Dr Paul Allen

Mitch Chase A skin-diseased man approached Jesus in Mark 1:40, and you were not supposed to approach someone while being unclean. The law of God said so. In Leviticus 13, if a priest confirmed you had a skin disease, you would dwell outside the camp until it was resolved. If you were close to crossing paths with someone, you were supposed to dishevel your hair and clothes and shout “Unclean!” so that people had fair warning. But the skin-diseased man in Mark 1 approached Jesus anyway. He fell before him and said, “If you will, you can make me clean” (1:40). That statement is especially intriguing because no unclean person would fall before an Old Testament priest and ask for cleansing. Priests could diagnose, but they could not heal. What was this man doing? The man had heard about what Jesus could do. In Mark 1:32, Jesus healed the sick at Capernaum (1:32–34). Word continued to spread, and more people came searching for Jesus the next day (1:36–37). Later, Jesus went throughout all of...

Tim Shorely I have stage four, poor-prognosis cancer, and I believe in healing, either bestowed directly by the Lord or through the intercession of others. I’m convinced there are moments when God transcends and circumvents the normal to heal instantaneously and supernaturally (1 Cor. 12:7–9). I sincerely believe he can and often does this without any means other than his love-released power—to make the body whole, the spirit glad, and the tongue exult. My faith doesn’t embrace fraudulent faith healers, name-it-and-claim-it charlatans, prosperity peddlers, or positive-thinking gurus. I believe God can and often does grant actual, supernatural healings of the body, spirit, and mind, by which the truly sick are made truly whole through the authority of Christ’s name, often catalyzed by the believing prayers of God’s people. But I still have cancer. Despite thousands of prayers, many of which have been bathed in ample faith and anointing oil, I still have cancer, and my clock’s ticking. T...

The ancient Hebrew songwriter of Psalm 116 sings with joy, I love the Lord because he has heard          my voice and my pleas for mercy. . . . The snares of death encompassed me;          the pangs of Sheol laid hold on me;          I suffered distress and anguish. Then I called on the name of the Lord:           “O Lord, I pray, deliver my soul!” Gracious is the Lord, and righteous;          our God is merciful. . . . You have delivered my soul from death,          my eyes from tears,          my feet from stumbling. (Psalm 116:1–8) This is the collective testimony of God’s people — he loves us, and we love him. And because he loves us, our Savior has promised that when we pray for anything according to his will, he will answer us (John 14:13–14). In two previous articles, I wrote about how I prayed for my daught...

In his magisterial history of New England, Magnalia Christi Americana, Cotton Mather notes that, after finishing his time with Mrs Drake, Thomas Hooker “in a little time . . . grew famous for his ministerial abilities, but especially for his notable faculty at the wise and fit management of wounded spirits.”1 The Puritan divine who would grow in stature both in England and America started out as a young college graduate called to a seemingly hopeless situation. As would soon become evident, his love for others and his skill in handling the Scriptures aided him in ministering to a woman teetering on the verge of heaven and hell. THE TROUBLED MRS. DRAKE About fifteen miles from London, the small parish of St. George’s in Esher, Surrey, called young Thomas Hooker (1586–1647) to serve as rector. Due to the congregation’s size, the wealthy Francis Drake, a relative of the renowned English explorer Sir Francis Drake, served as Hooker’s patron and invited him to live in his home. However, Hoo...

Elisha’s healing of Naaman in the Bible (the leper [and] commander of the army of the king of Syria) is a familiar story to many (2 Kgs 5:1–27). Naaman hears that Elisha, the prophet of Israel, can heal him, so he makes the trip. When the two meet, Elisha tells him rather dismissively that he needs to take a bath in the Jordan River. Naaman doesn’t take this well and prepares to go home. At the behest of some servants, he consents to dip himself in the Jordan. He is miraculously healed by the simple act. The display of power, so transparently without sacrifice or incantation, awakens Naaman to the fact that Yahweh of Israel is the true God. Here’s where the story usually ends in our telling, but that would result in the omission of one very odd detail—what Naaman asks to take back home. Two mules and a pile of dirt In 2 Kings 5:15–19, the elated Naaman returns to Elisha and begs him to take payment for healing him. Elisha repeatedly refuses. Finally, before embarking for Syria, Naaman ...

Theologians John Piper and Al Mohler have weighed in on why God answers certain prayers for healing in this life, but not all, and the role faith plays in the outcome. On an episode of his DesiringGod podcast, Piper responded to a reader who asked if greater faith would have saved his father from dying of a brain tumour. “[My] answer is that I don’t know. I don’t know,” Piper said. “What I do know is that I would go insane if I had to figure that out every time I preached — that when I preach, I’ve got to know what would have happened if I’d done things differently. And when I preach, it’s not just what’s at stake here on Earth; it’s what’s at stake eternally. Eternal lives are at stake when I preach, not just my dad’s few years of life on the planet. I cannot bear the burden — I can’t bear it — of having to answer the question, What if? What if? What if? “So it is with our prayers for those we love, whether physical healing or spiritual salvation. Would more faith heal? Would...

Around 1960, in the Republic of Congo, a two-year-old girl named Thérèse was bitten by a snake. She cried out for help, but by the time her mother, Antoinette, reached her, Thérèse was unresponsive and seemed to have stopped breathing. No medical help was available to them in their village, so Antoinette strapped little Thérèse to her back and ran to a neighboring village. According to the US National Library of Medicine , brain cells start dying less than five minutes after their oxygen supply is removed, an event called hypoxia. After six minutes, the lack of oxygen can cause severe brain damage or death. Antoinette estimates that, given the distance and the terrain, it probably took about three hours to reach the next village. By the time they arrived, her daughter was likely either dead or had sustained significant brain damage. Antoinette immediately sought out a family friend, Coco Ngoma Moyise, who was an evangelist in the neighboring village. They prayed over the lifel...

Just over one hundred years ago, B.B. Warfield delivered the Thomas Symth Lectures at Columbia Theological Seminary in Columbia, S.C. The transcription of those lectures forms the content of Warfield’s book Counterfeit Miracles , which opens with these words: “When our Lord came down to earth He drew heaven with Him. The signs which accompanied His ministry were but the trailing clouds of glory which He brought from heaven, which is His home.” Taking up the subject of miraculous healings, in particular, Warfield summarized his assessment of contemporary claims to the continuation of healings when he stated:  “All Christians believe in healing in answer to prayer. Those who assert that this healing is wrought in a specifically miraculous manner, need better evidence for their peculiar view than such as fits in equally well with the general Christian faith.”  For Warfield, the great burden of the day was for Christians to reckon with the biblical teaching about the uni...

Most of us have read John 5:1–9—the story of the blind, paralyzed man at the pool of Bethesda—many times. But I’ll bet there’s something that escaped your attention. Some time later, Jesus went up to Jerusalem for a feast of the Jews. 2 Now there is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a pool, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda and which is surrounded by five covered colonnades. 3 Here a great number of disabled people used to lie—the blind, the lame, the paralyzed. 5 One who was there had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. 6 When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, he asked him, “Do you want to get well?” 7 “Sir,” the invalid replied, “I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me.” 8 Then Jesus said to him, “Get up! Pick up your mat and walk.” 9 At once the man was cured; he picked up his mat and walked.” (John 5:1–9 NIV) If you read close...

What does the Bible teach about “the laying on of hands,” and how should this ancient ritual function, or not, in the church today? Like anointing with oil , much confusion often surrounds these outward signs which the New Testament has very little (but something) to say. Like fasting, the laying on of hands and anointing with oil go hand in hand with prayer and healing. Because of the way God has made the world, and wired our own hearts, on certain special occasions we reach for something tangible, physical, and visible to complement or serve as a sign of, what is happening invisibly and what we’re capturing with invisible words. Before turning to what the New Testament teaches about the laying on of hands today, let’s first get our bearings by looking at how this practice arose, functioned, and developed in the story of God’s people . Old Testament Foundations Throughout the Bible, we find both positive and negative senses of “the laying on of hands ,” as well as “general” (eve...