FAITH-HEALING
[p. 358] FAITH-HEALING
The first error in the so-called faith-healing people, is that they put sin and sicknesses on the same footing. They say that the work of Christ clears us of our sins, He “bare our sins in his own body on the tree” (1 Peter 2: 24), - and that He also bare our sicknesses - that is, that He bore each alike. Now if this is true our sins could come back on us again; for it is evident our sicknesses come back to us again. Here is their first unsoundness. They put no difference between sins and sicknesses.
Next, they entirely overlook the discipline of the Lord with regard to the body. The body is the Lord’s. He has washed away all our sins, but the body is His - His vessel, or channel for His service here; and He disciplines it, when it is acting in self will. “For this cause many are weak and sickly among you, and many sleep” (1 Corinthians 11: 30). And when we are faithful, He allows us to suffer in the body, if not by persecution, by other suffering, for our profit. “We which live are alway delivered unto death” (2 Corinthians 4: 11). Surely that is bodily pain.
Thirdly, these people misapply Scripture as to prayer, in order to produce results which will signalise themselves. They are seeking for evidences of God’s favour and countenance.
The scripture is plain, “that if two of you shall agree on the earth concerning any matter, whatsoever it may be that they shall ask, it shall come to them from my Father who is in the heavens. For where two or three are gathered together unto my name, there am I in the midst of them” (Matthew 18: 19, 20). The praying here clearly refers to something which the Lord approves of; and Scripture also implies that those who pray are gathered to His name, and that He is there. I quite approve of prayer meetings of this kind, and have been at two or three of such, with marked blessing; but there it is not unconditional, as the faith-healing people assert, but conditional in a very special way. There is first an agreement [p. 359] between two. It is not prayer for every case of sickness, as if it were a board of physicians, but a case as to which some two had previously agreed; and next, of the deepest importance, that they were gathered together unto the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Faith-healing in its system professes to effect cures in every case of sickness where there is faith in the invalid, and this must be so when it is assumed that a case of illness is evidence that there is not faith there. Thus Timothy with a weakly body must have been, according to them, lacking in faith. It is clear in James 5: 14, that the praying is not promiscuous, but limited to the elders, and the answer depends on their faith. In the matter of sin, any one can pray for his brother, unless it be a sin unto death: “I do not say that he shall pray for it” (1 John 5: 16). The faith-healing system is like a board of health. Every one can apply; there is no exercise about each case before the Lord. The Lord is not the one who counsels the prayer. Paul thanks God that he remembers Timothy in his prayers.