Sons of Sceva are practically everywhere and there ought to be a law to protect people against abominable merchandising such as is popular on North American television.  If you want to be healed you go to a doctor.  Then again you can just use your words in respectful and urgent prayer. You might even be one of the few people to whom God has given the power to speak basic and daily needs into existence, even when there are means within human reach.  The options for medical cures are quite clear.  God has been saying no to prayers for miraculous “healings” since Israel was a nation and there are no lessons necessary for access to the heavenly Father’s power to make people whole. It is worth finding out what on earth could a healing university be under the auspices of the Lord Christ and his apostles.

Treatment vs examination

A magical masquerade mime was present in the leprosy “treatment” in the levitical system.  Compared to what the Lord Christ did for lepers (Mark 1:40-45) we have to think of the distance separating the priest from the leper during his examination (Leviticus 13:3,5,6,8,25,30,32,34, and 14:3). You can see he had to do a lot of looking. The human body has always been the beneficiary of divine healing on request.

“O Lord my God, I cried to You for help, and You healed me.” [crying to God is the way things are, and he repeatedly heals…]

Psalms 30:2, NASB

The wounding of the sons of Sceva

11)  God was performing extraordinary miracles by the hands of Paul, 12) so that handkerchiefs or aprons were even carried from his body to the sick, and the diseases left them and the evil spirits went out. 13) But also some of the Jewish exorcists, who went from place to place, attempted to name over those who had the evil spirits the name of the Lord Jesus, saying, “I adjure you by Jesus whom Paul preaches.” 14) Seven sons of one Sceva, a Jewish chief priest, were doing this. 15) And the evil spirit answered and said to them, “I recognize Jesus, and I know about Paul, but who are you?” 16) And the man, in whom was the evil spirit, leaped on them and subdued all of them and overpowered them, so that they fled out of that house naked and wounded.” (Acts 19:11-16, NASB)

“And there were many lepers in Israel in the time of Elisha the prophet; and none of them was cleansed, but only Naaman the Syrian.” (Luke 4:27, NASB)

There may be oral traditions of even thousands of cleansed lepers, but these are absent from our sources of authority.  Leprosy is a picture of sin we probably do not want to make too much of, since their cleansing by the Lord Christ and his disciples was evidence for the last and greatest prophet that God’s kingdom had arrived (Luke 7:22)

God is not obligated to make anyone’s body like a baby’s and he definitely is not handing out glorious bodies before the time (Hebrews 11:39, Acts 7:5).  On the other hand God never ignores or fails to answer genuine cries for mercy and pardon.

“But He gave him no inheritance in it, not even a foot of ground, and yet, even when he had no child, He promised that He would give it to him as a possession, and to his descendants after him.”

Acts 7:5, NASB

It was no accident that I heard a merchantelevangelist offer access to God’s healing power by means of his forty-eight lesson drug deal. I naturally had to say something to warn people about this kind of masquerade.  One has to be in the grip of a reality other than God’s kingdom, as we have seen it unveiled in the documented work of the Lord Christ, to believe in and waste time on a forty-eight lesson masquerade from a merchantelevangelist. What next will they try to sell believers?