to say that ninety-nine hundredths of the credit and glory belonging to God in this matter has been taken from him, or failed to be attributed to him.
One method of divine healing known to numbers and believed in by many, is instant restoration by the power of God, in answer to faith and prayer on the part of the one afflicted, or by others who plead and believe in his behalf.
We have repeatedly in our life beheld both of these instances. Some cases where individual and solitary faith was sufficient to bring health and life back with a rush into the pain racked and disease smitten body. In other cases, for whose sakes prayer was made, the recovery came to persons who were hundreds of miles away and the deliverance arrived while the supplicators were on their knees pleading for the one who at that moment was hovering on the borders of eternity. Bishop Galloway of the M. E. Church South was undoubtedly brought back to life in this way.
Once while a pastor in New Orleans a leading woman of our congregation was suddenly restored, who had been given up by several doctors. Her husband, himself a prominent physician, was sleeping in a corner of the room, expecting to be told of his wife’s last breath. The writer was on his knees begging God for her life, when suddenly with a beautiful smile she spoke aloud and said, "God has healed me!" and it was so, and it was a perfect restoration.
Several months later, while at a district conference, a telegram came acquainting that body of ministers and laymen with the sad tidings of the swift approaching dissolution of a gifted and pious young preacher of that annual conference. Instantly the Presiding Elder called everybody to their knees, and asked one of the preachers to lead in prayer. The Spirit of God came on the man praying, and with tears and strong crying he plead, God willing, for the life of the young man. When all arose, after the prayer had been concluded, a number felt that it had been heard and accepted in heaven. In a few hours came the news that at the very time we were on our knees pleading with God about his sick servant, the dying man, over one hundred miles away, was suddenly healed. A second divine method of healing is by water. The great chemist of the universe in some way, and with a certain blending of chemical elements, and an abiding proportion among themselves that puzzle both physicians and pharmacists, has given a healing property to springs and pools of water that effect a perfect cure of the human body, though accomplished gradually and not suddenly like the first. As God made the water, and placed the restoring quality in its crystal flow, of course then the cure is as much a case of divine healing, as when it comes in answer to faith and prayer. The only difference is that one is direct, personal and immediate, while the other is instrumental, personal and gradual. But God is in both. That water heals many ailments and maladies of the flesh no one in possession of his sense and senses can truthfully deny. Twice the writer has been restored to perfect health by the power of this second mode of healing. Once at Cooper’s Wells in Mississippi, when a pastor in Vicksburg. Again in 1893, when we had sciatica boiled out of us by the steaming natural baths of Hot Springs, Ark. This kind of cure can be properly called Divine Healing Number Two. A third mode of divine healing has been deposited so to speak in climate.
None of us could count the people who, dying by inches in one part of the country, have been restored to perfect health by removing to another state or territory. As God has made the climate, and given to it the virtue or power to renew or relieve certain physical conditions, then are we compelled to admit the fact of a third kind of divine healing; and as we see an annual exodus of people seeking for the mountain, sea shore or desert atmosphere, as their different and peculiar troubles call for, then we behold plainly not only the faith of multitudes in such a cure, but later on we mark, in many instances, the proof of the healing in its obtainment. And this is Number Three. A fourth divine healing comes through the virtue of medicine and the skill of real doctors. That God has placed certain remedial qualities in the vegetable and mineral kingdoms, is recognized in Scripture, proved in nature, and realized in life. That God also has given to some men the cast of mind which, when informed and trained, makes them skillful and successful physicians, we can no more doubt than that he makes preachers, and scatters gifts of all kinds among the children of men.
We believe that there are multitudes asleep in the cemetery who would have lived many years longer if they had used the helps and means of recovery which God had sent them in medicine, and the knowledge and experience of men wise and able in the medical realm. As both medicine and men are the creations of God, the proper treatment by one, and the correct use of the other, can be most reasonably expected with God’s blessing on the instrumentality to result in a divine cure of still another order. This we would call Divine Healing Number Four. The writer and countless thousands can bear witness to this mode of restoration. And what is more, we can properly call it divine healing, and give God the glory. A fifth character of divine healing is to be seen in Nature itself. That is, in every case of real sickness the laws of our physical being, come to the succor of the afflicted and endeavor in various ways to throw off the disease; and wherever given a fair chance will bring relief.
Now as Nature and its laws are all of God, we are compelled to see in this restoration, no accident whatever, but a divine healing again; and which we can very truly term Divine Healing Number Five Here, then, we have five different kinds of Divine healing.
Furthermore we would state that we have seen every one of these forms and expressions of the power of God, not only present but testifying in our meetings These things being so, we cannot refrain from drawing several conclusions.
One is that the individual who has been blessed and restored through one of these operations, ought not to discount the experience, and cast his brother out of the synagogue whom God has helped in another way.
Second: To keep us humble and looking to him all the while; and to make us tolerant with one another, and to broaden us spiritually as well; God, who is pleased to heal us in a certain manner at one time, may see fit to restore us in a different way on another occasion.
Third: There are some people whom God evidently will never heal at any time or in any way. Whether these persons be good or wicked, yet it is alike manifest that they will never recover what, in some way, has been lost or forfeited. The Lord withholds his blessing from every one of the five modes of healing we have mentioned. This is not only beheld as a fact in Scripture, but also in daily life. As physical health is not essential to pardon, holiness, and entrance into heaven, we can breathe easily when we see a number of good people unable to find, in any of the five ways, a recovery of bodily strength and soundness. As for wicked people, we count it a blessing to the church, to society and to the world, that many of them can never get back their lost health and physical power. For there are very many men and women living today whom, if God was to restore in body, would at once become a curse to family and community as they plunged afresh into careers of worldliness, drunkenness, debauchery and general deviltry.
Healing, then, is not for everybody, as good sense, as well as the Bible, will show; and so is not to be taught, and sought after as all can and should ask for regeneration and sanctification.
Hence when a self-constituted evangelist and teacher telegraphed to a preacher in one of our large cities, "Have all the sick and devil-possessed to meet me when I come" -- there was shown at once in the dispatch that a fanatic and profound ignoramus was sending the telegram.
Fourth: That as all healing comes from God, then to God let us give the glory, whether the cure comes by climate, water, medicine, nature, or the direct personal touch of the Almighty.
Fifth: Our physical weakness, and acquired or inherited diseases need not keep us out of heaven, if our souls are well, and stay right with God. The beggar whom Christ tells us about was full of sores, and died on an ash-pile near the rich man’s gate. But the Saviour said the angels came for him, and bore him aloft on their snowy wings to Paradise.
Sixth: There is a healing of the soul which is far more important than that of the body, no matter how blessed and desirable the latter may be. When we obtain the grace of full salvation, it often brings with it, as a beautiful attendant or follower, a well body. But even if it does not and we may be called to witness and work for God in a frail and trembling tenement of clay, yet the spirit itself, full of spiritual health, will be a compensation that will pay many times over for all our physical pangs. Nor is that all. But one of these days the struggle and battle of life will be over, we will take the last breath, heave the last sigh and enter into rest and be well forevermore. St. John in Revelation has given us a picture of how it shall be with us then in the words, "And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying: neither shall there be any more pain; for the former things are passed away."
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