Then there is the question of blame. When it is discovered that a healing has not, in fact, taken place, how is that dealt with? The New Testament has no pattern of failures to compare, but it is instructive to see who was at fault in the one exception described in Matthew 17:14-20 with parallel accounts in Mark 9:14-29 and Luke 9:37-42. Jesus had not been present, and His disciples had attempted to heal a demon-possessed epileptic boy. Though they had the power to perform this miracle (Matthew 10:1), the disciples failed on this occasion. When Jesus arrived, He healed the boy. Later His disciples asked why they had not been successful. Jesus replied, “Because of your little faith” (Matthew 17:20).
Ironically, faith-healers who often encounter failures, seldom or never blame themselves. Instead they blame the person who is suffering. The charge against these sufferers? They lack faith. They have given in to the sin of unbelief. A noted campaigner, in the preface of his book on miraculous healing, tells of “literally hundreds” of instances of people “who fail to receive healing when prayed for.” In that same place he blames the failures on the peoples’ lack of Bible knowledge.
Failures tend to show up some time after the intensity of healing campaigns. During the excitement of the campaign some people do show improvements in their symptoms. But when the excitement wears off, so does the improvement. They may even be worse off. The world famous leader in media ministries, quoted earlier, attempts to deal with this in his tract on holding onto healing. He admits,
During the great healing revival, evangelists would hold short meetings, and I’d come along behind them with longer meetings. By the time I got there, I often found people who had been healed in those meetings already had lost their healing.
Some, he says, lose their healing almost immediately. He cites an example of a minister who was healed of deafness in a meeting by the “foremost healing evangelist” at the time. “He was perfectly healed. But by the time the meeting was dismissed, he couldn’t hear a thing. He put the hearing aid back on.” How does the media minister account for such relapses? “I tell them… ‘You didn’t have any foundation of the Word of God in you to help you keep your healing’.” Thus he blames the patient, with devastating results as we shall see.