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— How Rich is Rich?
— Understanding Isaiah 30:15
— Is Healing Going On Today?
HC: Good evening. Welcome to Open Forum.
CALLER: Yes. I have a few questions. One of them is, how rich does the Bible consider rich?
HC: How rich does the Bible consider rich? First of all, the Bible does not consider physical riches as being rich, necessarily. A man can be physically rich, and if he has not salvation, he is of all men most miserable. He is doomed to hell, and is to be pitied.
To be really rich is to be born again, to be a child of God, because then we are heirs of all the promises that are given in the Bible. We are heirs of the New Heaven and the New Earth. We become sons of God. We will reign in this New Heaven and New Earth eternally as kings. There is no one richer than a born again believer.
Now we can't see these riches with our naked eye today. Now we live on this earth in sackcloth, as it were, to use the figure shown in Revelation 11. We live humbly. We live patiently, bringing the Gospel. We are the physically poor of the world to a very high degree, frequently. But we are the heirs. We are the sons of the King. And once we've spent a few years here on this earth, we go home to our homeland which is Heaven. And from then on everything gets better and better. We are the rich of the world, really.
CALLER: Okay. Thank you. And I have another question. In Isaiah 30:15 it says, "For thus sayeth the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel. In returning and rest shall ye be saved. In quietness and in confidence shall be your strength. And ye will not." Does that mean you won't be able to be in quietness and confidence, or what?
HC: The question is raised concerning Isaiah 30:15, where God is using this language. First of all, let's get the context. The context of Isaiah 30 is that God is warning Israel that they are subject to judgment and hell, that God is going to destroy them because of their wickedness, their apostasy. And in verse 14 He uses the language of Judgment Day of the last day: "He shall break it as the breaking of the potter's vessel that is broken in pieces. He shall not spare, so that there shall not be found in the bursting of it a shard to take fire from the hearth or to take water withal out of the pit." God is speaking here of final judgment.
Now in verse 15 He is saying that it doesn't have to be this way. He says, "For thus sayeth the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel, In returning and rest shall ye be saved." You could be saved if you would rest in the Lord, if you would rest in Christ as your Messiah, if you would quit trying to get into Heaven on your strength, on your good works, on your deeds that you think ought to be looked upon as worthy by God, if you would quit trying to satisfy your own personal pride and take credit for what you are doing, if you would only recognize the dismal truth about yourself, that you're sinners and you're under the wrath of God. And the answer to it is to admit this and rest in the salvation that God is going to provide. Rest quietly, and confidently in this.
"But ye would not. But ye said, No. For we will flee upon horses. Therefore shall ye flee. And we will ride upon the swift. Therefore shall they that pursue you be swift. One thousand shall flee at the rebuke of one. At the rebuke of five shall ye flee." In other words, they're saying, "We will put our confidence in the things that we own, in our horses, in our physical strength, in Egypt," in whatever they could find their strength in. And God says, "You're going to be destroyed. You're going to be so weak that one could destroy a thousand of you."
And this of course is speaking very pertinently to us today. There are all kinds of people who are placing their confidence in their good works, in their worthy lives, in their righteous deeds, in their desires to please God along this line. They really believe that God will look with favor upon them because look how hard they're trying to please God. And God will say, "No. No."
Or they've placed their trust in their money, or in the lands they own, or in their physical strength, or the guns they have in the house, or whatever else it may be, or in their nation, whatever it may be. And God says, "No. None of those things have any strength whatsoever, because you're still under the wrath of God. You're still subject to Judgment Day and hell unless you have placed your confidence only in the Lord Jesus Christ. You realize that you're a sinner and that you're spiritually bankrupt, and you're in deep and terrible trouble with God. And therefore you cry out to God for mercy. You rest in Christ. You trust only in His Word as being sufficient to save you.
CALLER: Okay. I've heard you talk a few times about healers, you know, those who heal people. And a friend of mine was listening to one of these preachers. And he said that people there actually went in wheel chairs and walked out, and things like that. And I was wondering why you say that there's no healing going on today.
HC: The question is raised, in view of the fact that you can go to healing meetings today, and see people who come in wheel chairs walk out as if they are healed, doesn't this make a lie of the idea that God is not miraculously healing today?
Well, we first of all cannot trust an experience that we see. We do not build doctrine or truth by experience. That's a pragmatic way of doing it, and this is the way, for example, the scientific community does it. They run experiments, and based on the experiments they form a postulate or an axiom. They arrive at some kind of a law. When you drop an apple and it falls, and then you drop a silver dollar and it falls, and then you drop a feather and it falls, pretty soon you begin to sense that there's a law. And finally they call it the law of gravity. It's based on experiment, that there is a law of gravity, and so on.
But when we get to spiritual truth, we do not find out what the rules are by experience, because experience can be very deceiving. We have to find out what the rules are by the Bible. The Bible is the only trustworthy guide.
One of the laws, for example, that is being promulgated today by those who believe in miraculous healing is that Christ went to the cross to give us whole bodies, to heal our physical diseases. And they can quote a couple of passages in the Bible, a couple verses of the Bible, that appear to indicate this. But when we read the whole Bible, and compare all the scriptures, we find that that absolutely is not so. The Bible indicates that even though we're saved, even though in our spirit we go to be with Christ at death, our bodies will go into the grave. Our bodies will waste away. This is God's program, for saved people as well as unsaved people.
So therefore under no circumstance is Christ indicating, or the Bible indicating that Christ went to the cross to give us physical healing. Secondly, the Bible indicates that we're to walk by faith, not by sight. The Bible indicates that an evil and an adulterous generation seeketh for a miracle, or seeketh for a sign and so on and so on.
Well then, once we understand the Biblical statement, then we wonder, "Well then, what's happening out there?" Well, if I go to see a magician, for example, I don't know how he pulled a rabbit out of a hat. I don't know how he did all the things that he did. I saw it with my eyes, certainly. I saw lots of things. But I know they were impossible things. I know that somehow he didn't really do that.
But my mind is very easily deceived, My mind is very tricky. I went to see this magician knowing that he would deceive me this way, and knowing that my own mind would deceive me. This is the basis of many of the circus side shows, ant so on. Our mind is very tricky. We see what we want to see very frequently.
And so if people go to a place where there is reputed to be miraculous healing, then they're going to see miraculous healing. Their minds are conditioned to see this. Now true, there is some healing that is taking place. A tremendous amount of illness, and it's real illness, is psychosomatic in nature. Ulcers, hardening of the arteries, arthritis, migraine headaches, skin disorders, paralysis, are just a few of the diseases that frequently owe their basis to body tension, to anxiety that's within a person. And if that person will put his trust in anything at all, then the tension is removed, whether that trust is in the evangelist, in the healer, or in the Bible, or in whatever it is. If there is a real positive trust there, then the symptoms will also go away. There will apparently be healing. And it will be real healing. But it's not the miraculous healing that we read about in the Bible at all. It's simply that the tension has been removed.
Secondly, there is a certain amount of chicanery. I don't know how much, and I wouldn't even care to know how much or how little. But I know there is some, where there is just outright deception, in an effort to convince people that there is this kind of healing.
The important thing, however, is that if you go to a healing service, and you look at those on hospital beds, who are very obviously in need of a healing, or could stand a healing very nicely, as you look at their twisted limbs or their emaciated bodies, ridden by disease, whatever it may be, these kind always go out the way they came in, where there is very obvious disease. And these are the kind that Jesus healed, and the apostles healed. When James and John stood outside the temple gate, and the man was there with the withered limbs, who had never walked in his whole life, you can imagine what pencil thin legs, twisted little bone structure he had from his waist down. And yet instantaneously he stood up and jumped and ran, and so on. Now that kind of healing is not going on today.
CALLER: Okay. I heard about this girl in Oakland who bleeds every Easter, from her hands and her feet, where Jesus was nailed to the cross. And the doctors haven't found any explanation for it. I was wondering, is this another sign that Jesus is coming soon?
HC: It's not a sign from God, if indeed this is happening, and I don't believe everything I read, or that people tell me, because there's tremendous exaggeration today. I just don't believe everything that I read about. But assuming that it were true, it certainly is not a miracle done by God. God does not come with those kinds of signs and wonders today. God comes with the Word of God. It is the place where we're going to find divine truth. If you want some kind of an indication that we're near the end of time, read the Bible. It is the trustworthy account.
CALLER: Okay. And I've just got one more quick question. Who wrote the Book of John?
HC: The Gospel of John was written by the apostle John.
CALLER: Okay. Thank you.
HC: Thank you so much for calling. Good night.