Does God still heal people miraculously today, or are we lying to the sick and desperate every time we promise He will?

• T

  Theo3w ago

  My daughter was diagnosed with stage 3 lymphoma at 19. Our entire church fasted and prayed for months. Elders anointed her with oil, just like James 5 says. She died eleven months later. I am not bitter at God — I worked through that — but I am done sitting in any service where some preacher promises healing like it's a vending machine. That kind of preaching nearly destroyed my faith during the worst year of my life. So yes, I believe God CAN heal. I do not believe He promises to heal everyone who believes hard enough. That second idea is a lie that kicks people when they're already on the floor.

  187Reply
• J

  Jordan3w ago

  I went to a healing conference in 2019. The 'healer' called people out of the audience and declared their pain gone. I watched a woman with a walker — she was weeping — get told she was healed and to walk without it. She took maybe four steps and fell. Nobody helped her for a moment because everyone was too busy cheering. That image will not leave me. We have to reckon with the real human cost of getting this doctrine wrong.

  176Reply
• D

  Drew3w ago

  The problem isn't whether God can heal. Obviously an omnipotent God can do whatever He wants. The real question is whether He has PROMISED to heal, and whether lack of healing means lack of faith. That second claim is where the prosperity-adjacent healing theology becomes spiritually abusive. I've watched pastors tell grieving parents that their child died because they didn't pray with enough faith. That's not Christianity. That's cruelty wearing a cross.

  162Reply
• K

  Kofi3w ago

  I asked my pastor once why my friend with MS wasn't healed after we prayed for years. He said maybe she had unconfessed sin. I left that church that week. Not that church — that week. Some answers reveal the person giving them.

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• N

  Nina3w ago

  I've been a physician for 22 years and I have seen things I cannot explain medically. A woman in our congregation with a documented glioblastoma — one of the fastest killing brain cancers there is — had her follow-up MRI show complete resolution of the tumor. Her oncologist used the word 'impossible.' Was that God? I can't prove it. But I'm a lot more open to the possibility than I was in medical school. Miracles may be rare precisely because they're miraculous, not because God stopped doing them.

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• D

  Drew3w ago

  The prosperity gospel and divine healing theology are basically the same heresy with different products. One promises money, one promises health. Both of them imply that if you don't receive it, YOU are the problem. Both of them make God into a formula you activate with enough faith or enough tithing. Both of them prey on desperate people. I'm not saying God doesn't heal. I'm saying the industrialized healing movement is exploiting people's pain and someone needs to say it louder.

  139Reply
• Y

  Yuki3w ago

  Hebrews 13:8. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. If He healed in the Gospels He heals now. Full stop. Any theology that puts God's power in the past tense is cessationism, and cessationism is just unbelief with a seminary degree.

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• N

  Nina3w ago

  spent 15 years as a worship leader in a charismatic church. went to every healing service. helped carry people to the front. saw zero verified miracles. saw a lot of people fall down, cry, and then go home still sick. eventually i left. not because i stopped believing in God, but because i stopped believing in the show.

  121Reply
• RL

  Riley L.3w ago

  Here's where I actually land after 30 years of wrestling with this: God heals. He heals whom He chooses, when He chooses, in ways that frequently embarrass our theological systems in both directions. The cessationist is embarrassed when God shows up and does something undeniable. The health-and-wealth preacher is embarrassed when his star congregant dies of cancer. Both embarrassments are data. Maybe — just maybe — God is sovereign in a way that doesn't fit neatly on either side of this debate, and the appropriate response is to pray with genuine faith and genuine submission, not to promise outcomes we can't guarantee or to foreclose possibilities we have no right to close.

  116Reply
• S

  Sam3w ago

  Paul had a thorn in the flesh and God didn't remove it. Timothy had stomach problems and Paul told him to drink some wine, not pray harder. Epaphroditus nearly died and Paul was worried sick — no instant miracle recorded. Even IN the New Testament healing wasn't automatic or guaranteed for believers. The idea that healing is always God's will for everyone who has faith is not only unscriptural, it's contradicted within the New Testament itself.

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• LS

  Liam S.3w ago

  Can we just acknowledge that the global church — not wealthy Western Christianity, but the church in the Global South, in parts of Asia and Africa — reports miraculous healings at a completely different rate than we do? Missiologists and anthropologists, secular ones, have documented this. Either hundreds of millions of non-Western Christians are all lying or hallucinating, or we in the comfortable, rationalistic West have built a theology that fits our experience and called it biblical.

  101Reply
• P

  Priya3w ago

  okay but the person above quoting Hebrews 13:8 — that verse is about Jesus's CHARACTER not about Him constantly performing the same miracles in every age. context matters. do you also expect Him to walk on water in front of you at the beach? consistent hermeneutics please

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• D

  Drew3w ago

  I think we're conflating different things. God sovereignly choosing to heal someone is not the same as someone on a stage declaring healing over a crowd for a love offering. The first I fully believe in. The second is a business model.

  91Reply
• K

  Kofi3w ago

  The comment about carrying people to the front — were they being prayed for or were they being performed at? That's the real question. I grew up in a small rural Pentecostal church. No stage lights, no production. Three people in my immediate family received what their doctors confirmed were medically inexplicable recoveries. No cameras, no offerings taken. Just old people on their knees. I'm not interested in defending the circus. I am interested in defending the real thing.

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• T9

  Taylor 923w ago

  The cessationist above sounds very confident for someone whose entire position rests on an argument from silence. Show me the verse that says miraculous gifts ended with the apostles. Go ahead. I'll wait. Warfield built the cessationist case on church history and theological inference, not on a clear biblical text, and he knew it.

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• P

  Priya3w ago

  Cessationism makes no sense to me when you actually read church history. The gifts didn't just evaporate after John died. Irenaeus wrote about miracles. Justin Martyr wrote about miracles. Augustine initially doubted then documented dozens of miracles in his own diocese. The idea that God stopped healing in AD 100 something is historically made up. We invented that to explain our embarrassingly powerless western churches.

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• F

  Feli3w ago

  if god heals people why does he never regenerate amputated limbs. ever. not once documented in church history. its always cancer going into remission or back pain disappearing — things that have natural explanations. the moment we need a leg to grow back suddenly god is mysteriously silent. almost like theres a pattern there

  76Reply
• MK

  Marco K.3w ago

  James 5 tells us to pray for healing and anoint with oil. That's not a historical footnote. That's a present-tense command in a letter written to the church. If you think that command expired, you need to show me where the Bible says it expired — not where B.B. Warfield says it expired in 1918. God heals. He healed my father's atrial fibrillation and I watched his cardiologist's face when he reviewed the new EKG. I'll take that testimony to my grave.

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• Y

  Yuki3w ago

  Reading through these comments I keep seeing people reject ABUSES and then conclude God doesn't heal. That's a category error. I reject abuses of communion theology — that doesn't mean Jesus didn't institute the Lord's Supper. Charlatans exist in every sphere of human activity. Their existence doesn't disprove the reality they are counterfeiting.

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• N

  Nina3w ago

  Hard cessationist here. The miraculous sign gifts served a specific purpose: validating the apostolic message before the canon of Scripture was complete. Once we had the completed Word of God, the scaffolding came down. This isn't unbelief — it's recognizing that God works through different means in different redemptive epochs. He still works powerfully. He still answers prayer. But the age of signs and wonders has passed. And frankly, most of what gets called miraculous healing today doesn't hold up to any scrutiny.

  63Reply
• NT

  Nina T.3w ago

  to the person who wants peer-reviewed studies — the National Institutes of Health have funded studies on intercessory prayer. the Cochrane reviews exist. the results are genuinely mixed and inconclusive, not a slam dunk for atheism the way you seem to assume. also, if your epistemology only allows for what can be peer-reviewed you should be honest that you've already ruled out the miraculous before examining the evidence, which is not science, its scientism.

  58Reply
• S

  Sam3w ago

  The amputee argument is the atheist internet's favorite gotcha and it's actually not as clever as it sounds. We don't get to dictate the category of miracles God performs any more than we get to dictate His other decisions. The question isn't why God doesn't grow limbs back — it's whether He acts supernaturally at all. And the documented medical literature on spontaneous remissions that defy statistical probability is actually quite large.

  54Reply
• D

  Drew3w ago

  my grandmother prayed over my uncle who had a severe infection after surgery, fever spiking, doctors preparing my aunt for the worst, and he pulled through overnight in a way the attending nurse told us she had not seen before. am i 100% sure that was supernatural? no. am i 100% sure it wasnt? also no. i think humility cuts both ways here. the materialists and the stadium healers are both too certain.

  47Reply
• M

  Maya3w ago

  The anecdotes in this thread are moving but anecdotes aren't data. Humans are terrible at evaluating medical claims because we don't naturally account for spontaneous remission rates, placebo effect, misdiagnosis, or confirmation bias. If you want me to believe miraculous healing is real and verifiable, show me a peer-reviewed, prospectively designed study. Otherwise you're asking me to discount everything I know about how human cognition works.

  44Reply

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