Chapter 17

Healing and the Atonement

What the cross purchased for the body, and when the purchase is delivered

Picture a room in a nursing home on a weekday afternoon. A woman in her eighties lies in the bed by the window. She has asked God for months to heal her, and she is growing weaker. Two visitors from her church stop in. The first pulls a chair close to the bed, takes her hand and prays for her to be healed. Then he stays a while, asks about her grandchildren and reads her a psalm. The second visitor stands at the foot of the bed and asks questions. Has she forgiven everyone who wronged her? Has she said out loud that she is healed? Has she doubted God’s promise? He is sure that the reason she is still in that bed is somewhere in her answers.

Both visitors believe that God heals. The second has also been taught that when God does not heal, someone has failed, and the woman in the bed is the only one there to blame. That is Finis Dake’s teaching. In his course God’s Plan for Man he puts healing in the atonement on exactly the same footing as forgiveness.¹

This is why it is just as easy to heal as to forgive sins. Both were atoned for and borne by Christ so that they could be completely removed from man. God’s Plan for Man, Supplement Twenty-Four, p. 943²

In a supplement on how to get healed, he states the promise in a sentence that allows no exception at all.

Everyone who has faith will be healed without exception. God’s Plan for Man, Supplement Seven, p. 259³

If everyone who has faith is healed, then everyone who is not healed lacked faith. Dake draws that conclusion himself, as his own pages will show. This is harmful false teaching. It takes the full healing of the body, which the New Testament places at the resurrection, when believers receive “the redemption of our body” (Romans 8:23), and demands it now. Then it lays the blame for every unanswered prayer on the sick.

I was trained in Pentecostal schools, and I believe God heals today. The church should pray for the sick, anoint them with oil and expect God to act (James 5:14–16). My argument is with the guarantee Dake built around that gift.⁴

What a guarantee does to the sick

Sick people and their families act on what they have been taught about healing, usually in the hardest weeks of their lives. When the teaching is wrong, its mistakes land on the people least able to carry them.

The first thing it changes is prayer. If healing is promised on the same terms as forgiveness, then asking God whether He wills to heal is like asking whether He wills to forgive a repentant sinner. The question itself becomes unbelief. Dake says exactly that, and his words appear below.

The teaching also changes how friends visit the sick. If healing is guaranteed, a body that stays sick means the arrangement broke down somewhere. God cannot be the one who failed, since He keeps His word. So the failure must be on the human side, and suspicion falls on the person in the bed. The friends who came to comfort her end up examining her.

It weighs heaviest on a believer who is dying. Under this teaching she cannot simply commit herself to God. She has to ask whether she believed hard enough, whether she confessed a symptom and undid her own healing, and whether some hidden doubt is keeping her sick. Her last weeks become a review of her own faith, and the God she is about to meet looks less like a Father than a judge waiting for her to meet His terms.

Healing on the same terms as forgiveness

Dake’s healing teaching is gathered in a few places. Most of it is in Lesson Fourteen of God’s Plan for Man, “Divine Healing and Divine Health,” and in two supplements that go with it. He covers much of the same ground in three chapters of Bible Truths Unmasked.⁵ In the supplement on the atonement he reaches a section he heads “Healing Is Absolutely Sure,” and he opens it this way.

Two ideas are joined in that paragraph. The first concerns the cross. Christ bore our sicknesses, and healing is among the things He purchased. Many Christians would agree with some form of that, and I am one of them. The second idea concerns timing and certainty. Every believer can be healed now, on the spot, by faith, in the same way a sinner is forgiven the moment he believes. The last sentence then supplies the reason for every case that does not fit: the sick person did not believe.

Dake also puts the promise in the language of rights. In Lesson Fourteen he sums up his case with a list.

Healing is the Christian’s family right (Matt. 7:7-11); redemption right (Matt. 8:16-17; 1 Cor. 11:27-30; 1 Pet. 2:24; Isa. 53); promised right (2 Cor. 2:20; 2 Pet. 1:3-4); legal right (Gal. 3:13-14); and gospel right. God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Fourteen, p. 248⁷

One of the five rights is a “legal right.” In Dake’s system healing is owed to the believer, and the summary comes at the end of a list he calls “22 Proofs that Bodily Healing is in the Atonement.”⁸ In Bible Truths Unmasked he gives a whole chapter the title “Bible Proof That It Is Always God’s Will to Heal,” and he opens it by arguing that because healing is in the atonement, God must will it for everyone the atonement covers.⁹

The terms of the guarantee

A guarantee comes with terms, and Dake writes them out. Supplement Seven is titled “How to Get Healed and Stay Healed,” and it gives nine numbered steps. The believer is to be born again, have faith, trust God and not man, and obey His Word. He is also to make peace with others, call the elders, control the tongue, live under God’s protection and praise God for the healing before it is felt.¹⁰ Taken as pastoral advice, most of the list is ordinary Christian living. What matters is the frame Dake builds around it.

We cannot guarantee the benefits according to the gospel until you meet these conditions. Are the benefits worth the efforts in meeting the conditions? If they are, then do as you were instructed. If they are not worth the effort to believe God without a waver, then do not fret because you do not get what you want. You cannot expect God to be a respecter of persons and give you these benefits when you fail to do as He requires. God is not that kind of God, and He will not break His laws for any one. God’s Plan for Man, Supplement Seven, p. 258¹¹

This is the language of a contract. There is an offer, a set of conditions and a warning that a believer who does not perform should not complain about the result. The last sentence holds the structure together. God will not step outside His own laws for anyone, because that would make Him a respecter of persons. On the next page comes the sentence quoted at the start of this chapter, that everyone who has faith “will be healed without exception.” A promise worded that way cannot survive a single faithful believer who prayed and stayed sick, so the system needs an explanation ready for every such case.

The explanation reaches back to the question of who gets sick in the first place. Dake draws eighty lessons from the Bible’s accounts of sickness, and the seventy-seventh reads like this.

That sickness will not come upon God’s people unless they turn from holiness to sin (Ex. 15:26; Lev. 26; Deut. 28). If this was true of preservation from sickness in the old covenant, it is much more true of men under the new covenant, which contains greater promises and a greater glory than the old one does (2 Cor. 3:6-15; Heb. 7:22; 8:6). In Ps. 91 we have a whole chapter which promises immunity from sickness, and this applies to the new covenant times as well as to the old covenant period. It may be only the sin of unbelief, as is clear in Points 45-56 above. God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Fourteen, p. 246¹²

A believer who walks in holiness will not get sick. If she does get sick, some sin is at work. If she searches her life and cannot find one, the last sentence names the sin that is always available: unbelief. No one can ever prove that this sin is absent, so the explanation can never fail.

When a believer stays sick

Dake knew that many Christians are sick, and he did explain it. His explanations all end in the same place. At the close of his eighty lessons he writes this.

These eighty lessons must be learned, and the truth must be obeyed, and faith must be exercised without wavering before God is obligated to deliver any sick person from the hands of the devil. God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Fourteen, p. 246¹³

Until the sick person meets the terms, Dake says, God is not “obligated” to act, and His hands are tied. On the same page Dake lists what keeps God from acting: unbelief, the sick person’s refusal to clear God of blame, believing lies, cooperating with Satan and exercising unbelief in place of faith.¹⁴ Every item on the list is a fault in the patient.

Later in the lesson he takes up the plainest objection, that many good Christians are not healed. His answer is short.

The reason all Christians are not healed is because they fail to believe that God heals, just like a sinner fails to believe God for the salvation of his soul. Only those who have faith will get what they want. God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Fourteen, p. 254¹⁵

Dake did not teach that every illness comes from the sick person’s own sin. He says so plainly: “We do not mean to say that every person’s sickness is a direct result of some personal sin, for this is not true.”¹⁶ He knew John 9 and refused the crudest form of the doctrine. But the weight moves to a second question. A believer may have fallen ill for reasons that have nothing to do with sin, yet on Dake’s account she stays ill because she does not believe. That second question is the one a dying believer actually asks.

Praying “If it be thy will”

The same logic reaches into the words a sick believer may use when she prays. In Bible Truths Unmasked Dake sets aside the example of Jesus.

There can be no analogy between Christ’s prayer, “If it be thy will” and the prayers of Christians concerning God’s will to heal. Healing is always of God and is always His will, and we do not have to ask Him if it is His will concerning anything that is definitely promised in Scripture. Bible Truths Unmasked, ch. 13, p. 90¹⁷

A page later he calls the prayer a sin.

It is clear by now that it is sinful to pray, “If it be thy will” concerning anything that God has promised to men. This kind of praying is a prayer of unbelief and it will never be answered. Bible Truths Unmasked, ch. 13, p. 91¹⁸

The prayer Dake rules out is the one Jesus prayed in Gethsemane: “O My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as You will” (Matthew 26:39). On Dake’s terms, a sick believer who prays the Lord’s words over her own bed has sinned. His wider law of prayer is the subject of Chapter 18.

Sickness as the devil’s work

Dake also treats sickness as the work of the enemy, and that adds to the sick person’s burden. In Lesson Fourteen he sets out the causes of sickness under capitalized headings. God gives the law, and under the heading “SATAN THE LAW-EXECUTOR” Dake writes that Satan “is the direct power in executing the law of sin, sickness, and death,” and that God “has given the actual power of this law into the hands of demon powers.” On the next page he draws the practical conclusion.

Demons must be cast out in order to have instant and permanent relief. God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Fourteen, p. 241¹⁹

He applies the idea to germs as well. Disease germs, he writes, are “so closely allied to the work of demons” that they are material agents of Satan in the bodies of his victims.²⁰ His Study Bible carries the same teaching in its note “Demons or Unclean Spirits (Ps. 106:37).” After linking demons to every sickness, the note says: “Disease germs, which are closely allied with unclean spirits, are really living forms of corruption which come into the bodies of men bringing them to death.”²¹ The posthumous compilation Heavenly Hosts lists “Cause infirmities” among the things Satan does, under a heading that reads “Proofs That Sickness Is Satan’s Work.”²² Dake’s teaching on demons belongs to Chapter 19. For the sick believer, it means that every week of illness is ground the enemy holds, and that her continued illness is a defeat she has allowed.

God heals today

The New Testament tells the church to pray for its sick and to expect God to act.

Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise him up. James 5:14–15 (NKJV)

James goes on: “Confess your trespasses to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed” (James 5:16). Healing is real, it is for today, and it rests on what Christ did on the cross. Dake was right to expect God to heal, and he was right to oppose the preachers of his day who taught that miracles ended with the apostles.²³ The question is what the cross promised for the body, and when the promise is kept.

What “by His stripes” purchased, and when

Isaiah’s song of the suffering Servant puts sickness and sin side by side.

Surely He has borne our griefs And carried our sorrows; Yet we esteemed Him stricken, Smitten by God, and afflicted. But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; The chastisement for our peace was upon Him, And by His stripes we are healed. Isaiah 53:4–5 (NKJV)²⁴

The New Testament uses this passage in two ways. Matthew applies it to the sick people Jesus healed in Capernaum, quoting “He Himself took our infirmities And bore our sicknesses.”²⁵ Peter applies the same words to sin.

who Himself bore our sins in His own body on the tree, that we, having died to sins, might live for righteousness—by whose stripes you were healed. 1 Peter 2:24 (NKJV)²⁶

Dake takes Matthew’s use as the whole meaning of the passage and then sets it on the same timetable as forgiveness. The church has held both uses together. The cross purchased a full salvation, and the body is included in it. But the New Testament also says plainly that the body’s share has not yet been handed over.

For we know that the whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs together until now. Not only that, but we also who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, eagerly waiting for the adoption, the redemption of our body. Romans 8:22–23 (NKJV)

The people groaning in this passage are believers who have “the firstfruits of the Spirit.” Paul is writing to Spirit-filled Christians, and he tells them that their bodies are still waiting for redemption. He treats the waiting as the normal state of believers in this age, and he calls it hope: “But if we hope for what we do not see, we eagerly wait for it with perseverance” (Romans 8:25).²⁷ Firstfruits are the first part of a harvest, real in themselves and a pledge that the rest will come.

That is where healings belong. When God heals a believer now, He gives a real foretaste of what is coming. The end of all sickness comes when the body is raised.

So when this corruptible has put on incorruption, and this mortal has put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written: “Death is swallowed up in victory.” 1 Corinthians 15:54 (NKJV)²⁸

Paul describes his own body in the meantime.

Therefore we do not lose heart. Even though our outward man is perishing, yet the inward man is being renewed day by day. For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, is working for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory, . . . 2 Corinthians 4:16–17 (NKJV)²⁹

Paul does not say that the outward man should stop wearing down once the inward man is renewed. Both happen at once in the same faithful apostle, and God is at work in both. In Dake’s system a body that is wearing out is a benefit the believer failed to claim. In Paul’s it is the ordinary condition of faith on the way to glory.

The sick saints Dake had to explain

A guarantee with no exceptions runs into trouble when the New Testament records exceptions, and it records several. Epaphroditus, Paul’s fellow worker, “was sick almost unto death,” and Paul credits his recovery to God’s mercy. Timothy had stomach trouble and “frequent infirmities,” and Paul advised a little wine. Paul wrote, “Trophimus I have left in Miletus sick.” Paul himself asked three times for his thorn in the flesh to be taken away, and God said no.³⁰

Dake does not skip these passages, and his answers are worth hearing. Trophimus, he says, was “no doubt run down in body and had a physical breakdown because of his many labors for Christ” and needed rest, not healing.³¹ Timothy’s trouble came from bad water, and Paul’s advice was about diet. Paul’s thorn was no disease at all but “an angel of Satan,” since the Greek word for messenger can mean angel.³²

Many careful readers take the thorn as persecution, and Dake is in good company there. His account of Timothy is possible as well. Trophimus is another matter. Paul uses a common word for sickness, and Dake has to turn it into exhaustion. Nothing in the verse suggests that reading except the need to protect the guarantee.

Epaphroditus receives a single sentence. Dake says he “was brought back to health by proper rest and faith.”³³ Paul gives a different account. He says that God had mercy on his friend, and that if Epaphroditus had died, Paul would have had “sorrow upon sorrow.” That is how a man speaks of a gift he received and knew he might not receive. An apostle who believed healing was guaranteed would have had no reason to brace himself for grief. A single faithful believer left sick is enough to answer “without exception,” and the New Testament names several without any sign of embarrassment.

The death his guarantee lets stand

Dake’s parallel between sickness and sin also raises a question about death. Sickness is not the only thing the fall brought into the world. Death came through the same door. If every benefit of the atonement can be received now by faith, then freedom from death should be available now as well.

Dake saw the objection. A critic had written that if healing were in the atonement, a Christian would never die. Dake replied under the heading “No Christian Needs To Be Sick.”

It is true that no Christian needs to be sick, but it is not true that death comes only by some dreadful disease. Under God’s plan men will die until the time of the rapture when men will then be changed without death (Heb. 9:27; 1 Cor. 15:21-58). Men can die and should die free from diseases that Christ bore for them. God’s Plan for Man, Supplement Twenty-Four, p. 943³⁴

In this answer Dake grants a delay for death. Christ defeated death on the cross, believers still die, and they will go on dying until a future day. That is the very pattern he refuses to allow for sickness. Death is given a future fulfillment, and sickness must be removed at once, but Dake never offers a text that explains why the two are treated differently. The only reason is that his system needs the difference. Scripture puts them together. Paul calls death “the last enemy” because it is still standing, and he puts the redemption of the body in the future even though the Spirit has already been given.³⁵ Sickness and death belong to the same curse, and the New Testament schedules the end of both for the same morning.

Grace that is sufficient

Paul tells the Corinthians that “a thorn in the flesh was given to me, a messenger of Satan to buffet me” (2 Corinthians 12:7). Then he tells them how he prayed about it.

Concerning this thing I pleaded with the Lord three times that it might depart from me. And He said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness.” 2 Corinthians 12:8–9 (NKJV)

Whatever the thorn was, the exchange has a clear shape. A man of great faith asked boldly, and he asked three times. God did not rebuke him for failing to meet the conditions or send him back to search his heart for doubt. God gave him grace and His own strength, and told him that was enough. Dake’s system has no room for that answer. In it every refusal has to be counted as a failure on the human side, because the only other possibility is a God who did not keep His own contract. A sick believer who accepts that system is left with endless self-examination where she should have found a Father.

The church’s answer holds both truths at once. It prays boldly, because God heals, and it rests in Him, because He is good when He waits. Job’s friends had a tidy explanation for suffering, and God rebuked them for it (Job 42:7). Their fault was that they brought a formula to a man God had not condemned. The gospel does not require the dying to explain themselves. It gives them a Savior who was Himself “A Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3).

Didn’t Jesus heal all who came to Him?

Some readers will say that Jesus healed everyone who came to Him, and that this shows the Father’s will for every sick believer. The Gospels do report it. Matthew says that Jesus “healed all who were sick” (Matthew 8:16), and that ought to shape what we expect from God. But those reports describe the days when the King was present in person and His kingdom was breaking into the world. They do not describe a standing arrangement that God now owes every believer. John records a visit Jesus made to the pool of Bethesda, where “a great multitude of sick people” lay waiting. Jesus healed one man there and went on His way, and John tells it without apology.³⁶

Isn’t “not yet” an excuse for unbelief?

Others will say that putting full healing at the resurrection is a way to excuse weak faith. The charge would hold if the delay were invented to explain failures. It comes from Paul, who wrote it to Christians who already had the firstfruits of the Spirit (Romans 8:23). Nothing here asks anyone to pray smaller prayers. Believers should ask boldly, call the elders, anoint with oil and expect God to move. The objection is to what comes after the answer is no, when the sick are told that the fault is theirs. A believer who asks God for everything and then trusts Him with the outcome is showing more faith than one who must hold a guarantee steady by the strength of her own certainty.³⁷

Doesn’t Dake’s teaching comfort people?

A third objection is that Dake’s teaching comforts the sick, because it tells them God always wants them well. It does comfort them, until the healing does not come. The same reasoning that says God certainly wills your healing must also say, when you stay sick, that the failure is yours. “Everyone who has faith will be healed without exception” sounds like good news to a believer who is well. To a believer who has prayed for a year and grown worse, it is a verdict on her faith.

The redemption of our body

Dake taught that healing is in the atonement on the same terms as forgiveness, to be received now by faith as a legal right. He published the conditions and warned that God will not break His laws for anyone. He taught that God is not obligated until the sick person meets those terms, that Christians stay sick because they do not believe, and that praying “If it be thy will” over healing is a sin. That is harmful false teaching. It promises now what God has promised for the resurrection, and it leaves the sick to carry the blame for the difference.³⁸

The true doctrine gives the sick more than Dake’s does. They can ask God boldly for healing and receive His healings as gifts. When the answer is no, they can hear it without being accused, because God’s grace is sufficient in weakness. Their hope rests on a promise that does not depend on the strength of their faith on a hard day. The cross paid for the body, and the resurrection will deliver it. Every believer who dies in Christ, healed or unhealed, will rise in a body that will never be sick again, when “Death is swallowed up in victory.”