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Articles Is Divine Healing a Christian Reality, Bought & Paid for by Christ?

Is Divine Healing a Christian Reality, Bought & Paid for by Christ?

Is everyone we pray for meant to be healed?

2026-03-26 by Steve Forkin

The line between real miracles and what the medical community will call a psychosomatic healing is very much blurred, by the modern signs and wonders movement in the Charismatic churches of today..

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jesus healing today

Is Divine Healing a Fixed Christian Reality?

Is everyone we pray for meant to be healed?

If you attend a healing convention by famous faith healer, Benny Hinn, it’s very easy to be swept up by the atmosphere, the music and the crowd. The dynamic isn’t too different from a modern Rock concert. Yes, Hinn uses all the “Christianeese” terminology, he prays for everyone who arrives on stage to be healed, and like clock work they all fall down with the so-called miracle working power of the Holy Spirit.

They each claim to be healed from ailments ranging from back-pain to arthritis, and even cancers it is claimed are miraculously gone.

They couldn’t all be wrong, or could they? What do people experience when they fall to the ground? Is this really a miraculous event? Is it the working of the Holy Spirit, or is it just crowd dynamics or even more sinister, could it simply be suggestion or hypnostism that is at play?

These are all very important questions and we must not shy away from them. If the claims of the healing movement are true, they should have no fear of being questioned, what could be worse than to have the sceptics proven wrong and the miracle movement proven true?

Is it really true that the majority of Christians today struggle with demonic oppression or even possession? Is it true that all Christians are called to be healers and deliverers.

If you spend time listening to and engaging with the modern Demon Slayers, you will come away with the idea that all Christians are not only able to, but are actually commanded – like a modern army – to go out and heal the sick, deliver the demon oppressed and even, yes, even raise the dead!

It’s not as if Christians doubt God’s ability to heal today, much like he did through ministry of Jesus in the 1st century. I have never yet met a serious Christian who doubts God can heal. We can safely set that notion aside. The questions we must ask are, these:

(Each of these questions relate to the New Testament)

Hold on a minute here, you might be reading this and thinking. God is indeed healing the sick today. I don’t doubt – indeed never have – that God sometimes, sovereignly & supernaturally heals the sick today, and has done so through the church age in the last two millenia.

The question really is, does God heal all the time, the way quite naturally Jesus could & did heal the sick, and that so with immediate, obvious and visible results. Yes, Jesus didn’t just heal someone who had a cough, but healed the blind, the lame, the deaf and even raised the dead, you know those who have started to stink in their graves due to decay.

This kind of healing, simply does not take place in any church today, even those Charismatic churches who shout the loudest about divine healing – yes Bethel church in Redding California, I am talking about you – such healings don’t take place there either!

For an honest & medical review of the modern healing movement, see the reference section below, by a Christian medical professional.

A few years back there was this amazing Christian apologist, called Nabeel Qureshi – a former devout Muslim, who became a wonderful follower of Christ and an amazing evangelist with an apologetic ability. He, very sadly had terminal bowel cancer, and during this time went to visit the Bethel church in seeking healing.

There can be no doubt, this man was a wonderful follower of Christ, definitely a man who believed God could heal & off he went in search of those who would prayer the prayer of faith and heal him. The rest is history, he died a few months later.

This is not to scould the believers at Bethel, this is just a reality check. Such moments should be the occasion for anyone who proclaims the fixed reality of divine healing to ask some serious questions, but no those guys at Redding just dig in and get worse..

Ok enough of a sidetrack, in this article I cannot unravel all the reasons why some Chritians proclaim healing as a fixed (bought and paid for) reality, what I want to do is answer just the one question, and this from the gospels alone.

Did Jesus teach that all Christians are meant to heal the sick.

I have watched enough sermons by those who answer this question in the affirmative to know one of their major arguments goes like this:

So, case closed right? Not so fast. First let’s just affirm what by all means should be affirmed. According to the three synoptic gospels did give his apostles the authority to heal the sick. We can see this by the following two examples:

But wait – the smart reader will recognise something in the second passage, based on the same literal reading of the first passage. If we as Christians are commanded to heal the sick – based on the reading that Christ gave his apostles this authoriy, are we not then also to wander around the countryside with a staff in hand, not take any food and carry no money in our wallets?

Clearly that is not how Christians are reading this passage, but wouldn’t consistency of a literal reading demand this? To say this bluntly, this is just not how we are meant to read the Bible. Did Jesus ever say “every Christian has the authority to heal the sick”, or “every sick person who is prayed for is meant to be healed”. No, there are no such injunctions anywhere in the Bible.

Let me help you with an illustration. You are working for a large car manufacturer. You are just one of the ordinary workers, but one of your friends works for HR and at the pub, one night, you exchange details of your work contracts and obligations. Your friend in HR tells you he has the authority to hire & fire new workers, and laments “It’s tough to be the one who makes that call”. Are you at any point going to say to him: “Wait a minute, can’t I fire you, since everyone is meant to be able to follow the example of the CEO, and be a faithful worker & follower of the business work ethic”? Clearly this is not how a worker would think, is it. Why not, well that should be obvious. The HR person’s authority is specific in relation to hiring and firing. This authority was never allotted to the worker..

You might be objecting now with, but wait a minute, Jesus gave this same authority to the 70 did he not, surely that was the moment when we should realise that this authority is for all believers?

The only example we have of the seventy, actually it was seventy-two but that is a minor detail, is in Luke’s gospel chapter 10. Please read the whole chapter to get the context. Nothing in that chapter, once again suggests that this narrative translates into a command for all times and places and people in the church age. Nothing.

Ok, but then surely the great commission settles it for us?

Somehow the Charismatic movement has turned the great commission into:

Please read the great commission again slowly and recognise words. Jesus did not say that making disciples equals healing the sick or casting out demons. What did Jesus say: “teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you”.

How can we rightly understand what this means? My humble suggestion is to slowly, one at a time read the epistles of the New Testament. They each follow the same general pattern. They start with greetings & words of encouragement, then in principle they all continue a sizeable portion of doctrinal truth statements about God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit & his work in the church. Then the remaining chapters of each of the epistles contain exhortations for how we as Christians are to be “observing all that I have commanded you”.

Does it not strike you as an important consideration that not a single one of the New Testament epistles contains a single command or exhortation for the church or individual believers to go out and heal the sick & cast out devils, never mind the strange & odd occurrences of “being slain in the spirit” that occurs in regular Charismatic Sunday morning services. This part is totally absent from the New Testament, never mind the Old. Also, does it not strike you as odd that Charismatics are not going around the streets slaying people like this? Well, if that truly was the way real “healing was administered” - should they not be doing so?

Frankly, am glad they are not, for their sake..

The real issue here is one of sound Biblical interpretation – starting with the very basics of sound use of basic language devices. If Christians were to attempt to interpret legal documents in a court of law, the way they attempt to interpret the books of the Bible we would have chaos.

So what was Jesus trying to say when he said “teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you”? RT France, writing in the New International Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew explained it this way:

“So, they are to teach not their own ideas, but what Jesus has ‘commanded’ (entellomai) a term which so far in the gospel of Mathew has especially been associated with ‘commandments’ (the cognate noun ‘entolle’ - cf Mt 5:19, 15:3, 19:17, 22:36-40) given by God through Moses. The basis of living as the people of God will henceforth be the ‘new Commandments given by Jesus. (“New International Commentary on the New Testament, The Gospel of Matthew”, R.T. France)

Let me perhaps finish with the only reference to healing in any kind of “commanded” relationship in the New Testament epistles. The only other references to healing in the epistles are firstly to people who were sick and not healed, and finally the mention of the special gift of healing in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthian church. The sincere Bible student, upon reading 1 Cor 12 is left in no doubt whatsoever that the gift of healing mentioned there is special and not for all. To use that as an injunction or as evidence that all Christians are meant to heal, or even worse that all those prayed for should be healed, is a serious misuse of the English language, never mind the text of scripture.

Back to the final passage. Here we are told, those who are sick should call for the Elders of the church. If anything at all, the idea given here is that it is the duty of the Elders to heal the sick, but again a close reading of this passage actually demonstrates that the healing in view might actually be of a Spirital nature, namely the forgiveness of sins: “Confess your sins to one another & pray for one another, that you may be healed”. Nonetheless the passage does indicate that we can & should pray for the sick & ask for God to heal. If this verse was all we had, we might be left thinking, God will always heal, but given that Paul several times mentions sick people being left behind etc.. is proof that whilst God does sometimes heal, there is no guarantee. God is sovereign after all. We can’t tell him what to do. That’s a fools errand.

Nonetheless, I do actually think that churches – many non Charismatic churches – should actually follow the advice of James here at times more closely.

Where the Charismatics err, due to false interpretations of the gospels & false expectations of what is actually promised by God through the message of Jesus, the Non Charismatics sometimes err on the side of rarely even asking God for and believing he might just heal!

References - relating in particular to the ministry of Benny Hinn

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