If I were putting together a humor book about the antics of ministers and their minister sons, this recollection of Jordan’s would surely have to be included:

“An Ohio guy put in the Cincinnati newspaper a quarter-page ad explaining that he was going to continue the healing ministry of his dad who just died. Now, this guy has a big old church down around Cincinnati and he bought ad space on the religious page and put that in print for everybody to see, thinking it made perfect sense. If you going to continue the healing ministry of your daddy who just died, I don’t think I want you messing with me!”

*****

While the Bill Mahers of the world have a field day ridiculing Christians who look to the Benny Hinns of the world for physical healing, the reality-check, as always, lies in the Bible, where it’s made clear that divine healing is a fundamental sign God promised the nation Israel and doesn’t exist today under God’s current ‘dispensation of grace’ laid out by the Apostle Paul.

“That healing stuff isn’t there (in the Gospels) so that your gout and rheumatism can get over with and you can show, ‘Oh, look how much God loves me today!’ ” confirms Jordan in an old study I have on tape. “But if you’re getting your message back here (in the Old Testament, Gospels and early part of the Book of Acts), you would expect healing to accompany it, wouldn’t you? You’d expect tongue-talking, demon-casting, etc., wouldn’t you? Sure you would! But you know good and well it don’t happen!

“Intelligent people with good sense in every other area of life put blinders on when it comes to that. You don’t need to do that. There’s an answer. That isn’t your hope. If you think it is, you’re just going to wind up in the can. Sooner or later, it’s going to drive you into spiritual insanity. You just can’t sustain that. What it drives you to is away from God’s Word into human viewpoint and the bondage of religion.

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In his new book, “The Two Gospels,” Bible scholar R. Dawson Barlow relays how, “I have on several occasions asked some of those misguided zealots, ‘Do you really ‘heal the sick’?’ I would be very specific with them that I did not mean isolated cases of healing scattered hither and yonder. I have asked preachers, ‘Do you heal like Jesus healed? Do you do greater works than he did, as he said?’ (John 14:12)

“When our Lord healed, he healed all manner of disease, time after time! Yet the proponents of this view say, ‘Yes, I do heal the sick and cast out demons,’ even though they admit that they do not, on any occasion, heal all the sick that are brought to them.

“On several occasions, I have looked some of these folk squarely in the eye and asked them, ‘Do you raise the dead?’ Believe it or not, some of those well-meaning souls will start telling stories (actually, lies) that they, or someone they know, have raised people from the dead in Africa, or China, or some other remote place (from them).

“They will resort to telling these stories that suspiciously always take place on the other side of the earth. . . . During my years in China, I have asked believers in almost every province I have traveled about all the stories I have heard about resurrections (actually resuscitations).

“These dear believers, who struggle so valiantly against the animosity of the Buddhist influence and the strong arm of a hostile government, deny any reports of anything like these resurrections take place.

“All the confusion from these kinds of fairy tales could be cleared up instantly when we accept the fact that the above scriptures were addressed to the Jew, and the Jew only. We foolish believers would be a lot better off if we stopped personalizing mail that was written to Israel as though it was written TO us.”

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As I wrote about in my last posting, Israel’s hope has had to do with the arrival of a physical, visible, earthly kingdom ruled over by their Messiah.

Jordan says, “When Jesus began to preach in Matthew 4:17, did He preach the same thing John the Baptist preached? Sure He did. He’s preaching the same gospel, the same message. In fact, if you go down to verse 23, you’ll see what it’s called.

“This is called the Gospel, the Good News of the Kingdom. Wonder why it would be called that? Because what’s the hope of this man in time past? The kingdom; deliverance into the kingdom. The time has come for God to accomplish His purpose in the nation Israel. They got a hope and there it is. Read the rest of that verse—‘and healing all manner of sickness...

“ . . . ‘And his fame went out throughout all Syria and they brought unto him all sick people who were taken with divers diseases…’

“Isaiah 33 says the inhabitants of that kingdom ‘will no more say I am sick.’ God says, ‘I’m the Lord God that healeth thee.’ You ever hear people talk about that verse?

“People don’t even know where that verse is. It’s in Exodus 15:26. Some times I get aggravated when I have to show people where the verses are that they’re quoting. Think about that. They just quote a verse and don’t even know where it is in the Bible.

“How in the world are they going to understand it if they don’t even know where it is to read?! Then, they never do get the WHOLE verse. You ought to go back and read that verse sometime. The healing is out here (in the millennial kingdom Christ will reign over after His Second Coming).”