Benny

I was 10 years old when my mom would let me watch Oral Roberts 'heal' people on our black and white Philco TV set on Sunday nights. He'd bring these poor people up to the the stage inside the tent, making them throw their canes or crutches or wheelchairs away, and miraculously make a leg grow, or heal an earache, or make a lifelong pain go away - or mostly go away. It was fascinating.

I had never seen anybody be healed before. I'd heard about it but no one in Sunday school had a definitive answer, and none of them could do it. What Oral did looked real, even though we never actually saw the legs growing. The people in wheelchairs could all of a sudden stand! They couldn't walk very well which I never could figure out; but maybe standing was a good start!

But sadly, no one followed up with these 'healed' people to see how long it lasted, or if they were really had been healed. We were supposed to just take Orals' word for it.

Aren't we supposed to test all things?

In today's world we have a guy on TV who comes along with an Eastern accent and tells us that he was taken up in the clouds and God showed him the whole Earth. Hmmmmm. And then Jesus told him personally-in-the-flesh that he should consider becoming a preacher. Hmmmmm. And that with enough faith he could become rich! Double hmmmmm.

Being an astute student of the human psyche, Benny Hinn decides he'll give it a shot. A 'sucker born every minute' he read somewhere. If he could get people revved up far enough and in enough of a mindless frenzy, maybe they'd believe anything. But first he needed a gimmick. Something spectacular. Something that would make people instant believers in Benny - er, God. Sure, God appearing to him in his bedroom was pretty spectacular, but unfortunately, no one else was there to see it.

"Hey, I know," he said, talking to himself in the mirror one day. "Let's make people fall over when I blow on them. We'll call it - uhh - being slain in the spirit. We'll find some obscure verse that if taken out of context and no one checks the Greek, it'll sort of support what we're doing, kind of. Something like where it says...and a desert wind blew."

And even with God personally visiting him, it turns out Benny isn't much better at healing people without that lingering, pesky 'after-limp', as Oral was. Or the after-stutter. Or the after-I still can't hear too good.

Benny will tell you that sometimes it takes time. Fine. So is he just giving these people encouragement and not really healing them? If the healing is real why don't old women turn into young women if they're healed, or turn back the clock on hair color and eyesight.

Don't get me wrong. God heals. God heals all the time. Miraculously. In ways we couldn't even imagine. But I don't believe God needs Benny's help, or Oral's help, or your help or my help. He made us;he created the universe. He can handle healing without us.

And what if God's plan is NOT to heal this or that particular person? Maybe He has something else in mind? And who among us would be arrogant enough to think we could know the mind of God. We're human. We can barely remember to put clean underwear on everyday, let alone know the inner thoughts of God.

What if Jesus attended a Benny camp meeting in the flesh. Do you really think Jesus would be jumping around and laughing out of control or falling over or barking like a dog or convulsing on the floor or speaking in tongues? Again, who can know the mind of God, but that kind of behavior doesn't seem like what would come from someone who created the universe in exact order and detail.

I'm thinking Jesus might instead blast through Benny's organization, ripping things out, turning over the tables with the holy key chains and prayer shawls, and telling these people to sell everything they own and give it to the poor. Before you get too excited, it could be that Jesus would do that same thing at Focus on the Family , or Liberty Baptist College too. He would for sure do it at the TBN studios. But that's another story.

If the healing that Oral and Benny and others claim to do really is real, wouldn't it be the coolest thing to invite NBC or ABC or FOX to do a feature news story on these 'healed' people? Invite the reporters to test their claims of healing and do their own detective work. No holds barred. Let these secular news people see these God-given results first hand. If the healing turned out to be irrefutable and 100% consistent, it would make headlines all over the world. Even news people might take a second look!

But Benny and Oral don't do that. Benny and Oral don't invite the 'secular' media to monitor what they're doing. They don't invite the 'Christian' media in either. They don't want the heat. Benny and Oral wouldn't want it spread around that they were losing their touch.

But if this healing really is from God, what is there to fear? Wouldn't we want to shout these proofs from the rooftops and to the world, and ESPECIALLY to the secular media?

Seems like Benny is after that part of the viewer's brain that says, 'He's-doing-God's-work-I-can-see-it-with-my-own-eyes-and-we-must-give-and-give-generously-because-Benny-has-talked-to-God-personally.'

When Benny looks in the camera and closes his eyes and says a lady in New Jersey just got healed of a tumor, how do we know that for sure? Do we touch our TV screens and really think God is going to heal us by doing what Benny says? Can Benny really tell God what to do? And most of what you see on TV is pre-taped and is not 'live'. I wonder if pre-taped healing via having people touch the TV after-the-fact works or not. Actually, I'm not sure if pre-taped prayers work later on either. Does the lady in Cleveland get healed twice? I don't know.

Here's a radical idea. If this healing really is real, how about just doing all of it quietly? Without the show. Without the circus. Go quietly to the hospitals where little kids are dying of cancer and heal them. Go rest-home-cruising and give some old folks a new mind or new heart or new liver or new knees or new teeth. Find some old lady in a hospital who has had a hard life and is about to die without God. Give her a new outlook. Maybe a new heart in more ways than one. Wouldn't that be incredible?

Granted, Benny is doing his show in front of 100,000 people 'live'. But that doesn't make it any more real. It sometimes still takes a lot of Benny's effort to heal someone, and even then it doesn't always seem like it 'took' all the way. Do you suppose when Jesus healed the blind man it took him a few tries to get it to work? I don't think so.

Do you suppose when Jesus called Lazarus out of the tomb it took more than a split second for Lazarus to wake up from the dead? I don't think so.

Do you suppose when Jesus turned water into wine they had to wait a couple hours or even a couple of minutes for it to ferment and get tasty? I don't think so.

If today's circus healing is from God why does it take so long and is not always complete? Is God getting old and can't heal as fast as He used to? Why does the 85 year old woman who has a boil on her neck, still walk with a limp after Benny does his thing? Did God forget that she had a bad leg too?

Some would say that I am on the edge of blasphemy to question all this. But if one Christian can't honestly question another Christian when there is at least the appearance of a sham and it isn't supported Biblically, then we might as well give up.

Some would say Benny and Oral and their ilk are blessed men of God. I can't help feeling that the possibility lurks that they are only men of men. Men with Gaul. Men with a gift to be sure;the a gift of 'miraculous' marketing and shamelessness.

The mind is a pretty powerful thing. Let's turn our mind towards God...not men.