Christians, Medicine, and Faith Healing

Should Christians take medicine, or simply rely on faith healing?

Many Christians have died throughout the ages because they were waiting for their faith healing. They refused to receive medical help. Recently, many have died, and are indeed dying of HIV/AIDS because they were told that they must just believe, and God will heal them of their HIV.

What do you believe? Is it okay for Christians to receive medical help? Is it lack of faith to take medication when you are sick? Is it lack of trust in God as our healer?

Let me start by saying that the idea that because we are children of God, God will heal us, is a demonic idea! It is the devil's idea. It is the trick that the devil has always used. When the son of God himself, Jesus Christ, was being tempted by the devil, the devil used this very idea. He said to Jesus "If you are the Son of God...." Many Christians are being sold the same old devilish idea that "If you are the son of God, God will heal you of whatever disease you have". Nothing can be further from the truth. To decide not to take antiretrovirals (ARVs) because God will heal us is testing God. Testing God is something that Jesus said we must not do.

“... ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’ ” (Matthew 4:7 NIV)

We should never be tempted to think we are righteous to the point that God owes us healing, wealth, happiness or whatever it is we desire, or that we have enough faith to receive all these things.

One of the wisest men who ever lived, at least according to the Bible, was Solomon. Even in his day, there were men who destroyed themselves because they believed this demonic lie. See what he says:

"Do not be overrighteous, neither be overwise— why destroy yourself? Do not be overwicked, and do not be a fool— why die before your time? It is good to grasp the one and not let go of the other. Whoever fears God will avoid all extremes." (Ecclesiastes 7:16-18 NIV)

There are many who are dying before their time whilst they are waiting for their healing. Take Dineo (not her real name). She was diagnosed with cancer. She went to her doctor, and he decided to start her on chemotherapy treatment. She was admitted into hospital. I went to visit her whilst she was in hospital. She was doing well with the treatment. But a friend of hers came to visit her. She told Dineo that she knows a place where they can pray for her and she will be healed of her cancer.

Dineo was now bed ridden. At this point, she would do anything to get healed. The pain, the side effects of the chemotherapy, the fear of death, she wanted it all to stop. So she decided she will try this prayer thing. She asked the doctor to discharge her. Her mother went to the hospital and they signed the papers that she be discharged even though it was against the doctor's advice. They carried her into the car as she could not walk.

From the hospital, her friend took them straight to the "Healing House". She spent two weeks there. I don't know what they do in that two weeks. At the end of the two weeks, it was time for healing. They prayed for her. And then the "miracle" happened! She jumped up from her bed and ran around the hall. She was "healed", or so they thought. From the "Healing House"' they went straight to her sister to show her the miracle. It was all joy. Dineo and her mother slept at her sister's place that day.

The following morning Dineo was sick again. She asked her mother to take her to the hospital. They washed her and put her in the car. She could not walk again. She was admitted again into hospital. A day later she passed away from the cancer that she was supposedly healed of. Her mother was devastated when I went to see her. The healing pastor was not there at the funeral to bury her. Whatever happened at the "Healing House" was not healing.

Dineo did not need to die. I believe this confusion also comes from ignorance about what medicine is. Let me explain. Naturally, when we eat food, our bodies extract all the nutrients the body needs to be healthy, that is the vitamins, proteins, iron, etc. However, because our bodies are no longer in the state that God created them in, sometimes the body cannot absorb these nutrients. After a while, the body becomes sick because it is not getting the nutrients. Or the body gets infected with a virus, and the body cannot destroy the virus because it does not have the vitamins it requires to kill the virus.

It is at this point when the body can no longer naturally get its vitamins and proteins from food that the medicine becomes necessary. Medicine is simply highly concentrated nutrients which are extracted from plants. So when the sick person takes a tablet for flu, they are actually supplementing their diet with what the body needs at that time, in this case vitamin C. This is one of the reasons the doctor will advise that you take your medication with meals. There are other reasons. Therefore, medicine is nothing else but food with a high concentration of a specific nutrient.

The same way we eat food to stay healthy, we "eat" medication to stay healthy or get healthy. We don't say, "Because I am the child of God, and I have faith, I will not eat food because God will sustain me. After all, Jesus said man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God." That would be ludicrous. Those that believe christians should not take medication are using the same erroneous logic. In some cases when you have flu, and it is not so serious, the doctor may advise you to eat oranges because they have vitamin C. In that case, the oranges are medication. The truth, though, is that all food we eat IS medication. It is what makes us well and keep us well.

When Jesus' disciples asked him to teach them how to pray, he said they must pray to God to "Give us today our daily bread." (Matthew 6:11 NIV). Why? Because we need food to stay healthy. "Bread" here means that which sustains us, whether bread, rice, pap, potatoes, tomatoes, bananas, etc. It is food. And in this food, God has hidden all the nutrients your body needs.

Paul, one of the greatest apostles of the church, the one whose shadow healed people who touched it, did not pray for Timothy to be healed of his illnesses. Instead, this is the advice he gave Timothy: "Stop drinking only water, and use a little wine because of your stomach and your frequent illnesses."  (1 Timothy 5:23 NIV) In another incident, he actually left his friend sick without getting him healed with prayer. "Say hello to Priscilla and Aquila; also, the family of Onesiphorus. Erastus stayed behind in Corinth. I had to leave Trophimus sick in Miletus." (2 Timothy 4:19, 20 MSG). What? Paul leaves somebody sick without praying for their healing? What is going on? Well, what is going on is that God has purposed that we eat our broccoli and veggies. They keep us healthy. And if we fall sick, we must eat our veggies, failing which we must take our medication, which is a concentrated form of veggies.

Does it mean God does not intervene in a supernatural, miraculous way to give healing? No, it doesn't mean that. He does intervene supernaturally, but he prefers the natural way. The natural way is also a miracle of God. For a heart to keep pumping from the day the baby is still in the womb until 100 years later non-stop is a miracle we cannot explain. I know sometimes good diet is not enough. If your parents died of cancer, chances are high that you will have it too, despite eating your veggies. But the good news of the gospel is that Jesus became a man like us, to take our body of flesh and blood, so that he could heal it. When he returns, we will get a body like his, with no more pain and sorrow, no more cancer, HIV, diabetes, or any other disease that afflicts us. However, in this body we share in his suffering, even suffering that leads to death.

In expressing this hope of the future without disease, John gave this encouraging imagery in the book of Revelation:

"Then the angel showed me a river with the water of life, clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb.  It flowed down the center of the main street. On each side of the river grew a tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit,  with a fresh crop each month. The leaves were used for medicine to heal the nations. No longer will there be a curse upon anything. For the throne of God and of the Lamb will be there, and his servants will worship him." (Revelation 22:1-3 NLT)

We look forward to that day when "there will be no more death or sorrow or crying or pain.” (Revelation 21:4 NLT) Today when we pray for food, we are praying for healing, when we pray for forgiveness, we are praying for healing, when we pray for his kingdom to come, we are praying for healing, when we pray for his will to be done on earth, we are praying for healing, when we pray to be kept from temptation, we are praying for healing.

Whatever you may be sick of today, I pray that God the Father, by the grace of Jesus Christ, in the power of the Spirit, may give you the healing, whether naturally or supernaturally! Amen.

Confessions of a Xenophobic Pastor

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South Africa’s past is synonymous with Apartheid. However, a new tag may soon overtake the apartheid tag – Xenophobia, crudely defined as discrimination against foreigners.

My wife traveled to one of the African countries earlier this year (no, it was not Zimbabwe – not that I don’t like Zimbabwe. I love it, and was there for a week recently myself). Her host, who was driving her to the airport was stopped by a traffic policeman. The policeman spoke to the driver in a local language she could not understand. The policeman asked the driver where he was going. He mentioned that he was taking his South African passenger to the airport for a flight home. On hearing that she was South African, he remarked: “Oh, she is South African? Let her come out so that I can show her what Xenophobia is.” (Of course he was joking. He immediately released them so that she did not miss her flight.)

“Are you xenophobic?” I often ask my friends and acquaintances. Of course, their responses are not different to when you ask somebody: “Are you racist?” The answer is often: “Me? No. No way! I like Zimbabweans/Mozambicans/Blacks/etc.”

People have come up with all kinds of reasons why xenophobic attacks took place in South Africa recently. The most common reason given is that it is because of poor service delivery. Of course the government did not buy this explanation. They commissioned their own fact-finding team into the trouble spots to establish the causes of these attacks. Their conclusion was that this was a work of criminals and a “third force”, whoever that is.

As a South African, I had to engage with the issue as well. “Am I xenophobic?” I decided to unpack the whole concept, and not simply tell myself that I am not xenophobic. As usual, my starting point when it comes to the condition of our society and human behaviour in general, is to begin in the Christian Holy Bible. Although I am a Psychology graduate, I have since found that psychology; sociology; anthropology and other related social sciences have a big weakness in their theoretical make up.

My first quest was to understand why humans fight each other in the first place. I found out that James, a Jewish believer from the first century, gave an answer about the causes of fights and wars almost 2000 years ago:

“²What is causing the quarrels and fights among you? Don’t they come from the evil desires at war within you? ² You want what you don’t have, so you scheme and kill to get it. You are jealous of what others have, but you can’t get it, so you fight and wage war to take it away from them. Yet you don’t have what you want because you don’t ask God for it.” (James 4:1-2 NLT)

Of course this was not James’ wisdom. It was inspiration from the Triune God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Christian Holy Scriptures are inspired by God: “All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful to teach us what is true and to make us realize what is wrong in our lives.” (2 Tim. 3:16 NLT)

The root cause of human conflict is resources/opportunities. Those who live in war-torn DRC, or in Angola during the 1980s, or in Sudan, Palestine, Iraq or any other conflict-ridden country, will tell you that their oil, diamonds or gold has turned out to be their curse instead of a blessing. As you can see, those who said xenophobia was due to poor service delivery were partly correct. People were fighting over limited houses and jobs. The government was not completely wrong either. As it turned out, in most of these xenophobic attacks people looted the shacks of foreigners for their possessions, and even their small shops.

One social networker on Twitter lamented the problem on Twitter: “…the brutality of an African on another baffles me. Colonialists and slave traders I can understand. But our own kind?”

Once again, I find that the Christian Holy Scriptures are the best place to start. In the Genesis creation account, we read that God created creatures according to their own kind. However, there was another creature he created according to its own kind. This creature was called human. Human is translated from the Hebrew word adam, the name of the first human. Of all the creatures, God created humans one of a kind. He only created a male, and created the female out of the male. Therefore, there is no difference between male and female humans, except their genitalia. God even said the male and female humans will marry and become one, because they were originally one of a kind (but this is a topic for another day).

When we don’t see ourselves as humans, of one kind, we start inventing our own identities. When we see foreigners as of another kind, and not our own kind, we start discriminating against them, because they are not one of us. For example, I used to see myself as a Muvenda, but I don’t see myself that way anymore (if you are Muvenda, please read to the end before you stone me).

Humans are social creatures. They don’t like getting lost in the sea of other billions of humans. Therefore, they create new identities. Several hundred years ago, some humans developed a slang ( slang is jargon/words used by a group of humans to understand each other). This slang is now called Tshivenda language. Those that spoke and understood this slang called Tshivenda started calling themselves Vhavenda. All other language groups came about this way since the time of Babel (Genesis 11).

You see, Tshivenda and Vhavenda did not exist a thousand years ago. Neither did the English, the Afrikaners, the Zulus, the Basothos, and many other nationalities. It is the same with cultures. They are social inventions by humans, driven by location, time and circumstance.

When humans identify themselves by their language, culture or their GPS location on the earth, they misrepresent their own identity. Three years ago, I met one of Africa’s greatest minds in Oxford, England. His name is Eddie Obeng. By original location of his parents, he is originally from Ghana. As we were having tea, somebody asked him a question: “So, Eddie, where are you from?”

Eddie responded in a way that stayed with me since then. He said: “Do you mean where am I from this morning, last week, last year, ten years ago, thirty years ago, hundred years ago, a thousand years ago, or six thousand years ago?” Of course Eddie knew what the person who asked the question meant. He was just making a point. If he said he was from London, he did not know what we thought of Londoners. If he said he was from Africa, or Ghana, or Kumasi, or that he is Ashanti, he did not know what our attitudes are to those identities. We would put him in a box, and he did not like that.

If I call myself a Muvenda, I define my origins as being less than a thousand years old. If I define myself as a South African, my origins are less than five hundred years old. If I define myself as a Guatenger (somebody from the Gauteng province of South Africa), I define my origins as less than ten years old. As you can see, my identity is what I see my origins to be.

As a converted xenophobic pastor, I had to redefine my origins. Now I see myself as a human, a descendant of Adam, the first human. I am not a Muvenda, but you may call me that if calling me human leaves you feeling short-changed.

When God started the Christian church two thousand years ago (church is simply a group of Christian believers), he started by breaking down the main human symbol of identity in human society, namely, language, because he wanted the church to be comprised of humans, and not Jews, not Greeks, not Romans, not males, not females, nor rich, nor the poor from the other side of the tracks. This is what happened on the Day of Pentecost, the day the church started in its current form.

^“4 And everyone present was filled with the Holy Spirit and began speaking in other languages, as the Holy Spirit gave them this ability… ⁶ When they heard the loud noise, everyone came running, and they were bewildered to hear their own languages being spoken by the believers. ⁷ They were completely amazed. “How can this be?” they exclaimed. “These people are all from Galilee, ⁸ and yet we hear them speaking in our own native languages! ⁹ Here we are—Parthians, Medes, Elamites, people from Mesopotamia, Judea, Cappadocia, Pontus, the province of Asia, ¹⁰ Phrygia, Pamphylia, Egypt, and the areas of Libya around Cyrene, visitors from Rome ¹¹ (both Jews and converts to Judaism), Cretans, and Arabs. And we all hear these people speaking in our own languages about the wonderful things God has done!”(Acts 2: 4-11 NLT)

Paul having gotten the point of what the church was, changed his view of believers and people in general. He made this point repeatedly in his writings:

^“26 For you are all children of God through faith in Christ Jesus... ²⁸ There is no longer Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male and female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Gal. 3:26,28 NLT, see also Rom. 3:9; 3:30; 10:12; 1 Cor. 10:32; 12:13; Col. 3:11).

Jesus became a human, and died for humans, so that humans can become humans again, as God created them to be. He removed the wall that divided humans, namely, language, culture, location, gender and social status. “¹⁴ For Christ himself has brought peace to us. He united Jews and Gentiles into one people when, in his own body on the cross, he broke down the wall of hostility that separated us.” (Eph. 2:14 NLT)

So, are you xenophobic? It is a matter of how you see or define yourself, or what your assumed identity is. If you are anything other than human, you will be surprised at what humans may become when an opportunity arises. Ask the Rwandans. Ask the South Africans. Ask the Germans. Ask the Americans and British slave owners. Ask the Zimbabweans.

You see, when there is only one peanut left, and somebody must have it, it most often will be Takalani Musekwa, and not Bizza Musekwa. Why? Because for some strange reason, Takalani has a right to the peanut, and not his brother.

Thank God he has saved me from the foolishness of my old identity. Our South African Constitution Fathers, had the foresight to state in the preamble of the South African Constitution: “We, the people of South Africa, Believe that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, united in our diversity.” You have heard my confession. Are you xenophobic?