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Divine healing has been one of the themes of the Church of God Reformation from our earliest days. All one has to do is scan the pages of the early Gospel Trumpet issues, now available for online reading at http://palni.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/landingpage/collection/aupublic. In them we read many articles concerning this truth and many testimonies of readers who were eager to share the “grace of healing” they had found in the promises of God.
Even before he was editor-in-chief of the Gospel Trumpet, Enoch E. Byrum wrote a comprehensive work on this doctrine. He devoted several chapters to the healing of the soul, covering such topics as “Conviction,” “Consecration,” “Faith, “Conversion,” “Sanctification,” and “Two Works of Grace.” Then followed a detailed discussion of “Divine Healing of the Body,” and he concluded with over 60 pages of testimony of those who had been healed.
In 1897 Jacob Byers wrote song-poem that has appeared in nearly every one of our hymnals and song books since—
“He Is Just the Same Today.” It had more than the four or five stanzas most of us have sung. The earliest copy I could find of this poem has twelve stanzas.
A few years later Enoch Byrum produced another major work on divine healing. Well over 200 hundred pages are devoted to testimonies and then another nearly 300 pages to explaining the doctrine.
This doctrine brought much persecution in our earliest days, for the Biblical teaching on this subject was unfamiliar to most Christians then. By 1927, however, Herbert M. Riggle, an associate of most of the pioneers, was able to preach at our International Camp Meeting in Anderson, “And divine healing is another point of truth. Back there [in our pioneer days], to teach and practice it was considered almost sacrilege. Members were put in jail for trusting God for the healing of their bodies and their children. At that time we were about the only people who boldly taught and practiced this truth. Now nearly every church teaches and practices healing to a greater or less degree. . . . Brethren, in all this I greatly rejoice. The effect of our message is bearing fruitage everywhere.”
In fact, it is difficult to find Christians anywhere today who do not believe that God heals in answer to prayer, although some may quibble over whether it is the result of the “gift of healing” or simply an answer to prayer. I recall a conversation I had with a Roman Catholic priest when I pastored in Michigan. We were discussing the differences between our “ordinances” and their “sacraments.” When I mentioned the sacrament of “extreme unction” (“extreme” indicating the end of life and “unction” indicating anointing with oil), he gently corrected me. He said when a priest anoints with oil now, it is to pray for the physical healing of the sick one.
Though today we don’t seem to emphasize it as we once did, one would be hard put to find a congregation of the church of God where the sick are not anointed with oil in expectation of a healing touch from Jesus. We cherish this truth, but like most of the truths we cherish sometimes we are better at proclaiming it than at practicing it!
Like most of the truths we cherish, we also have debated this one in a lively manner. In the past some have been so persuaded that God would not heal if the sick one took medicine, that they would not even pray for that one. Dale Oldham relates an experience with physical healing early in his pastoral ministry that settled the issue for him. He had been raised with no medicines in his home. As he expressed it, “No aspirin, castor oil, or spirits of camphor.” He was called to pray for a lady in his congregation who had suffered a heart attack, and nothing the doctors could do helped her. He writes, “I was stymied, for all I could see was a bedside table literally covered with medicine bottles. How could I pray the prayer of faith with all those corks staring at me? Nevertheless, as earnestly as I could I asked the Lord to touch the woman. I left hoping for the best. The next day she was downtown shopping and telling everyone how she had been healed. In fact, she was still alive forty years later. That experience was good enough for me. It taught me to pay no attention to the medicine bottles.”
We also have argued, not over whether God can and will heal the sick, but over whether healing is in the atonement. That seems to me a rather fruitless argument, but I think Charles E. Brown had a good answer for it. Following a lengthy discussion of the Fall of man and its effects, which include sickness and death, both spiritual and physical, he reasons that since spiritual death has been negated already by the atonement of Jesus, and in the physical resurrection, physical death will also be negated, healing may be regarded as a foretaste of that resurrection. He concluded, “It is the atonement which makes it possible for us receive not only divine healing but every blessing which we have from God’s hand by the extension of our lives and blessings at a time when we were a doomed race.”
Rather than debate the matter, the current issue of Truth Matters will simply examine when the Bible says clearly about it, and we have included several testimonies of healing from our own midst. We will not quibble over niceties and words, but we will exalt Jesus the healer, for He is just the same today!
Divine Healing of Soul and Body (Grand Junction, MI: Gospel Trumpet Co 1892.) v
Noah H. Byrum, Familiar Names and Faces (Moundsville, WV: Gospel Trumpet Co., 1902) 270-274
200Sermon, “The Reformation’s March to Victory” (Clarksville, TN: Reformation Publishers Reprint 1986) 48
Genuine Instances of Divine Healing (Anderson, IN: Gospel Trumpet Co., 1911)
Giants along My Path (Anderson, IN: Warner Press, 1973) 141 Questions and Answers (Anderson, IN: Gospel Trumpet Co., 1949) 87-89
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