IN REGARD TO the suggestion-based ‘Crisis Experience’ induced in Charismatic-Pentecostal meetings, we have so far examined the phoney claims concerning so-called “Baptsism in the Holy Spirit” and their so-called “Tongues” experience. A further component in the suggestion-based ‘Crisis Experience’ induced in Charismatic-Pentecostal meetings is that of phoney faith-healing. One famous pioneering practitioner of this activity was Morris Cerullo (1931-2020), whose claims for healing were held up to scrutiny by a BBC television documentary entitled “The Heart of the Matter” after his “Mission to London” at Earls Court in 1992. Of the 2,250 claimed healings, nine “best cases” were submitted for investigation but none was found to bear out the truth of the claims. [For full details of this, see Sword and Trowel, No.3, 1993, pp.2-4. See also the details at this link: https://web.archive.org/web/20110606105638/http://www.e-n.org.uk/136-Giving-their-lives-to-the-faith.htm . See also the details given in the 1993/1994 PDF article at this link https://cdn.centerforinquiry.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/26/1994/01/22155712/p05.pdf ]. Such mendacious claims are typical of Charismatic faith-healing — all of which is in stark contrast to the healings of Jesus, which were 100% successful every time, involving genuine organic change in body structure, and about which there could be no controversy. [It is worth noting the extraordinary and revealing fact that Morris Cerullo’s “Mission to London” faith-healing circus was an accredited member of the Evangelical Alliance in the U.K.].

So what does the Bible say on the matter of divine healing. It is of great significance that the “gifts of healings” and “workings of miracles” are referred to in the plural in the Greek texts (1 Corinthians 12:9-10,28). This is because all occurrences of healings and miracles were separate gift-events which took place through the immediate impetus of the Holy Spirit. A person did not receive “the gift of healing” on a permanent basis, so that he became a professional “healer” and could heal at will, as it were. In the Bible, every time a healing or a miracle took place, the one through whom the healing or miracle was performed received a specific prompting from the Holy Spirit to carry out the act. That person might never receive such a prompting again; or, on the other hand, he might receive many.

Some especially notable examples of this process in action are recorded in the New Testament. First, the healing of the lame man at the temple-gate called Beautiful (Acts 3:1-10). Peter and John must have gone up to the temple at the ninth hour by this route on many occasions; but it was only on this one occasion that the Holy Spirit prompted them to perform this healing. It was a classic example of the use of a “sign”, after which evangelism could follow, as it did (Acts 3:11–4:4). Second, there was the deliverance of the slave girl possessed with a spirit of divination (Acts 16:16-19). She harassed Paul for many days, but was ignored by him. Suddenly, on one particular moment of one particular day, Paul wheeled round and commanded the demon to come out. One must assume that this was the time chosen by the Holy Spirit for Paul to be empowered to do this. Without such prompting of the Spirit and the accompanying gift, even the Apostles did not attempt to work a miracle or perform a healing. This is presumably the reason why, when Peter was given the gift of working a miracle to bring Dorcas back to life, instead of simply uttering a command, he prayed to the Lord to discern whether or not it was the Spirit’s intention to do this (Acts 9:40). Understanding all this is most important today because there are a great many people who set themselves up with what they call “a healing ministry” in the manner of Morris Cerullo. However, not only are they attempting to use a spiritual gift which is no longer extant (as I shall shortly show), but they are usurping what is the sole prerogative of the Holy Spirit in distributing “gifts of healings” according to His own will (Hebrews 2:4). There were no Christians who set themselves up as professional, full-time, Spirit-empowered healers with a ‘healing ministry’ in the New Testament. To set oneself up in this way would be pure Shamanism — and indeed that is the way that the modern ‘Christian’ faith-healers function.

The gifts of healings referred to in 1 Corinthians 12:9 were an extension of the Apostolic sign-ministry of healing set out in Mark 16:18, as these sign-gifts could only be received through the personal distribution of one of the Apostles (as we saw in an earlier section where we showed categorically that the phrase “those who have believed” refers to the Apostles only, as the context clearly shows, as one does not see any of the phoney Charismatic healers being unharmed by snake-bites or after taking a deadly poison!). The healings of Christ and His Apostles were never intended to be an end in themselves, just to make people feel better. Neither were they given in order that we may have an example to mimic. It is vital to understand this. The healings of Christ and His Apostles were instead carried out as a sign that the promised Messiah had truly and finally arrived. In other words, they were authenticating signs performed both as fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy and as practical parables of the spiritual healing that a person receives when he or she comes to Christ. Let us expand on this concept.

It is of signal importance that the Lord Jesus, at the beginning of His public ministry, identified the nature of His messianic work by quoting Isaiah 61:1-2a in the synagogue in Nazareth, which has been recorded in Luke 4:16-30: “He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind”. The healing miracles and deliverance ministry which He subsequently carried out were in fulfillment of this and other Old Testament prophecies (e.g., Isaiah 35:5-6; 42:6-7), and served to identify Jesus Christ to Israel as the long-awaited Messiah. When John the Baptist sent men to Jesus to ask if He was the Coming One, Jesus then authenticated His Messiahship to this last of the Old Testament prophets by presenting a detailed catalogue of His healing ministry (see Matthew 11:2-5). Why did He do this? Because it was these things which represented the infallible ‘signs’ that He had come. Moreover, these healing ‘signs’ provided vital spiritual lessons about His redemptive mission as the Saviour of the world (e.g., John 9:39). For the real healing in this life is not having a mere physical affliction temporally removed but having your soul eternally saved. This is why the Pentecostal-Charismatic emphasis on physical healing is so utterly misplaced. The state of one’s body is comparatively irrelevant. The healing of the soul is the real healing in this life!

It cannot be over-emphasised that Jesus did not practice healing, or empower His Apostles to do so, in order to provide us with a nice example to imitate. Mark discloses the real reason why Jesus healed when he records Him as saying to the Scribes and Pharisees, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance” (Mark 2:17). Here we are shown by the Lord Himself that the true healing which is at the heart of the revelation of God in Jesus Christ is the forgiveness of sins. The real sickness of humanity is sin. As the Lord said to Jeremiah: “The heart is deceitful above all things and incurably sick [the full meaning of the Hebrew word, וְאָנֻשׁ, veanush]“ (Jeremiah 17:9). All Jesus’ healings were an illustration of his unique power to heal that human heart. Nowhere is this brought out more powerfully than in the healing of the paralytic who was lowered through the roof:

“Which is easier: to say to a paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Get up, pick up your mat, and walk’? But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins…” He said to the paralytic, “I tell you, get up, pick up your mat, and go home’” (Mark 2:9-11) [emphasis added].

The Scribes knew very well that only God can forgive sins (Mark 2:7), and that Jesus was here ascribing Divine status to Himself. That is precisely why He performed healings and miracles: To give unassailable proof of His Deity (cf. John 20:30-31), a fact which would eventually lead to His being executed by the religious authorities (Matthew 26:63-65; John 19:7). He authorised only His Apostles to continue that sign-ministry (Mark 3:15; 16:17-18). To imitate Christ by attempting to enact such miraculous physical healings, as many do today, is to deny the uniqueness of His sign-ministry and that of the Apostles sent personally by Him to establish the solid foundations of His Church (2 Corinthians 12:12; Mark 16:17-18; Hebrews 2:4).

Another facet of gifts of healings is that they occurred exclusively by direct command of the Apostles or those empowered by them (e.g., Luke 4:39; Acts 3:6; 9:34; 9:40). God still heals today, if it is His will to do so — not through direct command, but by means of prayer — not through apostles or other gifted people with a sign ministry, but through the pastoral ministry of the elders of the local churches (James 5:14-16). It is impossible to reconcile the passage in James 5:14-16 with the Charismatic “faith-healing” of today. The way there is clearly set out for the Christian who is sick: There is no advice to seek out a ‘gifted’ healer. Just a simple exhortation to “call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord”. This conveys some significant information: for, either the spiritual gifts of healings were no longer in existence by the time that James’s letter was written (c. AD 60), or the original Charismatic gifts of healings were solely for the authentication of the Gospel rather than as a form of medical treatment. Whichever of these is the case, the present practice of faith-healing is not in the least consistent with the explicit teaching on healing in James 5, which must surely be the “control text” to which we must turn for instruction in this pressing pastoral area.

Because the gifts of healings were given as a “sign” that the promised Messiah had come and that He was God manifested in the flesh who had power to forgive sins, they were only applicable to the church in the Apostolic era. But the sign-healings of Jesus, the Apostles, and those empowered by them are just as much for our benefit as they were for the people alive at the time. So, when the New Testament canon was complete, all the “signs” necessary for the authentication of the Messiah throughout the remainder of this age had been recorded in the Scriptures. Once the churches had been established throughout the world, they provided the proper place for an ongoing healing ministry through the eldership.

Let it be noted here how vastly different are the immediate, instantaneous, completely organic healings of Jesus Christ and His Apostles when compared with the psychosomatic, shamanistic, suggestion-based, small-scale, low-key ‘healings’ being practised by so many in the Pentecostal/Charismatic churches today. After decades of witnessing this scam, I am so fed up with seeing the trickery of so-called ‘healing ministries’. Certainly, God still works miracles. Absolutely, He still heals. Without a doubt, He still delivers people, spiritually and wholly. But no one today can go round claiming that they have a ‘miracle ministry’ or a ‘healing ministry’, or a ‘deliverance ministry’. When one understands the unique nature of Apostleship in the New Testament (as I laid out in the previous section of this chapter) and grasps how suggestion and mesmerism work on primed, gullible people, one will see through all the impostors who set themselves up with such ‘ministries’, a real stain on the Church.

So I here put out a nine-part challenge to all those who lay claim to a personal ongoing ‘healing ministry’ today:

  • Do not just ‘tarry’ in your tent meeting waiting for all those desperate people to line up in front of you (while, of course, you ignore the very difficult cases in wheelchairs). Instead, go out into the casualty departments of your local hospitals on a Saturday night and bring instantaneous organic healing to the battered victims of the brawls and accidents that present themselves there for treatment. Notice those knife-wounds disappearing on the spot. Watch those bent and broken bones straighten and come together before your eyes. See that smashed-in skull become a whole one, without a scratch.
  • Then nip up to the surgical wards and lay your hands on the amputees, everything-ectomies and hopeless cases, so that their truncated limbs and diseased entrails will be restored to them.
  • When those wards have been completely emptied, go to your local ‘Institute for the Blind’ and bring some colour into their lifelong darkened lives for the first time with your ‘remarkable healing powers’ [sic].
  • Then buzz over to the offices of ‘Scope’ (formerly ‘National Spastics Society’) and ask to be taken to their many training centres, where you can restore those withered limbs there and then.
  • When all the callipers have supposedly been thrown on the scrapheap, if you still want to show you have a ‘proven ministry’ (as you claim), find some local authority Special Schools and make that Down’s Syndrome melt away from those pleading little faces.
  • That twisted and hunched little kid with cerebral palsy in the wheelchair who you just walked past in the street — why don’t you turn around and wave your ‘gifted hands’ over her so that she walks away and puts a huge smile on the faces of her parents’, who have struggled for so many years?
  • With all the filthy earnings you have accrued over the years through your phoney ‘ministry’, put on your Gucci suit and fly your private jet over to some middle-east country and enter a leper colony and make it redundant through your ‘amazing powers’ (as your kitsch and lying ministry brochure says).
  • And if you still have any energy left, take your stretch-limo across to the local mortuary, wave your hand over the cadavers and bring some of its formerly frigid occupants out for a breath of fresh air and a good meal.
  • One final gesture for you then is to get your ass over to Benny Hinn’s place and put him in a straitjacket and see if he can miracle-work his way out of it.

If you lay claim to a ‘healing ministry’, I challenge you to do all these things today. Why wait? Imagine what an amazing effect it would have in the world. For those are the kinds of healings which Jesus Christ and the Apostles carried out in the course of their ministry (e.g., Luke 22:50-51; Mark 1:40-42; 3:1-5; Luke 8:43-44; John 9:1-11; 11:43-44). Not only did they have a 100% success-rate, but nothing was too difficult for them to tackle. If you believe you should be healing ‘just like Jesus’ (as you claim), then anything less than the same success-rate and instantaneity of His healing is a complete sham. By all means, call yourself a “faith healer” or even a “Shaman”, but do not make the false claim that you are “doing the works of Jesus”.

You people who claim to have a ‘healing ministry’ have not the faintest idea what a real miracle is, or what real healing and deliverance actually are. If you want to ‘claim your healing’, then claim those which are the same as those that have been recorded in the New Testament. For they are the healings which have been given to us as a sign to point the way to Jesus, the Forgiver of sin, which is the true miracle, healing, and deliverance.

When the famous Council of Nicaea was held in AD 325, it was attended by some three-hundred bishops from around the empire. Accounts of this gathering state that a great many of the delegates were crippled and came limping in on crutches, having suffered physical abuses in the persecutions. But there was no healing service. Just a quiet faith in Jesus Christ and an acceptance of their sufferings for the Lord. They knew the great secret that the true healing is that of the soul. They knew that “our light affliction, which is but for a moment, is working for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory” (2 Corinthians 4:17). That is the real theology of healing!

If people are going to get themselves out of these false church settings in which phoney healings and pseudo-miracles are rustled up, they are going to have to work really hard at this. They are going to have to get to grips with what the Bible actually teaches rather than base their understanding on some counterfeit hypnotic anecdotes. People say to me, “But I’ve seen people healed”. When I question them closely about what those healings consisted of, none of them involved anything which could not be accounted for by deep psychosomatic effects or powerful suggestion — basically, faith healing, which works in any bewitching setting but does not involve instantaneous organic healing. Just imagine what a sensation it would cause if someone was genuinely and instantaneously healed of a serious organic or genetic affliction, such as Down Syndrome, or a leg in a calliper shrunken and shrivelled by poliomyelitis, or the twisted limbs of Cerebral Palsy or even blindness from birth, all happening in such a way that it could be witnessed and catalogued without any reservations. But these healers do not deal with such afflictions, for obvious reasons. They are unable to heal them. In terms of biblical healing, they are impostors and mountebanks, for there can be no such thing today as someone having an ongoing “healing ministry”. Apparently, the best they can do is lengthen legs — and even that is highly suspect! [Check out “Charismatic leg-lengthening ministry” through an internet search. It would be extremely comical if it was not so tragically heinous].

In October 2016, BBC journalist, Emily Yates, who has cerebral palsy, began to follow John Mellor, a ‘Christian’ healer, and decided to go to one of his huge healing gatherings to get healed. She made a video of her experience, entitled, “Heal me in the name of Jesus” (See details here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/article/12fb29da-567c-488b-8523-d1f11a79e40c ). When the big day came, she went through it all at a 500-crowd meeting where she witnessed what she described as “the placing of hands on heads and prayers in foreign tongues” (Ibid.). But when her turn came, although when she was caught up in the frenzy she felt some fresh lightness in her legs (which would be the psychosomatic element), it soon returned to normal and she was not healed. John told her that he would “try again” but she had had enough. At the conclusion to the film, Emily says on-screen,

“I keep hearing of all these, like, amazing miracles that are happening and all these people with these horrendous illnesses that are getting healed and all we saw was people with sprained ankles and headaches and frozen shoulders feeling better” ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-M30YaHnm8 ).

Exactly. There is an awful lot of hopium in these situations but very little hard medical evidence. Can you imagine what a global sensation it would be if real healing took place on the grand scale that is claimed in the Charismatic movement? But proper investigations always come to the conclusion that there is no real evidence of organic healing of serious afflictions. What kind of a witness is that? As Emily’s video comes to a close, these words appear starkly on the screen, “John Mellor claims he has healed people all over the world. We found no medical evidence to back up these claims” (Ibid.). And it is always the same with these Charismatic healing ministries. Can you imagine that happening through an investigation in Jesus’ time? With Him, the evidence was powerful and transformative. There was never even a whiff of doubt, which is why the authorities were so afraid of Him and out to destroy Him.

It is a very sobering thought that there will not merely be a few but many on the Day of Judgement who will ‘knock on the door of heaven’ and say to Jesus: “Lord, Lord, have we not…done many wonders in Your name?”  But He will declare to them, “I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!” (Matthew 7:21-23).

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[The above article has been extracted from the upcoming 1,040-page Second Edition of “The Serpent & the Cross: Religious Corruption in an Evil Age”, which will hopefully be published in the early Autumn this year. You can obtain an information brochure about the book from this link: https://diakrisis-project.com/2025/07/04/pre-publication-information-brochure-for-the-serpent-the-cross-now-available-for-distribution/ ].

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© Copyright, Alan Morrison, 2025
[The copyright on my works is merely to protect them from any wanton plagiarism which could result in undesirable changes (as has actually happened!). Readers are free to reproduce my work, so long as it is in the same format and with the exact same content and its origin is acknowledged]

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