S. Divine Healing
Divine Healing
“Is any sick among you? let him call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord: And the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up; and if he have committed sins, they shall be forgiven him. Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed. The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much.” (James 5:14-16). TO properly interpret this text, or better still, not to interpret it at all, but to accept it for what it says—to believe it because God has uttered it—is to preach what many eschew as false.
It requires no special courage to condemn the faiths that one’s own folks condemn; but to set up as Scriptural what has long been overlooked by one’s own people is to bring upon the speaker criticism, and, often, even rebuke. And yet no man is quite so safe in standing firmly by the text of Scripture as is the preacher, the first article of whose denominational faith reads like this: “We believe that the Holy Bible was written by men divinely inspired, and is a perfect treasure of heavenly instruction; that it has God for its Author, salvation for its end, and truth, without any mixture or error, for its matter; and is the supreme standard by which all human conduct, creeds, and opinions should be tried,”
I should hesitate for a long time to overthrow any dogma that had the support of a few sacred texts, hut to cut the cable of tradition and set sail by the chart and compass of God’s Word is always a safe course for a, believing soul.
“To the law and to the Testimony; if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them!” And if those who hold another opinion “speak not according to this Word, it is because there is no light in them.” To the text then:
“Is any sick among you? let him call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord: And the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up; and if he have committed sins, they shall be forgiven him. Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed. The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much.”
Three great truths, with their minor and constituent suggestions, stand out in it, Sickness is Real
First, the Scriptures speak of sickness as real. The Old Testament and the New know nothing of the modern “illusion” theory. “Behold, thy father is sick”: was said of Jacob (Genesis 48:1). “And the Lord struck the child that Uriah’s wife bare unto David, and it was very sick”, is said in 2 Samuel (2 Samuel 12:15). “And I Daniel fainted, and was sick certain days” Daniel says (Daniel 8:27),
These three samples of Old Testament statements might be followed by fifty passages out of that part of the Word that uses the same expression “sick”, and never once suggests that it is not a substantial fact, a bitter experience. In the New Testament we read how “a certain man was sick, named Lazarus”, and to Jesus they said, “Lord, behold, he whom Thou lovest is sick.” And “when Jesus heard that” He did not say, “This is not sickness, but a delusion.” But He did say, “This sickness it is not unto death, for the glory of God”.
All through the New Testament Christ goes healing the sick, and never once does He explain to them that they are not sick, but are suffering from an “illusion.” On the contrary, it is reported that they were sick and that He “healed all that were sick”, and “oppressed of the devil” (Matthew 8:16; Acts 10:38) The Scriptures teach that sickness is real and to deny that is neither scriptural nor reasonable. The unreasonableness of the “illusion” theory appears at once in the face of a story I heard a few years since. A gentleman down in the southern part of this state was sick. The wife—a Christian Scientist— met on the street by a neighbor who said, “Your husband is sick?” “Oh, no,” she replied, “he only thinks he is sick.” The small boy of the family heard the mother’s answer. Three days later the same neighbor met him on the street and said, “How’s your father?” To which the youth replied, “He thinks he’s dead!” The Scriptures commonly attribute sickness to Satan. Present-day preachers commonly attribute it to God. It would be well for those of us who stand in the pulpit to study the Scriptures upon the subject of sickness, and cease maligning our Father in Heaven who is not disease, but is health instead. In all the cases of sickness reported in the Bible, I could count on my fingers those instances for which God assumes the responsibility.
Miriam was smitten by God of leprosy; David’s son was smitten of the Lord; Herod was smitten of God and there are a few other instances. These are exceptions to the rule; they are dire judgments against sins. Satan is back of the ordinary sickness and suffering.
Job and his wife alike supposed that God had smitten him with loss of children, of property, and with loathsome disease. But the Scriptures expressly teach that Satan was back of the whole business. In the New Testament it is said of Christ that He cast out the evil spirit in one, and compelled the “dumb and deaf spirit” in another to come out; and out of the lunatic He cast out the evil spirit. The woman who had an infirmity of eighteen years, He speaks of as one hound by Satan to these many years. And then the general assertion is made that He healed all that were sick and “oppressed of the devil”. When my children were small and suffering from sickness it was impossible for me to keep my conception of God, as a God of goodness and of love, and yet believe that He was afflicting the innocent little ones with dread disease. That the devil would delight is such business, is just like him; and so when I found them suffering I was not surprised, for Satan is “the god of this world”, including the flesh.
Along with this unscriptural teaching that God is the Author of disease is a common assertion that sickness is a means of grace.
Those who say this remind as of the Scripture, “Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth, and scourneth every son whom He receiveth” (Hebrews 12:6). The son in my house that I loved best. perchance, I chastened oftenest; and yet I never put disease upon him, nor could I have, so long as a father’s heart was in my breast. Shall men be tatter than God? Is it a means of grace? Are the sick people of this world, as a rule, its sweetest spirits, its most enthusiastic Christians? May, verily, the majority of them, I believe, are soured by their experience, and lose heart and hope in consequence. Impatience and selfishness are their common traits.
There are beautiful exceptions, but that is the rule. Do we believe it to he from God, and a means of grace? Then why on earth do we send for a doctor to get us well as shortly as possible? Do we prefer health to holiness? You people who contend that it is a means of grace, why don’t you encourage sickness for the sake of spiritual growth? I personally, I have not found it to be a means of grace, and I do not believe it to be from God, and hence I have no hankering for unhealth.
I feel about the sick-bed as the colored boy did about his place on a Southern plantation. Before the slaves were freed, he fled North. Reaching Boston, he took refuge with an abolitionist, who fell to talking with him and said, “Didn’t you have a good master in the South?” “Yes, sah.” “Did he let you sleep it) the house?” “Yes, sah.” “Did he give you a good bed?” “Yea. sah,” “Give yon plenty to eat?” “Yes, pah1’ “Well, What did yon want to run away from him then for?”
“Look hea’h, Boss,” the black: boy replied, “if you thinks you wants the place, it’s open to you.” And that’s what I have to say concerning the sickbed. I believe it to he from Satan, as a rule, and so the Scriptures teach. An old writer says. “The Lord often sharpens His saints on the devil’s grind-stone,” and concerning this Dr. Gordon adds, “We admit the truth most fully, hut we do not, therefore, advise that the grind-stone be set up as a part of the furniture of tile Lord’s House.” The Lord may use sickness for the good of man, for He makes “all things work together for good”. Sometimes God has made sin to work our salvation, “What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid” (Romans 6:1-2).
Recently I have known two men whose salvation has resulted from the bitter experience of sin and its consequences. Shall we Sanctify sin and sickness into ordinances of God? By no means, lest we make? God the minister of each.
Christ is offered in the Word as the sickness-bearer. The Hebrew in Isaiah 53:4-5 reads: “Surely He has borne our sicknesses and carried our sorrows.
“But He was wounded for transgressions. He was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon Him; and with His stripes we are healed”. In Matthew’s Gospel—Matthew 8:16-17 we read:
“When the even was come, they brought unto Him many that were possessed with devils: and He cast out the spirits with His word, and healed all that were sick:
“That it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Esaias the Prophet, saying, Himself took our infirmities, and bare our sicknesses”.
Commenting upon this, Dr. Gordon remarks, “The yoke of His Cross, by which He lifted our iniquities, took hold also of our disease, so that it is in some sense true that as God made Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin, so He made Him to be sick for us, who knew no sickness.”
God’s Prescription for Sickness is Anointing and Prayer The elders, by request of the sick, shall anoint.
“Is any sick among you? let him call for the elders of the Church: and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord”.
You may ask, “Where arc the ‘elders’?” And I am compelled to answer that, at this point. Baptist churches and others have likely departed from the Scripture, and today the deacons are doing the work that the elders were originally appointed to do, while the deacon’s office is filled by men flamed trustees. The early Church had as its officers—the pastor, or bishop, elders and deacons. Now iti my denomination--the Baptist—we have the pastor, deacons, and trustees. The deacons in such churches perform largely the same office as the elders in the New Testament Church; while the trustees have been assigned the work that gave rifle, originally, to the appointment of deacons. So I reckon my deacons as the elder? in my church.
According to this text; they are not to hunt out the sick, but sire to respond to the request of the sick. For three centuries after Christ that was the universal custom. Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Origen, Clement, and other? tell us of cases of devils cast out, of tongues given, of poison failing of its effects, and of the sick raised to health in answer to prayer, finch authors as Water land, Dodwell, and Marshall insist that miracles of healing did not fail until the rise of the Catholic Church, and we know from history that since that time they have appeared among God’s most devout people—the Waldenses, Moravians, Huguenots, Friends, Baptists, and Methodists, not to speak of the experience of the Scotch Covenanters, Knox, Wishart, Livingstone. Welsh, Baillie, Peden, Craig; as, also, with George Fox, the father of Quakerism, and our own Baptist fathers, Powell, Knollys, and Jessey; and these were men that followed the letter of our text, The “oil” here is the symbol of the Holy Ghost; and is applied as such. It is hardly medicinal, far if God is any sort of a physician, He is not a quack who would prescribe oil for all diseases, In the Old Testament and in the New, olive oil was used for anointing and, almost without exception, as a symbol of the Holy Ghost. The fact that the elders, and not physicians, were to apply it, makes this view the more reasonable, and the additional words, “And the prayer of faith shall save the stick”, puts beyond dispute the thought that the oil had any other significance than symbolizing the Spirit.
Lange, one of the greatest of Bible students and scholars, commenting on Mark 6:13. and they “anointed with oil many that were sick, and healed them”, says, “Oil here is simply a symbolic medium of the miraculous work, and that the anointing was a symbol of the bestowing of the Spirit as a prerequisite condition of healing.”
Prayer and confession were the essentials to restoration. Five times in as many verses here “prayer” is divinely appointed. “Is any among you afflicted? let him pray”, “is any sick among you? let him call for the ciders of the Church; and let them pray ever him”, “The prayer of faith shall save the sick”. “Pray one for another, that ye may be healed”. “‘The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much”. Prayer! Prayer! Prayer! Prayer! Prayer! The most of us never stop to pray when our people are taken ill. We have professed to believe in God, and insist that what He says in the Scripture is so, but how easily we forget “Whatsoever ye shall ask of the Father in My Name, He may give it you” (John 15:16); “That if two of you shall agree on earth as touching any thing that they shall ask, it shall he done for them of My Father which if in Heaven” (Matthew 18:19); and even the more specific promises; “And these signs shall follow them that believe: * * they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover” (Mark 16:17-18). When I make this plea, I am not speaking against physicians, but I am speaking for God. I am not even saying that I would not, under any circumstances, call a physician; but I am saying that I have a scriptural warrant for prayer.
It is all right for the unbelieving world to make their first appeal to human help, it is all wrong for the followers of Jesus Christ to make their last appeal to Divine help. I have found Christian physicians—friends of the doctrine of Divine healing. One of the first physicians in the city of Chicago, a man who was; prominent in two medical institutions, one of them famed the world around, said to me years since, that the Scriptures plainly taught that God would raise the sick ill answer to prayer; and at his request, I went into one of those institutions twice to speak to the medical students from this text. As God’s men and women, we have not begun to understand the power of prayer. And confession is also essential.
“Confess your faults one to another”.
We readily understand the necessity of that. Crying to God is not praying! The man who has sin in his heart might cry to God forever, and receive no answer. “Beloved, if our heart condemn us not, then have we confidence toward God” (1 John 3:21). She had had with a step-mother, and the bitter things that had been said. We sent for the woman. Mutual confessions were made, and “the peace of God, which passeth all understanding” possessed her, and her prayers, after that, availed for peace and grace.
Prayer and confession, they are “Divine appointments.
God’s Promise is Restoration and Forgiveness The Scripture plainly says, “The prayer of faith shall save the sick”. Mark you, it is not the oil that you use, but the prayer of faith.
It is not supposing that sickness is an “illusion” that is to save, but “the prayer of faith.”
It is not conversing with departed spirits that saves, but “the prayer of faith”.
Blessed the man who can make “the prayer of faith”. That is a mighty tribute that Paul pays to Abraham, lie “believed Gad, end it was counted unto him for righteousness” (Romans 4:3). To believe— that is the climax of Christian blessedness.. To believe God—that is truly the divinest of all Human accomplishments.
Russel Conwell, in his life of Charles Spurgeon, says: “There are now living and worshipping in the Metropolitan Tabernacle, hundreds of people who ascribe the extension of their life to the effect of Mr. Spurgeon’s personal prayers. They have been sick with disease, and nigh unto death: he has appeared, kneeled by their beds and prayed [nr their recovery. Immediately the tide of health returned, the fevered pulse became less, the temperature was reduced, and all the activities of nature resumed their normal functions, within a short and unexpected period.” The success of our own A. J. Gordon in this experience. the blessings that were upon the petitions of A. B. Simpson, and the wonderful things that have come into the work of many others, have, in my judgment, one explanation—they were men who “believed God”. But I want you to notice the next sentence, “and the Lord shall raise him up”. The woman who comes to me saying that, as a medium, she can accomplish health, incites a reply that “if so, you must do it through Satan’s power, for God has never given this to mortal man. He alone has this power.” The newspapers used to speak of Dr. Dowie, “the Divine Healer”. They used to apply a kindred term to Dr. Cullis, “the Faith-cure Man”; and to a multitude of others whose claims have better or poorer foundations. But such men as love the Scriptures reject instantly, and almost with insult, having any such abilities assigned to them. When Peter and John, in the Name of Jesus Christ, had spoken the word of healing to the lame man at “the Beautiful gate of the Temple”, we read:
“All the people ran together unto them in the porch that is called Solomon’s greatly wondering.
“And when Peter saw it, he answered unto the people, Ye men of Israel, why marvel ye at this? or why look ye so earnestly on us, as though by our own power or holiness we had made this man to walk”? (Acts 3:10; Acts 3:12)
Some of the Lord’s people seem to think that ii one teaches the doctrine of “Divine Healing,” he assumes to himself some peculiar “power of holiness.” but Peter utterly repudiated the thought, “as though by our own power or holiness we had made this man to walk”?
“The God of Abraham, and of Isaac, and of Jacob, the God of our fathers, hath glorified His Son Jesus; * * “And His Name through faith in His Name hath made this man strong, whom ye see and know: yea, the faith which is by Him hath given him this perfect soundness in the presence of you all” (Acts 3:13; Acts 3:16).
“We do not deny that Theosophy has its healing. We do not question that healing has come out of Spiritualism; nor can we doubt that Christian Science has seen much of physical improvement and health. But we say this, that any system that does not conform its teaching to the truth in God’s Word, must explain its healing upon some other ground than that of the intervention of the Divine One.
He would not, He could not cooperate with error. The author of sickness, even Satan, it he could, by associating healings with heterodoxy and all error, deceive God’s people and lead them into darkness—would delight himself in so doing.
We read in the Word that “Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light”, and would “deceive the very elect”.
If we be men of God, our faith ought to be firmly grounded in the Word of God. What it does not teach, we dare not accept; what it plainly teaches, we dare not reject. And more blessed still, He who heals the sick, forgives sins.
“And if he have committed sins, they shall be forgiven him”.
Physical health is it good thing. Second to a saved soul. I count of consideration a sound body and a balanced mind, which is health. But it is second. The first thing in importance, the thing all-essential in importance, the thing without which life is a failure, the thing in the lack of which death is doom—is sins forgiven and the soul saved. Divine healing rests in Divine love, “God is love”. “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins” (1 John 1:9).
There is no way in which to put God to pain, more effectually, than to call into question His Spirit of love, or disposition to forgive.
Henry Moorehouse was in Dublin one day, when a friend asked him to go and see an old lady who was in great trouble. He found the poor old woman in a modest cottage, rocking herself to and fro, and moaning as if her heart would break. Moorehousc asked her what the trouble was and she answered, “My boy has broken my heart,” and then explained, “You must know, sir, that he went away and has done things that he thinks are wrong, but L could forgive him that, if only he would let me. But here is a letter that breaks my heart”; and she picked it tip and began to read and finally came to this sentence, “Dear mother, if you can never forgive me for my sins, don’t curse me.’’ Then she broke out, “I never knew how much I loved him until he went away, and now to think lie should say, ‘Mother don’t curse me.’ That breaks my heart.” She saw in that sentence the thought that she might refuse to forgive, and then, “curse him”; therein was the sorrow.
It must be an infinite sorrow to the infinite heart of God for the man, in whose behalf He has given His Son, to doubt that He will forgive. Don’t do it, my friend! Come back to God, and come now, for the promise is, “Him that cometh to Me I will in no wise cast out”, and the invitation, “Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest”.
1 heard once the cries of a woman who died in the home where we boarded. For many days before her death she cried for peace of mind, but none ever came. At last she told me of a trouble.