On health-and-wealth prosperity gospel, and why God does not heal

I woke up late yesterday on a Sunday and was late for the church service at the church that I regularly attend. It was a nice Sunday rainy morning, but anyway, that isn’t really a good excuse to sleep in. As such, I decided to visit the service of another church which holds a service later in the day. I settled on going to the service at Lighthouse Evangelism Woodlands, a church that I visited quite some time ago for the miracle healing service.

During the sermon section of the service, they had a live transmission of the recording of a sermon from the other Lighthouse Evangelism at Tampines beamed onto the screens, which was rather impressive in my opinion, something which I think that the church that I regularly attend can pick up. The congregation at Lighthouse Tampines was viewing a sermon being given by this American guy named Larry Hutton. Larry Hutton started off his sermon by giving a prosperity gospel cum sales pep talk for the items that he was selling at the reception area. His line went, “Don’t you know that you are spirit, and immaterial, like God? Oh yes, I tell ya. You are god-beings. That does not mean that you are God, but you are god-beings. Let’s look at John 10:34, which says “Jesus answered them, “Is it not written in your Law, ‘I have said you are “gods”. Let’s also take a look at the passage in Psalms 82:6 where the psalmist says “You are ‘gods’; you are all sons of the Most High.’ And God is spirit, so that means that we are spirit in being as well. And when God made creation, he gave man dominion over all things on earth, and that includes his body as well. Look at how the apostle Paul describes of his body in 1 Corinthians 9:27. He calls his body ‘It’, and talks about bringing it into subjection. We thus have dominion over our own bodies, and authority to command away all sickness whatsoever from our bodies.” And then he talked about how we as believers need spiritual food for our bodies, and these how his book products and audio products are good spiritual food for the believer, how he was so glad when he last came to the church two years ago and saw that the congregants bought most of the items he was selling because it shows that they are hungry for spiritual food, how some people who bought his product testified that they and their families have not been ill for the past decade after buying his products etc.

I wonder whether people who attend these pentacostal churches and listen to these health-and-wealth prosperity gospelist preach buy into these messages. I would think that most people would have come into encounter with sad or difficult circumstances in their lives such as ill-health or poor finance, and where they have prayed most faithfully and repeatedly about the issue and found their prayers go unanswered. Or they would have seen close and loved ones in such circumstances and were unable to do anything about it. How do these prosperity gospel preachers preach their prosperity gospel with that show of assertiveness when what they say don’t square off with any inkling of observations of reality?

Back home that evening, I was looking up on the internet on the question of whether God still heal people today. I came across a video featuring a woman named Joni Eareckson Tada, an evangelical Christian author, radio host, and founder of Joni and Friends, an organization "accelerating Christian ministry in the disability community. She became a quadriplegic in her teens when she dove into Chesapeake Bay after misjudging the shallowness of the water. She recounted how she prayed to God for healing for her disability, how she went for a miracle healing session by a well-known miracle healer, and went away disappointed when she saw that neither her, nor all those paralyzed people in the wheelchair section at the session were healed on that day. And until today, she remains a quadriplegic. In addition to that, she recently had to undergo breast cancer treatment and surgery. Her perspective to the question as to why God does not heal her is that God is more concerned with inner healing of a person for his or her sins, rather than the outer healing of the person’s physical disabilities, and while God may still heal, he doesn’t always.

I could imagine that a person in her situation would have become an agnostic or atheist instead of choosing to remain in the faith. In my opinion, it is disappointing that God does not heal people, especially those who believe in him, or that even if he does, he does not do it more frequently. In that sense, while I don’t believe that health-and-wealth prosperity gospel is true, I would have wished that it was, and Christians would have easy, comfortable lives while they are living on earth.