Healing From Heaven And Hell
It was one of the strangest manifestations in all of history. Suffering people in Paris who visited a new tomb began to experience supernatural healings. But others started having spasms and convulsions to the point that they couldn’t control their bodies. Their arms and legs would go through amazing contortions. This weirdness spread like wildfire. Soon the streets were full of writhing, contorting men, women and children in a trance-like state. It became so widespread that those who fell under the power of it were called Convulsionaires. While the miraculous healings continued, the Convulsionaires began to display disturbing abilities. In a convulsive trance, they could be tortured in the most horrible ways and remain completely unhurt.
In France, in the early 1700s an unusual sect appeared in the Roman Catholic Church. It came to be known as Jansenism after its founder Cornelis Jansen. The Pope, the Jesuits and the King of France hated it, but it was very popular among the common folk and the parish clergy. The French Christian mathematician/philosopher Blaize Pascal was a strong supporter of the Jansenists. Though it is forgotten today, by the 1730s the group was one of the most well-known and controversial in all of Europe.
One reason the Jansenists were so popular was because some of their leaders displayed unusual gifts of miraculous healing. At the very pinnacle of their success, tragedy struck. One of their saintliest leaders, Francois de Paris, died at only 36 years old and was buried in a church cemetery in Paris. Very soon, people began making pilgrimages to his grave. And very soon miraculous healings began happening there. These healings included everything from cancerous tumors to paralysis to deafness to prolonged bleeding and on and on. As you can imagine, people thronged to that cemetery. Then the supernatural manifestations got even stranger. Thousands fell under the power of a terrifying force that took complete control of their bodies. And once under that control, they insisted that hideous tests be done on them.
As many thousands watched, Convulsionaires were severely beaten with heavy and sharp objects and even strangled. At the end there was no sign of the slightest injury, not the tiniest bruise or wound. These manifestations went on for years. The streets around the tomb were crowded with Convulsionaires. At one point it took 3,000 volunteers just to watch these writhing people to make sure they didn’t do things like remove their clothes during seizures. This became so well-known all over Europe that people from every level of society, from the intellectual elite to the uneducated masses, came to witness the phenomena. Many enemies of the Jansenists came who wanted to refute what was happening. They went away confirming the miracles. A member of the Paris Parliament went to investigate. He wrote four large volumes describing what he saw. Those descriptions have come down to us. Here are some of the dark miracles:
A 20-year-old female Convulsionaire leaned against a stone wall while a volunteer, a very powerful man from the crowd, struck her 100 times in the stomach with a 30-pound hammer using all his strength. She was completely uninjured. An observer took the hammer and struck the stone wall where the woman had been leaning. On the 30th blow, the stone broke through, creating a large hole. Another young woman bent over backward with her lower back supported by a sharpened peg. A fifty pound stone was hoisted by rope to a place high above her and allowed to drop with full force on her stomach. This was done over and over without the slightest response from the woman except that she yelled over and over, “Strike harder, harder.” When it was finished, she walked away without the slightest scratch.
It is very significant that many of the Convulsionaires pleaded to be tortured because they said it relieved the agony of their convulsions. They were struck with metal rods and chains. The most powerful men couldn’t strangle them. Fire couldn’t hurt them. All manner of tortures were tried including crucifixion. When taken down from the cross there were no wounds. People tried to cut and pierce them, all to no avail. A sharpened iron drill was placed against the bare stomach of one man. Then another man tried to pound it into his body. He struck as hard as he could over and over, but the point wouldn’t pierce the flesh. Through it all the Convulsionaire looked enraptured and yelled, “It does me good. Strike twice as hard.”
But this wasn’t all. Some of the people developed psychic abilities during their convulsions. Some levitated. One man rose into the air and no one could pull him down. All of these events had many, many witnesses. Through all the dark strangeness, the healings continued. The niece of Pascal had a very bad ulcer in her eye. A few hours after being at the cemetery, the ulcer vanished. Through it all the original goal and message of the Jansenist movement was totally lost, which was holy living.
So what are we to make of this? The modern religion that might be called Scientism rejects anything that can’t be explained on a material level. If any manifestation does not lend itself to some form of scientific observation and explanation it is either misdiagnosed or disregarded. This has caused a terrible vulnerability for entire populations. Belief in the existence of invisible forces of great power and evil is considered primitive ignorance. Even when the strangest anomalous events occur that cannot be explained apart from the attack and control of unseen powers, they are blindly ignored. This includes such manifestations as superhuman strength, psychic and clairvoyant powers, total transformation of voice and personality, the knowledge of languages unknown to the victim, raging hatred at any mention of Jesus Christ and more.
Much of what was demonstrated by the Convulsionaires can be explained only by demonization. These people were entered and indwelled by interdimensional beings that we call an evil spirits. They demonstrated their presence and power through agonizing torture and miraculous healings.
I have told you about the Convulsionaires because what happened to them is one of the clearest examples of the historic, double-pronged attack against humanity. On the one hand healing and rewarding and on the other enslaving and torturing. The carrot and the stick. In this way, throughout history, entire cultures have come under their hellish control.
But I’m here to tell you that there is another far more powerful force that is fighting to set humanity free. Jesus Christ is the Warrior King who gave His life to liberate us from enslavement to an unseen world evil. What He did was a dagger in the heart of Satan who is the father of all evil beings. No clearer manifestation of Jesus’ power can be found than in the physical and spiritual healings that He performed when He walked in this world.
As I talked about in the last episode, Jesus’s healings were vastly different from those performed by the alien gods that have been at work in countless cultures. He went out to where the suffering people lived. They didn’t have to sleep in temples or make sacrifices to get His attention. He sacrificed His life for them. The only agony that he created was for the evil spirit beings that He cast out of suffering victims. But here is a serious question. Does Jesus perform miraculous physical healings today? I have to admit that for many years it wasn’t an issue that I wanted to confront on a practical level.
I have always believed that God does heal people miraculously. But my belief was theoretical. I pray for people who are sick and I am so glad when they are made well. God does miracles through medical science. As far as direct healing from prayer and the laying on of hands, certainly it’s taught in the New Testament. Jesus did it. His Apostles did it. And it’s happened since then such as through the Spanish conquistador Cabeza de Vaca. You can read that amazing story here or watch the link the below.
All of that said, I had never had any personal experience of such miraculous healing…until one night in a private home.
When Carel and I moved to the mountains of California we began attending a local church. There we met some wonderful people. They invited us to be part of a fellowship group that met each month. It was small. About a dozen of us would share a meal, have a short Bible study and a few minutes of prayer together. The leader of this group was a retired pastor named Earl Kuester. Earl was a widower. For many years he had pastored a small church in southern California. But when we met him, he had been retired for a long time. Upon retirement, he and several members of his church had moved up to the mountains together, buying homes in the same area. Those people were in this little fellowship group.
As we got to know them, we began to hear a strange story. In the late ‘50s and early 1960s, Earl was pastoring his church when his wife came down with cancer. They had five small children so you can imagine the agony this brought not only to their family but to the entire congregation. Everyone was praying and back then medicine couldn’t do very much. Earl really didn’t know anything about miraculous healing. It wasn’t a subject that had been taught at the seminary he had attended. In his desperation, he began to do serious research. As he read and prayed, he began to believe that God was giving him the gift of healing. With real faith, over and over, he prayed for his wife. Well, she wasn’t healed. About 1962, she died.
Even though he had experienced such great sorrow and lack of success, Earl continued to believe that God had given him the gift of healing, the ability to pray for people, lay hands on them and see them made well. At his little church, they began having Sunday evening healing services. It was never a huge event. They didn’t start a TV show. A few people would come and there would be prayer. The friends in our fellowship group who had been there said that real healings did take place. But it was nothing like you see with the big TV faith healer wolves.
Here is how Earl told me it worked. On Sunday afternoon, he would spend time in prayer for the evening service. While he was praying, very frequently he would get a pain in some part of his body. He believed God was telling him that someone in the service had a problem in that area. So during the meeting, he would ask, “Is anyone having a problem here?” and point to that place on his body. From what I was told, many times it proved to be true, a person would come forward for prayer and would be healed.
Now all of this had happened many years in the past. We had been in his little group for several years and nothing like it had ever occurred. My attitude was, I don’t need to make a determination about all of that. He is such a good man, so humble and giving, whatever happened back then, or what he thought happened, that’s fine. It doesn’t relate to now. So when he talked about it, I would just smile, nod and say, “Wonderful”. Then one evening, something happened.
After dinner Earl said, “The Lord told me this afternoon that somebody here is having trouble with their foot.” He pointed to a specific place on his foot. “If there’s somebody like that, let us know so we can pray for you and you can get your healing.” I looked around. Nobody responded. Suddenly, I got a very strange feeling. About 30 years before, something had happened to me. My wife and I and our little children were living in the Chicago area. One holiday we took our kids to Starved Rock State Park. We had a great time. There was a kids’ play area with a little merry-go-round, the kind an adult has to spin while the kids ride on it. I was spinning it when, suddenly, I stepped on a tree root that was sticking out of the ground. I felt terrible pain. I thought I had sprained my ankle. Actually, I had broken a bone in my foot, but I didn’t know it.
We didn’t have any money and no health insurance, so in spite of the pain, I didn’t get it checked out. I just wrapped it tightly with an ace bandage and hobbled on it. It hurt for months, but finally it got better. However, my foot was never the same. It didn’t bother me unless I walked for some distance. Then it would really hurt. Thankfully, I’m a writer and I didn’t have to do much walking. I would go for weeks without any pain at all. But eventually, it would return. That night Earl Kuester pointed to his foot in the exact place where I had experienced pain for 30 years even though I wasn’t feeling it at that moment.
My first thought was, okay this is crazy. Could he be talking about me? What am I going to do about this? No one else stepped forward, so rather sheepishly I said I’d had trouble there. I was a little embarrassed as he prayed for me in Jesus’ Name with his hand on my foot. How much faith did I have? Almost none. I had acknowledged the problem and accepted the prayer, that’s all. But my first thought afterward was, “What am I gonna do when this doesn’t work and I still have the pain? I’ll just be very quiet and hope he doesn’t ask about it. He thinks he’s got the gift of healing and I don’t want to hurt his feelings.” So much for my faith.
Well, that was almost 20 years ago. The pain has never returned and I’ve walked a lot. Something happened to me and I guarantee it wasn’t caused by the Placebo Effect. Nothing like that ever happened again in that fellowship group. The odd thing? One of our friends in the group had been having serious problems with his feet for years. Over and over we had prayed for him. But the healing came to me. I would have been happy for him to get it instead. Earl Kuester and several other members of that little group are in Heaven now.
We rely on modern medicine and we should. I view it as one of God’s gifts to us. But in the dark time ahead that Jesus predicted is coming we may very well get to the point where modern medicine is no longer available or doesn’t work. At that time, evil beings will offer supernatural healing. But their healings will enslave. Also at that time, Jesus may choose to work His healing power through individuals. If so, it will come to humble people like Earl Kuester. And it isn’t going to be something they can use whenever they want. It will come in specific cases when God chooses to give it. It didn’t come when Earl prayed so desperately for his wife.
How much faith will you need to receive that healing?
Not the kind those wolves, the prosperity teachers, blather about. At one point Jesus stood in front of a man with a withered hand. He was having one of his regular confrontations with the Pharisees about healing people on the Sabbath. He told the man to stretch out his hand. As he stretched it out, it was healed. Jesus could have healed his hand while it dangled beside him, but He demanded that the man take the tiny step of faith and reach toward Him. If he had refused to do so, I’m sure he wouldn’t have been healed. If I had remained silent that evening, my foot would still be in pain.
But there is a much deeper step of faith. And those who follow Jesus are called to it. It is saying to God, “Your will be done even if it is not what I am praying for so desperately right now.” Earl Kuester came to that place with his wife. After her death, he went forward seeing other people healed, but not the one he loved most in this world. At this moment, I have a dear friend, a brilliant man with an undergraduate degree from Harvard and a doctorate from Yale who has been serving Jesus Christ all of his life. Three years ago, he was diagnosed with ALS. Today he can only communicate with the outside world by directing a computer with his eyes. So much prayer has been offered up for his healing. But no healing has come. Yet, that man’s faith is strong.
I don’t know why God doesn’t heal everyone I pray for. Other than the ugly fact that most likely I would become a vile TV faith healer. I don’t know why God hasn’t given me all sorts of things that I have deeply requested. But after 76 years of life I can tell you two facts. First, looking back I’m so glad He didn’t allow me to have a number of things that I desperately wanted. Second, over all the years, almost all the vital lessons that I have learned have come through pain and difficulty. Many, many years ago I learned to say each day, “Lord Jesus, I want your will no matter what, because I know it is for my best. Even if I can’t understand it in this world, I’ll understand in the next.”
What should we look for to prove that any supernatural manifestation is really from God and not from the Powers of Darkness? The first evidence of real spiritual power that comes from Heaven is a deep love for Jesus Christ and a desire to bring glory to His Name. If that is not present, no matter what supernatural power is being displayed it will be false. The second evidence is humility. I don’t mean the chest-beating public kind. I mean the kind that has humbled itself beneath the Mighty Hand of God. Usually, that kind of humility is the result of suffering. The third evidence is compassion that comes from a broken heart, a heart that knows the true meaning of repentance and the forgiveness of Jesus Christ. If these are not present, no matter what the miracle might be, even if you see a person raised from the dead, do not follow the one who has done it.
Let me conclude with another story. It is a strange case that happened in 1982 in Pakistan. It was originally examined and reported by Dr. Rex Gardner who was a researcher and physician at Sunderland District General Hospital in England and is recounted in Michael Talbot’s book, The Holographic Universe.
In 1982, in Pakistan, an English physician was working named Ruth Coggan. One day, as she was treating patients, a woman named Kamro came for help. She was 35 years old and eight months pregnant. For most of her pregnancy, she had been experiencing bleeding and frequent pain in her abdomen. It was clear to Dr. Coggan that something was very wrong. She told Kamro to go to a hospital right away. The woman didn’t want to do it, but a couple of days later, she had no choice. The bleeding had greatly intensified. Coggan examined her again. She had lost a huge amount of blood and her feet and abdomen were dangerously swollen. The next day in the hospital there was an episode of bleeding that was even worse. There was no choice but to remove the baby immediately by Caesarian section.
When Kamro’s uterus was opened a large amount of dark blood flooded out and continued flowing. It was clear to Dr. Coggan that the woman’s body had no clotting ability. After the baby was delivered there were deep pools of blood filling the bed and the incision was still flowing. The situation was desperate. If something wasn’t done immediately, Kamro would die. Coggan managed to find two pints of blood for a transfusion, but it wasn’t nearly enough to replace the huge amount that had been lost. With that, all options were exhausted. Well, all but one. Prayer.
Here is what Dr. Coggan wrote in her journal, “We prayed with the patient after explaining to her about Jesus, in whose Name we had prayed for her before the operation and who was a great healer. I also told her that we were not going to worry. I had seen Jesus heal this condition before and was sure He was going to heal her.”
After praying, there was nothing to do but wait. Kamro kept on bleeding, but very strangely, her general condition didn’t get any worse. It stabilized. Dr. Coggan reported that she visited the patient that evening and prayed for her again. The bleeding continued just as heavily as before, but the woman didn’t seem affected by it. 48 hours after the surgery, the blood started clotting and she began a full recovery. Ten days later, Kamro and her baby girl went home. Dr. Coggan reported that, though she had no way of measuring how much blood had been lost during the surgery and afterward, she was certain that it was more than Kamro had in her whole body.
So if you don’t believe in Jesus and His ability to heal, this presents a serious problem for you. Humans can’t produce blood fast enough to replace such a catastrophic loss. If we could, nobody would ever bleed to death. So where did Kamro’s new blood come from with such incredible speed? The doctors who examined the case had only one answer. Her new blood came out of thin air.
So, my friend, have you experienced the deep healing of Jesus? I’m talking about the most important kind, the healing of your spirit forever by having your sins forgiven and receiving eternal life from Him. That’s what He died to give you, to take away the disease of sin that is killing you. All it takes is a simple prayer of faith asking Him to forgive you and be Lord of your life. That kind of healing from Him will last forever. If we can be of help, contact us at ThorncrownStudios@gmail.com
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