HEALING BY EVIL SPIRITS
One of the most mysterious utterances in the New
Testament is uttered by our Lord towards the close of the Sermon on the Mount.
“Many will say to me in that day”
therefore these people appear on the earth at the end, ‑ “Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy by thy name” ‑
not in thy name, as standing in Thy stead, and therefore clothed in Thy power (Mark 16: 17); but by it, as a magical formula or
else as an empty profession ‑ “and by thy
name cast out devils,* and by thy name do many
mighty works?” (Matt. 7: 22).
In response, our Lord does not challenge the reality of the ‘mighty works’ but He completely exposes a heart
of fundamental unbelief. He will
respond:‑ “I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.” In other words, they are those of whom
he had just warned His disciples (verse 15):‑ “Beware of
false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing” ‑ that is, in a Christian
profession ‑ “but inwardly are ravening wolves.”
[* Exorcism occurs in Witchcraft and Spiritualism:
either as between hostile spirits; or (in Christian countries) as a studied
camouflage, a theatrical performance to insinuate Christian exorcism, so as to
back the claim of miracles by the name of Christ.]
Now one of the acutest problems confronting us is this
‑ no ‘mighty work’ is more
emphasized for proving miraculous power than the healing of the sick; and one
outstanding sect exactly fits our Lord’s words. Numbering some 2,500 so-called
‘churches’, Christian
Science stresses healing more than any other tenet, with countless alleged
examples to prove its power, while its fundamental creed is totally unchristian. Its founder, Mrs. Eddy, was once a Spiritualist medium by profession, and
therefore able to work the ‘miracles’
of the seance; while she overturns the whole Christian Faith in the words,‑ “His
disciples believed Jesus dead while He was hidden in the sepulchre; whereas He
was alive.”* Mrs. Eddy
herself showed all the symptoms of a powerful, demon-possessed medium. “At times her attacks resembled convulsions. She fell headlong to the floor, writhing
and screaming in apparent agony.
Again she dropped as if lifeless, and lay limp and motionless, until
restored. At other times became rigid like a cataleptic.” **
[* Science and Health, p. 349.]
**
Miss Milmine’s Life of Mary Baker Eddy, p. 21.
Supernatural disease is a fact. A missionary writes from
But
our problem is infinitely more difficult.
Other groups, fundamentally Christian, also claim miraculous powers, and
to prove the claim incessantly point to their cures. There are the Roman Catholic cures at
Now
we get a lightning-flash on the whole subject in a synagogue of Galileo. It was a meeting of the people of God,
and Jesus Himself was among the worshippers; and there was “a woman bowed together” ‑ apparently
severe curvature of the spine ‑ manifestly a true child of God who had
come to worship. Our Lord addresses
her as a ‘daughter of Abraham’,
obviously in a sense in which the Pharisees present were not ‘sons of
Abraham’; and He names no sins to be forgiven, asks nothing about
her faith, and simply gives her an instant cure.
But
the revealing fact lies in our Lord’s diagnosis of the disease. He says:- “This woman whom Satan hath bound, lo, these eighteen years” (Luke
13: 16). So Paul himself
experienced “a thorn in the flesh”
which he describes as “an angel of Satan to
buffet me” (2 Cor. 12: 7); and
he even gives the reason of the permitted infliction - “that I should not be exalted overmuch”. Similarly Satan “smote Job with sore boils from the sole of his foot unto the
crown of his head” (Job 2: 7); but not until he had received permission
from God to do so, and with the ultimate issue of Job’s complete and
golden triumph.
Now
this power of Satan is much greater than we realize. The fact which is the basis of all
Witchcraft, that Satan has even the power of death, the Scripture openly states.
Our Lord came “to bring to nought him that HATH THE POWER OF DEATH,* that is, the devil” (Heb.
2: 14). “The devil,” our Lord Himself says, “was a murderer from the beginning” (John
8: 44). One passage both
establishes it as a present fact, and reveals at least one reason of so awful a
power being in the Devil’s hands.
Concerning the incestuous brother the command to the Church was “to deliver such a one unto Satan for the destruction of the flesh” (1
Cor. 5: 5): that is, Satan retains the power throughout the history of
the Church; but simply as the executioner of God’s judgment. So after God had said to Satan
concerning Job:- “Behold, all that he hath is in
thy power,” we read of Job’s sons, ‑ “There came a great wind from the wilderness, and smote the
four corners of the house, and it
fell upon the young men, and they are dead” (Job. 1: 12, 19). These examples go far towards proving
that Satan’s power of death, even over the unsaved, is strictly subject
to the permission of God.
[*Both
our versions translate by ‘had’;
which is comment, not translation, and comment obviously suggested by a felt
difficulty. Rather, in the words of
the Pulpit Commentary :- “With
power given him over death, the penalty of sin, as long as man remains in his dominion,
unredeemed.”]
It
is extraordinarily significant that Christian Scientists, while disowning all
belief in a God who controls Satan, and yet having stumbled on the experience
of Satan’s death-power, are dominated by the very fear which is the soul
of Witchcraft, and for identical reasons.
Threats
of death, which have abounded in Christian Science, drove Mrs. Eddy nearly mad
with fear, and produced lawsuits founded on charges of murder by
witchcraft. “In coming years,” she says, “the person or mind that hates his neighbour will have no
need to traverse his fields to destroy his flocks and herds”;
“in warfare with error we attack with intent to
kill, as the wounded or cornered beast turns on its assailant”;
“they should have fear for their own lives in
their attempts to kill us.”* Mr. G. W. Louttit, a former First Reader of First Church of Christ
Scientist, says: “These persons [members
who dare not leave the Society] know that the hatred
of a Christian Scientist, if he understands the system, is more venomous and
far-reaching than the hatred of any other person: it is a hatred that pursues
and bites with mesmeric power, and in many instances has brought rivals and
victims to an unhappy end.”
[* Miss Milmine's Life of Mary Baker Eddy, pp. 224, 354.]
So
now we reach our critical point. It
follows from all we have pondered that two potential Healers were present in
the synagogue ‑ Christ and Satan: Christ, who did heal the woman; and Satan,
who, since he had bound her for eighteen years, could have unbound her at any
moment, and lo, a miracle of healing in an assembly of God! We have here remarkable light on
countless cures, even within the
On
the other hand, we must carefully keep our balance for in this lovely portrait we see what can happen in an assembly of God. This ‘daughter
of Abraham’, a woman of Abraham’s faith, has come in quiet
devotion to the house of God on the day of worship; utterly unaware of the
blessing about to fall, she offers no prayer - so far as we know - for healing;
but suddenly, a word falls from a Stranger present, whom she may never yet have
known; He says nothing to her about the
forgiveness of her sins, or of her sinning no more, erect for the first
time for eighteen years, she immediately before all the assembly glorifies God
out of a full heart; and her recorded experience has blessed myriads for nearly
two thousand years. Satan brought more into this
woman’s life than he had ever dreamed.
Nevertheless
the deepening peril of the end compels us to remember that a devil backs the Gospel from the mouth of a Paul. “A certain
maid having a spirit of divination
cried out, saying, These men are servants of the Most High God, which proclaim unto you
the way of salvation. And this she did for many days.
But Paul, being sore troubled, turned
and said to the spirit, I charge thee in the name of Jesus Christ to come
out of her. AND IT CAME OUT THAT VERY
HOUR” (Acts 16: 16).
It
is obvious that a movement whose raison
d'etre is healing, and that on a
gigantic scale, could not exist even for a few months without healing; and therefore all who imagine that supernormal cure is
necessarily a proof of a divine work need to study Christian Science. So also, in Spiritualism, we take but a
single example. In Odense, on the
Island of Funen, a ‘Brother Johannes’
, purporting to return after 200 years, “cured
all kinds of sickness in a spiritualist congregation, when invalids would throw
away their crutches and walk, and where (for example) a girl blind for eleven
years was made to see” (Daily
Mail, April 9, 1927). Witchcraft cures to-day. “The fakirs of
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