Does God Use Means In Healing?

Does God Use Means In Healing?

By John G. Lake

By the term “means” is understood the varied remedies, medicines and potions commonly used by the world at large and prescribed for the sick—in short, Materia Medica. 

This should be an extremely easy question for anyone to decide. The world has always had her systems of healing. There were one thousand and one systems of healing evolved in all the centuries. They were mankind’s endeavor to alleviate suffering. 

They existed in the days of Jesus, just as they exist today. 

The ancient Egyptians used them and were as proficient in the practice as our modern physicians. Indeed their knowledge of chemistry in some respects seems to have superseded ours, as they were able to produce an embalming substance that preserved the human body and kept it from dissolution.

The public commonly believes that medicine is a great science, and that its practice is entirely scientific. Whereas, so great a man as Professor Douglas McGlaggen, who occupied the chair of Medical Jurisprudence in the University of Edinborough, Scotland, declared: 

“There is no such thing as the science of medicine. From the days of Hippocrates and Galen until now we have been stumbling in the dark, from diagnosis to diagnosis, from treatment to treatment.”

Dr. John B. Murphy, the greatest surgeon our country has ever produced, has spoken his mind concerning surgery as follows: 

“Surgery is a confession of helplessness. Being unable to assist the diseased organ, we remove it. If I had my life to live over again, I would endeavor to discover preventative medicine, in hope of saving the organ instead of destroying it.”

Just prior to his death he wrote an article entitled “The Slaughter of the Innocents,” condemning cutting out of tonsils and adenoids, demonstrating that the presence of inflammation and pus and the consequent enlargement was due to a secretion in the system that found lodgment in the tonsils and that the removal of the tonsils in no way remedied the difficulty, the poison being generated in the system. He purposed to give his knowledge to the public for its protection from useless operations that he regarded criminal.

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God’s Contrast to Man’s Way

What then, did Jesus have in mind as better than the world’s system of healing, which He never used or countenanced? 

God’s remedy is a Person and not a thing. 

The remedy that Jesus ministered the sick was a spiritual one. It was the Holy Spirit of God. 

The tangible, living quality and nature of the living God, ministered through the Soul and Hands of Jesus Christ to the sick one.

So conscious was the woman who was healed of the issue of blood, that she had received the remedy, and of its effect and power in her, upon only touching the hem of His garment, that she “felt in her body that she was made whole of that plague.” 

Jesus likewise was aware of the transmission of the healing power, for He said, 

“Someone hath touched me, for I perceive virtue has gone out of me.”

That same virtue was ministered through the hands of the apostles and of the Seventy. 

It was also ministered by the early Christians, when they received from God, through the Holy Ghost, the ability to minister the Spirit of God to others. 

Of the twelve apostles it is said: 

“He gave them power and authority over all devils, and to cure diseases. 

And He sent them to preach the kingdom of God, and to heal the sick.” 

Luke 9:1-2.

Of the Seventy it is written, 

“He sent them two and two, before his face into every city and place, whither he himself would come, and said unto them, ... 

‘HEAL THE SICK THAT ARE THEREIN, and say unto them, the kingdom of God is come nigh unto you.’”

So vital was this living Spirit of God and its healing virtue in the lives of the early Christians, that it is recorded of Paul that they brought handkerchiefs and aprons to him, that they might touch his body, and when these were laid upon the sick they were healed and the demons went out of them. Acts 19. 

In this instance even inanimate objects, handkerchiefs and aprons, were receptacles for the Spirit of God, imparted to them from the person of the Apostle Paul.

This was not an experience for the early Christian alone, but is the common experience of men and women everywhere who have DARED TO DISBELIEVE the devil’s LIE, so carefully fostered and proclaimed by the church at large, that the days of miracles are past.

Every advanced Christian, who has gone out into God, who has felt the thrill of His Spirit, who has DARED TO BELIEVE that the Son of God lives by the SPIRIT in his LIFE today, just as He lived in the lives of the early Christians, has found the same pregnant power of God in himself. 

Upon laying his hands in faith upon others who are sick, he has seen with his own eyes the healing of the sick take place, and realized the transmission of Divine Virtue. 

Today millions of men and women trust God only, for the healing of their body from every character and form of disease.

What, then, is this means of healing that Jesus gave as a divine gift to Christianity, forever? 

It is the living Holy Spirit of God, ministered by Jesus Christ to the Christian soul, transmitted by the Christian because of his faith in the Word of Jesus, through his soul and his hands to the one who is sick. 

This reveals the law of contact in the mind of Jesus when He gave the commandment: 

“They shall lay hands on the sick, and they SHALL recover.” 

Mark 16:18.

With praise to God we record to His glory, that through twenty-five years in this ministry we have seen hundreds of thousands of persons in many parts of the world, healed by the power of God.

Throughout these twenty-five years, in different lands, we have established churches and societies composed of Christian men and women who know no remedy but the one Divine Remedy, the Lord Jesus Christ.

They have faith in His redemption and in the presence and power of the Spirit of Christ to destroy sin and sickness in the lives of men forever.

In our own city, for five years, no day has passed in which we have not seen the healing of many. For five years we have ministered, with our associate pastors, in The Church at Spokane alone, to an average of from one hundred and fifty to two hundred sick per day, who come from all quarters of the land, and even from foreign countries, to receive the healing power of God. 

These healings have included almost every known form of disease.

The majority of these healings have been of persons pronounced hopeless by their physicians. Many of them had spent their all, some tens of thousands of dollars, for doctors, medicines, and operations. 

They found the Lord Jesus Christ, and the ministry of healing by the power of God, just as efficacious today as it ever was, thereby demonstrating the truth of the Word of God.