Divine Healing is Spiritual not Physical
The revival at Lakeland led by former pastor Todd Bentley has been the latest so-called divine healing revival and its popularity has been tremendous. The heresy for which Todd Bentley is preaching is even more extreme than that of Benny Hinn and other false faith healers. He not only causes these people to fall down with force but he physically injures them on purpose. He kicks and punches these sick people and tells them he did so because "he had to be obedient to the Lord.' He claims that sometimes cancer has to be physically driven out by kicking a man in the stomach. Please tell me which Scriptures show any physical pain being imparted upon those being healed before they were able to be healed? Christ made people whole, he did not impart physical pain upon them to do so. The sad part is that the man who has stage four colon cancer and was kicked in the gut by Todd Bentley still has stage four colon cancer. There is no evidence that any of these people are truly healed. It deeply saddens us to see the amount of people who are willing to follow such false and evil teachings. While Todd Bentley's revival was brought to an abrupt stop do to the break up of his marriage and his admitted "unhealthy relationship" with another woman, many people will still follow and support this type of ministry. We must be vigilant in sharing the truth about these false teachers. They are leading people into believing a false gospel of health and wealth which is a false gospel that will not only be unable to provide the health it promises, it will not provide salvation either. We must come to a saving faith in the true Christ of the Bible, not a false Christ as Paul warned us of.
But some people will argue there are passages that claim that we are promised healing. I am reminded of the time Jesus was talking with his disciples and told them to watch out for the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees in Matthew 16:6-12. The disciples thought Jesus was upset because they had not brought any bread with them. This was right after Jesus had miraculously fed the multitude more than once! Jesus reprimanded the disciples and reminded them how he fed the multitude with a few loaves of bread. He did not care about the bread! Jesus was not speaking of literal bread, but was warning them of the teaching of the Pharisees and Sadducees. The word yeast had a spiritual, not physical and literal meaning. Healing is spoken of that way too. It is our spiritual health that Jesus was concerned with. In that context Jesus reminds us that the sick need a doctor, not the healthy.
Luke 5:30 But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law who belonged to their sect complained to his disciples, "Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and 'sinners'?"
31 Jesus answered them, "It is not the healthy who need a doctor , but the sick. 32 I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance."
Jesus is saying that the sinners need spiritual healing, just like the physically sick need a physician. He is not saying that sinners are never going to get sick. Below I have an excerpt from our article on the Spiritual Gifts. It examines one of the popular verses that Charismatics use to teach that physical healing is a promise of God and shows how in reality it is about our spiritual, not physical health.
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