The following "Question" was asked by a member of the congregation at Grace Community Church in Panorama City, California, and "Answered" by their pastor, John MacArthur Jr. It was transcribed from the tape, GC 70-19, titled "Bible Questions and Answers."  A copy of the tape can be obtained by writing, Word of Grace, P.O. Box 4000, Panorama City, CA 91412 or by dialing toll free 1-800-55-GRACE. Copyright 2000 by John MacArthur Jr., All Rights Reserved.

Question

My question essentially arises from your presentation of Luke, chapter 4, this morning. As I drove home, I thought about this quite a bit; then I got home, thought about it some more, and I’m still thinking about it. So, the question in synopsis, in the line of reasoning, goes essentially something like this: if Christ (as you presented this morning) heals by one of two ways in His earthly ministry-it’s either by direct touch [or] divine intervention, where people are coming to Him in essentially a petitionatory manner and making requests of Him. He is either making a touch or someone else is making a direct petition to Him, person to person. And then He is, by word, healing some distance from where He is standing. Knowing that Christ is completely raised from the dead-He lives forever and lives on our behalf now, and has ascended to the right hand of the Father-what then, if anything, keeps Him from, either by the petition of the individual who is directly afflicted, or one on His behalf, through the petition of prayer, keeps Him from essentially doing the same thing where He heals supernaturally, directly, and completely, even though He is not physically present?

Answer

That’s a very good question, and I made somewhat of a reference to that this morning in the first hour, but not in the second. My wife pointed out to me that that would have been helpful if I’d have said something about it, so I’m glad you asked the question. I may comment on that next week. There are a number of ways that I need to approach the question, in order to give you a full answer. The first one is this: no one is saying that Christ cannot heal. I was talking about the gift of healing, which He exercised on earth for the purpose of demonstrating his Messiahship and revealing Himself to be the One who had power over the physical world, which the Messiah must have if He’s going to grant to us a glorified body.

So, I’m not saying He couldn’t heal. But, the gift of healing, which Jesus demonstrated, was unique to Him, the 70, and the apostles, and even diminishes with the apostles, as I commented on this morning. Paul met Trophimus when he was sick, and left him sick. So, even in Paul’s case, the power to heal had diminished as his ministry went on. I was talking about the gift of healing; that is, somebody here has the power to heal. Jesus had it and He gave it to those who were around Him who were His representatives, in order to affirm that the gospel that He was bringing and they were preaching was in fact from God. The gift of healing was the specific issue to deal with in the life of Jesus.

The question of whether Jesus can still or does still heal is a different question. And the answer to the question is He can do whatever He wants. But, mark this; this is very important to notice: there is no healing ministry that Jesus can do now that can prove that He is the Messiah. Because there is no way that even if He does heal somebody, that it is necessary to connect that with Him. He’s not here. You can say to someone, “You know, I had cancer and I prayed, and I don’t have it anymore.” That’s your belief, but that doesn’t say anything to the public at large; that doesn’t say anything to people about the power of Jesus Christ because there is no natural connection between what happened to you and Jesus. He’s not there, He isn’t speaking, and He’s not touching, and He’s not visible.

So, the purpose of Jesus’ miracles was clearly demonstrated: it was His voice and it was His touch connected to that healing. And it was not arguable because there were vast crowds in most cases who saw the touch and heard the voice. Jesus was making that necessary link that was really not arguable. Today, somebody says they were healed… Somebody might say, “Well, your view is that God did it. My view is you were lucky.” A Christian Scientist could say they were healed (and they do) without medicine, and a Moron could say God healed them… It might have been certain physiological things that were going on. Somebody could say they were healed by Allah. Somebody could say they were healed by praying to Buddha. Somebody could say that the witch doctor healed them or the Shaman healed them, or whatever it is. And you might say, “Well, that’s your belief.” And somebody comes along and says, “I had an illness and God healed me”; we, as believers, might affirm that, but that does nothing to demonstrate the deity of Jesus Christ, which was the purpose of those miracles. It does nothing to unarguably enforce the authority of Scripture because there’s no immediate connection. Do you see what I’m saying? So, it can’t achieve that purpose. So, we set that whole thing aside.

Then we come back to the issue of “does the Lord heal believers who pray for healing?” And the answer to the question is He can do whatever He wants to do. That is not, however, a major emphasis in Scripture. In fact, if you go through the New Testament and try to find a verse that says, “pray for people to be healed,” you won’t find one. It’s not explicitly part of what we do as believers. Paul prayed for the deliverance of the thorn in the flesh; didn’t get it. In James, we have a situation where “if any is sick among you”--which I think has to do with being spiritually wounded, spiritually weak… But even if we grant that it’s some kind of sickness, it says, “Go to the elders of the church and let them pray over you, and confess your sins.” So, in that case, if we take it as a healing, it would be a healing connected to some chastening for sin. The elders of the church pray on behalf of the person; the person confesses the sin; and when the sin is dealt with, then the reason for the chastening can be set aside.

But, apart from the passage in James, there is no command for us or demand of us to go to God and ask for physical healings. Can we do it? Of course we can do it. We can “cast all our care on Him” in the general sense; that’s part of our “care.” We can go before the Lord and say, “Can you glorify yourself in a physical healing or a recovery? Put your glory on display…” And the Lord may choose to do that. There are times when people are restored and when they become well when they’ve been ill, and the doctors can’t give a natural explanation to that. But, there is no guarantee and there is no--let’s put it this way: it is not the normal thing. I personally have never seen a quadriplegic walk out of a wheelchair, or a paraplegic move limbs that weren’t moved. I’ve never seen someone completely blind who could see as a result of prayer, or completely deaf who could hear as a result of prayer. I’m not saying God can’t do that.

The idea that I was trying to point out this morning is that miracles are very, very rare, extremely rare, not at all to be considered as normal course events. So, I do believe that we can go to the Lord and say, “Lord, you know, I’m praying for my dear friend who’s ill.” The Lord may through medicine, He may through His own power, working through the healing of that body for His own purposes, bring about restoration. You remember that Paul, when Epaphroditus was sick, he said, “Epaphroditus was near to death” but he said “the Lord delivered him”--remember that? And the Lord spared Paul the pain that his death would have brought on Paul, and as well allowed him further usefulness.

So, I do think that for God’s purposes, providentially--not in some massive kind of flow of miracles that are all around us--but at times, providentially, God can spare the life of a believer through medicine, through the restorative power of the body, even through His own supernatural intervention. And we have every right and every reason to ask God to do that, because those are the kinds of cares that we can cast on Him.

Question (continued)

Thank you. I just know it seemed to me this morning you were making the presentation to deal with the certain heretical doctrinal line of thinking, rather than just extrapolating from what was in the text. And I asked this question essentially from an ulterior motive because my girlfriend is an MD specializing--she’s a director of a major trauma unit here in Los Angeles. She tells me about times where there are people that come in, they go through the whole ultrasound process (she does a very, very thorough examination before they send them off to surgery) and she says sometimes that they go back and they do a second one. You know, when they’re shown physical symptoms of a certain disease. And she says later on--one, two days later maybe--there will be no signs. So, she questions me about that, saying, “What essentially has happened here?” And I essentially give her the reasoning that one of three things has occurred. Either one, you made a mistake--she doesn’t like that one. Point number two, the person never really had it--you essentially diagnosed something else that was correctable or whatnot. And the third one, actually, is that God did a providential action that was essentially nondependent upon the theology or the relationship that that person has to Christ in eternity, and it’s completely separate. Would you agree with that?

Answer (continued)

Well, I think that’s reasonable. The other thing would be that the typical thing of the amazing recuperative powers of the body. I think the diagnosis issue is really big; I think, you know, the medical science is very advanced, but doing the right diagnosis--I mean, you can miss the diagnosis, and then when you look for what you thought was there it’s not there. I think all of those are very right. There’s just a little sidelight on this.

I’ve been doing some work on--I’m going to do a book on the origins and the beginnings and all (we’ve talked about that), and recently I’ve been digging into things that are way beyond my mental capability. But, I’ve been studying a little bit about what’s called “zero-based energy.” Zero-based energy is so--it’s so beyond comprehension. Let me see if I can define it in a simple way. If you can create a vacuum, a perfect vacuum--now, a perfect vacuum would be the absence of everything but space, okay? You have space with nothing in it. In other words, that would be a vacuum; there’s nothing there. There’s nothing there but empty space! There are no nothing there…no molecules…nothing. I mean, it’s hard to conceive of that. There’s no air there, there’s no hydrogen, there’s no oxygen, there’s no chemicals, there’s no nothing…it’s just empty space--a vacuum.

They have been able to do this experimentally. What is absolutely mind-boggling to me is that when they create a complete and perfect vacuum and they study that vacuum--let’s say of a molecule--what they see in there are oscillating waves of energy. But, there’s nothing there! What is this? Well, the power is so great--and I don’t have this right; I’ll get this down exactly when I get the book done… I’m still working through the material…but it’s something like, they calculate that the amount of energy, the amount of what they called “zero-based energy” in one molecule would be enough to keep the stars of the universe lit for some number of millions of years. That’s in one molecule!

That’s the kind of energy that exists in the universe. Now, understanding that, and understanding when the Bible says “Almighty God” and the “power of God,” that that just blows our minds, just add up every molecule in the universe and imagine what His power is like! For Him to do a little tweaking on your anatomy is not a major problem. So, this is where Einstein, you know, at the end of his life, died in total disappointment…because he got all the way down to that and he couldn’t define it because it doesn’t have a chemical definition and it is God who upholds all things by the word of His power.

I only say that to point out the fact, look: there is energy the likes of which we cannot even comprehend. And if God chooses to activate, at any point, that massive energy in the recuperative process of the body--who’s to say He can’t do that? But, again I say, no matter what’s going on in the trauma ward, I doubt whether people who had their legs chopped off are getting new ones and I doubt whether quadriplegics, whatever is going on diagnostically or recuperatively, who have their spinal cord cut, are getting up and walking out. I really doubt that. I doubt whether people who have lost their eyes can see, and so forth and so on. These kinds of things the Lord does, but this is not an age of those kinds of dramatic miracles that were protected and preserved for that unique explosion that demonstrated the arrival of the Messiah.

Added to Bible Bulletin Board's "MacArthur’s Questions and Answers" by:

Tony Capoccia
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