Healing, Miracles, and Spiritual Warfare

Near the Heart of the Movement

From the very beginning, healing and the miraculous have stood near the heart of the movement we are studying. The early Pentecostals prayed for the sick and testified of recoveries; the charismatic renewal carried that expectation into the historic churches; and across the Global South today, prayer for healing and a keen sense of the spiritual battle mark much of the movement's daily life. For many believers, especially where medicine is scarce, the conviction that God still heals and still delivers is not a doctrine debated at a distance but a hope they live by.

So we must ask plainly what the Scriptures teach. Does God heal today? Is the gift of healing real? Is every believer promised health if only he believes? What is the nature of the spiritual conflict, and how is it to be fought? As throughout this course, we will affirm what Scripture affirms, decline what it declines, and keep two questions apart — for whether God heals is one matter, and whether healing is guaranteed on demand is quite another. And we will hold the whole subject, as we must, in submission to the Word and with Christ at the center.

God Heals

Begin with the great and gladdening truth: God heals. From the earliest pages of Scripture He reveals Himself as the Healer of His people — "I am the LORD who heals you" (Ex 15:26) — and the Psalms bless Him as the One "who heals all your diseases" (Ps 103:3). Sickness entered the world with the Fall and is no part of God's original design; and again and again, in His mercy, He has driven it back.

In the Lord Jesus this healing mercy reached its fullness. He "went about all Galilee… healing all kinds of sickness and all kinds of disease among the people" (Matt 4:23), and Peter later summed up His ministry in a single sentence: He "went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with Him" (Acts 10:38). The apostles, in His name, healed the lame and the sick after Him. To deny that God heals would be to close our eyes to the plain testimony of Scripture and to the compassion of Christ Himself.

The Gift of Healing and the Church's Prayer

Nor did this healing mercy cease to touch the church. Among the gifts the Spirit distributes, Paul names "gifts of healings" (1 Cor 12:9), and James gives the church a plain instruction for the sick among its members:

"Is anyone among you sick? 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 will save the sick, and the Lord will raise him up."James 5:14–15 (NKJV)

So the people of God are not to meet sickness with a shrug, as though healing were beneath their prayers or beyond their God. They are to pray, and to pray in faith, calling on the Lord who heals and asking Him to raise up the sick. Whether the extraordinary sign-gifts of the apostolic age continue as they were then is a question this course weighs elsewhere; but that the church should pray earnestly for the sick, and look to God to act, is beyond dispute. Where He heals, we give Him thanks; and we ask boldly, as children of a Father who delights to give good gifts.

But Not Healing on Demand

Here, however, we must speak carefully, for a real truth has been twisted into a cruel error. Some teach that every believer will always be healed if only his faith is strong enough — that health is a guaranteed right of the gospel, and that if healing does not come, the fault lies in the sick person's unbelief. This the Scriptures will not allow. They set before us godly men who prayed and were not healed, and they never once trace it to a failure of faith.

Paul himself is the clearest case. Three times he begged the Lord to remove his "thorn in the flesh," and three times the answer was not the healing he sought but a greater grace:

"My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness."2 Corinthians 12:9 (NKJV)

Nor was this the only such case in Paul's own circle. He "left Trophimus in Miletus sick" (2 Tim 4:20); he told Timothy to take a little wine for his stomach and his frequent infirmities (1 Tim 5:23), counsel he would never have given had he thought the illness a mark of unbelief; and when Epaphroditus was sick "almost unto death," Paul called his recovery the mercy of God, not the reward of a formula (Phil 2:27). Even the Lord Jesus, at the pool of Bethesda, healed one man out of a multitude of the sick who lay there. Healing, then, is God's to give as He wills, in mercy — never a wage the believer earns by the strength of his believing.

The Now and the Not Yet

Why, then, does God heal some and not others now? Scripture does not give us the whole answer, but it does give us the framework in which to rest. Full and final healing — the end of all sickness, sorrow, and death itself — belongs to the resurrection and the world to come, and is promised there without exception:

"And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away."Revelation 21:4 (NKJV)

Until that day, we live in the "not yet." We "groan within ourselves, eagerly waiting for… the redemption of our body" (Rom 8:23), and our present healings, real and gracious as they are, are foretastes of that final wholeness rather than its full arrival. God may heal now, and often does, as a mercy and a sign of what is to come; but He also has purposes that suffering can serve — the perfecting of His strength in our weakness, the deepening of our trust, and, as with the man born blind, the display of His own works (John 9:3). The believer who is not yet healed has not been failed by God; he is waiting, with all creation, for a healing that is sure.

Miracles and the Sign-Seeking Heart

What is true of healing is true of the miraculous more broadly. God is sovereign over His creation and is able to do wonders; nothing in Scripture shuts His hand. The signs and wonders of the apostolic age served to attest the gospel as it was first preached, God "bearing witness both with signs and wonders" (Heb 2:4). Whether such sign-gifts continue in the same manner today is the open question weighed in other units, and we do not settle it here; but that God still acts, still answers prayer, and can heal beyond human explanation, we gladly affirm.

Yet Scripture also warns against a certain hunger for the miraculous. "An evil and adulterous generation seeks after a sign," the Lord said (Matt 12:39), rebuking those who wanted wonders more than they wanted God. A heart set on signs can drift from the Giver to the gifts, prizing the spectacular over the Savior and measuring faith by marvels rather than by obedience and love. We are to seek God Himself, to trust Him whether or not He grants the wonder we ask, and to remember that the greatest miracle is not a healed body but a saved and changed soul.

The Reality of Spiritual Warfare

Alongside healing, the movement has always taken seriously the reality of spiritual warfare, and in this it is right, for Scripture is plain that the Christian life is a battle. There is a real enemy, the devil, and there are real spiritual powers of evil arrayed against the people of God:

"For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places."Ephesians 6:12 (NKJV)

We do not fight, then, merely against human opponents or against our own weakness; behind these stands a spiritual adversary, cunning and malicious, who "walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour" (1 Pet 5:8). To pretend otherwise, to treat the spiritual realm as a fable, is to be caught unaware in a war that is really being waged. The believer must be sober and watchful, and must not be ignorant of the enemy's devices.

Warfare in Biblical Proportion

But Scripture also keeps this warfare in careful proportion, and here the movement has sometimes stumbled. The armor God gives is not a set of techniques, formulas, or sensational rituals; it is truth, righteousness, the readiness of the gospel, faith, salvation, the Word of God, and prayer (Eph 6:14–18). Victory is not wrung from the enemy by the right words or the loudest voice; it is Christ's, who "disarmed principalities and powers" at the cross and made a public spectacle of them (Col 2:15). "Resist the devil," James writes, "and he will flee from you" (James 4:7), and John assures us, "He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world" (1 John 4:4).

So we avoid the two opposite errors. On one side is the denial that dismisses the demonic as unreal; on the other is the obsession that finds a demon behind every illness, every sin, and every misfortune, and that gives the devil more attention and more credit than Scripture ever does. To blame all our troubles on evil spirits is to excuse our own sin and to forget the ordinary weakness of the flesh and the pull of the world. The believer's confidence is not in his skill at spiritual combat but in his Lord; he keeps the enemy in view, but he keeps Christ at the center, and it is Christ, not the devil, who fills his thoughts and his praise.

The Pastoral Wound

As with the prosperity teaching, the errors around healing are not merely mistaken; they wound. Picture the believer, already bearing the weight of a long illness, who is told that his sickness lingers because his faith is too weak — or the grieving family informed that their loved one died for want of believing. To the pain of the body such teaching adds the pain of false guilt, and it slanders the God who is nearest to the broken.

The Scriptures speak a kinder and truer word. "The LORD is near to those who have a broken heart" (Ps 34:18). Paul's thorn remained, and God's grace was enough. A faithful shepherd will pray earnestly for the healing of his people, and will use every ordinary mercy of medicine and care without shame — for Luke, the beloved physician, was Paul's own companion, and wine was Timothy's prescribed remedy. But he will never lay upon the suffering the crushing burden of blame; he will comfort them with the presence of God and the sufficiency of His grace.

Holding It Together: Christ the Healer

How, then, shall we hold all this together? We pray boldly for the sick, expecting God to act, and we anoint and lay on hands as James directs. We use the ordinary means God has given, thanking Him for medicine and skill as His gifts. We submit our asking to His will, praying as the leper did, "Lord, if You are willing" (Matt 8:2), and as our Lord Himself did in the garden, "not My will, but Yours." We take the spiritual battle seriously, but in biblical proportion, resting in Christ's finished victory. And we comfort the afflicted rather than condemning them.

Through it all we remember that the Healer is the Savior, and that the aim of every healing and every deliverance is to glorify Him and to point beyond itself — to the greater healing of the soul from sin, and to the final healing of the resurrection, when He will wipe away every tear. He may heal the body now, in mercy; He will heal it fully then, in glory; and in life or in death, in sickness or in health, He Himself is the believer's hope.

Looking Ahead

In the next unit we take up the questions that have run beneath much of this study and press them directly: whether prophecy and tongues continue in the church today, and how any such gift relates to the closed and completed Scriptures. We will set out the strongest case on each side and, as ever, weigh it by the Word.

Discussion Questions

• How can a church pray boldly for healing while also submitting to God's will?
• Why is it both untrue and cruel to tell a sick believer that his illness proves weak faith?
• What examples from Scripture keep us from believing that healing is guaranteed on demand?
• How do we take spiritual warfare seriously without falling into obsession with the demonic?

Ministry Application

Write two or three sentences of comfort you might offer a believer who has prayed for healing and not received it, grounded in God's nearness and the sufficiency of His grace.