I knew I was dealing with an evil spirit then, so I placed my hand on her crown and forehead and said, “In the name of Jesus, I command you, Satan, to loose this woman. I ask this in Jesus’ holy name!”
As soon as I said that, Elizabeth started crying uncontrollably.
Gently I asked, “Elizabeth, can you say the prayer now?”
She nodded. I said, “In the name of Jesus,” and she said, “In the name of Jesus,” and she continued praying with me, accepting Christ as Savior.
Then her tears really started to flow.
I said, “Elizabeth, you are born again.”
She cried all the harder.
“What’s wrong, Elizabeth?” I asked.
“Dr. Crandall, for ninety-nine years I’ve never felt worthy. Right now I’m the happiest I’ve ever been!” Her sobbing made her chest heave and her hands shake, but she was smiling as the tears rained down.
In Palm Beach and everywhere else over the face of the earth, we are in a battle with Satan. It’s often not only a person’s sinful will that needs to be addressed but spiritual oppression as well. So sometimes it’s the best of medicine and the best of Jesus. At other times, the best of Jesus must come first.
Nickel-Plated Pistol
I had another patient, a man from South America whom I’ll call Fred. I had been treating him for years for a number of health issues. He came into the office for an appointment on a Thursday, and he wasn’t there so much for my help as to make an announcement.
“Dr. Crandall,” Fred said, “I just want to say thank you for everything you’ve done. But I’ve made a decision. I’m retired. I’ve lived my life and done everything I wanted to do. I’m not popular like my wife is—in fact, I don’t have many friends. There’s no reason for me to live anymore. I went to the gun show at the fairgrounds and bought a used shotgun, and next week I’m going to commit suicide.”
His tone was matter-of-fact. He was not asking for my opinion or permission, and I knew how truly serious he was. I told him, “Fred, you are not going to commit suicide.”
“Yes, I am. I bought the gun. I have it planned.”
“No one in my practice is going to commit suicide. Where do you go to church?”
He was a nominal Baptist but had long ceased practicing. “The real question, Fred,” I said, “is whether you know Jesus. Do you?”
“No.”
“Fred, if you have Jesus in you, you’ll be filled with the Holy Spirit and you won’t want to commit suicide. You feel lousy, I realize. But what if you were full of peace and joy? You can be.”
I started telling him stories of others I had seen come to Christ and preparing him to receive Jesus as Savior. “Fred, why don’t you accept Jesus today? Then we’ll see if you still want to kill yourself.”
“Well, I’ll do that, Doctor, but I doubt it’s going to change my mind.”
We went through the Sinner’s Prayer together, as Fred asked Jesus into his life and acknowledged Him as Savior and Lord. I felt that he was praying as sincerely as he was capable, but at the same time his spiritual oppression kept his words from being of much account. I could almost hear the devil whispering to him that this had been a perfunctory exercise. I knew that he needed a dramatic demonstration of God’s power to assure him of his salvation and victory over suicide in Christ.
I keep a bottle of anointing oil in each exam room. I went to the shelf where I keep the bottle and poured it over my hands so that they were dripping. I turned around and looked straight at Fred as the fragrance of the oil filled the air. He half turned away, looking at me as if to ask, “What are you doing?”
“You see these hands?” I asked. “These hands are anointed in this oil as a representation of the Holy Spirit. I’m going to put my hand on your forehead, and I’m going to pray that that voice inside you that’s telling you to kill yourself will leave. It has to leave if we command it to do so in the name of Jesus. Are you okay with that?”
“Yes.” He said this in a tone implying, Why not? We’ve come this far.
I held up my glistening hands and took the couple of steps between us. I repeated, “Fred, I’m going to put my hands on you now, and when I put my hands on you, the power of God is going to hit you, and the oppression you feel is going to leave.” I put my dripping hand smack on his forehead and prayed, “Father God, in the name of Jesus, I cast out the spirit of suicide and death in this man, in Jesus’ name. I command you to go, Satan. I command you to loose this man, in Jesus’ name. Christ releases you, Fred, into His peace and joy. Amen, let it be so, in the mighty name of Jesus.”
Fred hopped off the exam table so fast I thought I might have scared him and he was going to run out of the office. Boom! He was up. And then he started talking just as fast as he had gotten on his feet. “Dr. Crandall,” he said, “that thing that was inside me,” he said, “or around me or something—it felt like a horse collar at times, weighted, just pulling me down. That thing I’ve been feeling so long, it’s gone. It is! It’s gone.” He had a broad smile on his face. “What did you do? It was the prayer, right? And the oil. I don’t feel it anymore. It worked. I think it worked. I really do.”
Then I became the skeptic. “You sure you feel all right?” I asked.
“All right? I feel great! I’m telling you that thing left me as soon as you prayed. The instant you did.”
As a Christian I was rejoicing with Fred, but as a doctor I knew that a little caution might be called for. I wanted to verify if this healing would prove real and lasting, and I wanted to ensure that if Fred needed follow-up psychological care he received it. “Okay, Fred, you see how powerful God really is, don’t you?”
“I do, Dr. Crandall, I do.”
“Well, let’s work with God now and make sure you keep walking with Him and that you are completely delivered from this sense of oppression. It’s Thursday. I want to see you back here on Monday. And before you walk out of here I want you to promise me that you won’t harm yourself or others in any way. Is that a promise?”
“But it’s gone. It’s just gone.”
“Promise?”
“Oh, sure. No question.”
On Monday Fred came bounding down the hall like a youngster.
“You look pretty good, Fred,” I said. “You still feeling good?”
“I am feeling great, Dr. Crandall. When I left your office, you know, I was just so full of joy and peace and happiness and that thing that was weighing me down was just gone, poof!, like I told you. When I drove home, I went straight through the front door to my dresser. I grabbed the shotgun, got back in my car, threw the gun in the passenger seat, and drove out near a river. There I heaved the gun into the water. It was all because of that prayer. I’ve felt like my life could start all over again ever since.”
His life did begin again, as Fred is happy and healthy today.
I Doubt My Doubts
These two cases and others like them taught me that many times Satan’s oppressive hold over people has to be removed by the power of God before they can be restored to health. I have my credentials as a doctor, and I also have the authority Christ gives His followers to deliver people from spiritual oppression.
At the same time I am always warring against my own doubts, my own skepticism, wondering whether in cases like Fred’s his cure might have been the result of his belief in my authority and the dramatic way in which I went about praying for him. But I have been through so many such experiences that I have more doubts of my doubts than of my beliefs. I have learned to walk in the authority Christ gives His followers, and I feel now that when I see someone suffering from spiritual oppression—someone who is captive to the enemy—I have the authority, like a general in an army, to command the forces of heaven to go into action so that the kingdom of God will come to reign in the person’s life.
I hope I’m never presumptuous about this, because I don’t have any supernatural power personally. I only know and believe ever more strongly that it’s God’s will
for every person to have God’s life in him or her, and that God is pleased whenever His followers help others understand this and, most important, experience it.
CHAPTER 13
Salvation: The Ultimate Healing
At times only God’s intervention can help my patients when we’ve exhausted medicine’s resources. But in order for God to heal someone, He has to be present in the patient’s life, because that’s the primary way God heals us. God addresses our fundamental disease—mortality—in every case when a person asks Christ into his heart. The healing of the soul and the restoration of the person to eternal life with God is the healing He will always work for anyone who believes. God desires souls first and foremost.
We will all die someday, unless Christ returns first. If we are healed of one thing, we will die of something else. But if we have the life of Christ in us, death will be only a transition to a new life with God. When I first started praying for my patients I just concentrated on the immediate problem, the particular disease the patient was battling. God has taught me to address the underlying and eternal issue before asking God to cure a particular illness.
First the healing of the soul and then the healing of the body was definitely the protocol that needed to be followed in Ted Wittimeyer’s case. He was a seventy-year-old man I had taken care of for years. He was diabetic and suffered from heart disease and peripheral vascular disease. As a result, he had minimal blood flow in his legs.
Ted came for an appointment one day with a bandage wrapped around his leg. He told me, “Dr. Crandall, they want to cut my leg off next week.” I unwrapped the bandage and saw why: he had an ulcer on his leg as big as a cantaloupe that went right down to the bone. “They’ve been trying to treat this for six months, and it’s just not going away.” He began to weep. “I don’t want to lose my leg. I don’t want them to amputate.”
I reviewed the doctors he had been seeing with him to make sure he had received the best care. “Ted, you’ve seen the best doctors in town,” I said. “All I can do is pray for your leg, if you’d like me to. Would you like me to do that?”
“You want to pray for me?”
“Yes. But first, you need to become a Christian.” I spoke with Ted for a while about his religious training, which was virtually nonexistent. When I asked if he had accepted Christ as Savior, he replied so openly and without any pretense that I thought about the childlike way we all come to Christ. “Is that something I need to do?” Ted asked. If he needed to do that, he would. They were going to chop his leg off. He was desperate.
After Ted received Christ I said, “Now that you’ve got Christ in you, He’s helping to fight the battle. So let’s pray for your leg.” I put my right hand on the ulcer, in the midst of the goo. “In the name of Jesus, Father God, I cry out for this leg. I ask that You heal this ulcer, in Jesus’ name. Lord, we command the tissues to fill in, the muscle, the ligaments, the nerves, the arteries, the veins to be restored in this leg, in Jesus’ name. Father God, we command all illness and infirmity to be gone in the mighty name of Jesus. I command you, Satan, to loose this man, in Jesus’ name. We command healing on this leg, in the name of Jesus. Lord, peace on this leg, in Jesus’ name, amen.”
I put a fresh bandage on Ted’s leg and met with Ted and his wife in my office study. Ted’s wife was naturally anxious about my opinion. “There’s no rush on this thing,” I said.
“But they want to amputate next week,” his wife said.
“I understand that. But let’s wait. Come back at the beginning of next week and let me take another look at the ulcer. Perhaps there’ll be some improvement.” I left it to Ted to explain to his wife what had happened in the office, if he cared to.
Monday, my nurse came running into my office. “Dr. Crandall, you have to speak to Ted’s wife. She’s on the phone and she’s hysterical. I don’t exactly know what she’s trying to say. She’s flipped out.”
I went to the nurse’s station and picked up the phone. “Dr. Crandall,” Mrs. Whittimeyer said, “you’re not going to believe this. Fred’s at home, and that ulcer, it’s starting to fill in with new tissue. The edges of the ulcer are getting smaller, and it’s starting to fill in. It’s melting away!”
“That’s good, isn’t it?”
“Sure, it’s good. But we’re supposed to have the leg amputated this week. What do we do?”
“Like I said, come in and see me. Don’t go to the other doctors before you do.”
“Okay, we won’t.”
“Since it’s improving, you don’t need to see me this week. Let’s wait another week. Then come in to me first. Okay?”
Ted came in the next week with a huge smile on his face. He was wearing long pants. He sat on the exam table, both legs covered. I lifted up his pants leg on the one I remembered as being diseased, and there wasn’t any ulcer on it. Maybe I had not remembered correctly. I examined the other leg. But there wasn’t any ulcer there, either.
It was embarrassing, but I had to ask, “Ted, which leg was the ulcer on?”
“The first one you looked at.”
“Take off your pants.”
“Dr. Crandall, the ulcer is gone.” He was beaming.
“Fine, I believe you, but let me see.”
With his pants off I could see that the ulcer had completely filled in with new tissue. It was hyperpigmented, like any major wound that’s healed, but otherwise his leg was normal.
I was so incredulous I took a good long look at the other leg to make sure they were both disease-free. I kept looking from one leg to the other, having trouble believing this had actually happened.
Ted’s wife was in the exam room with him. “What do you think happened?” I asked.
She said, “God’s real. God healed his leg.” To this day they’re still talking about it and walking with God.
Love Helps People Take the Risk
I am able to talk so openly with people about Christ, in part, because I see them at such vulnerable times in their lives. In my experience, I’ve had only one patient refuse prayer, a Jewish man suffering from brain tumors who believed his religion forbade him to pray with me. God has given me a great love for the Jews, as I’ve mentioned before, and particularly ever since Chad’s death my Jewish patients have been able—I cannot say exactly why—to sense this. When we are talking about Christ across religious traditions it’s vital that the love of Christ be evident within us before we ever say a word.
The love of Christ that He gives us to extend to others touches something very deep within every soul that wants to believe. Perfect love casts out all fear, the Scriptures tell us (1 John 4:18), and when the other person knows we love him or her, the person feels safe and is able to take the risk of faith more easily.
Because we are made in the image of God and made for communion with God, there’s always an impulse to reach out for God. It’s odd, isn’t it, how in times of distress people always call on God, even if in a blasphemous way?
Even before I entered college, I was fascinated by medicine and volunteered as a helper in an emergency room. I wanted to see the gory stuff, the motorcycle accidents, the car crash victims. I couldn’t get over how seriously injured people would always call on Jesus for help. One guy’s leg was almost cut off in a motorcycle accident. They brought him in in the ambulance without administering any pain medication. He was screaming, “Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!” Why that name? I wondered. Why is he calling on that name? Small children did this as well.
At the very end, when things are tough, something within us wants to call on the name of God. Most people really do want to know that there is something beyond this life, and if you step forward with that something else, they grab it.
The Big Picture: Mrs. Marion
I had an unforgettable patient who taught me about the big picture—how salvation is the great healing and every physical healing a sign of our ultimate happiness with God. Her name was Mrs. Marion and she came from South Carolina. South Carolinians of Mrs. Marion’s
stamp have a cultured and musical accent and her refinement showed in everything, from her flowered print dress to the way she held herself. Five years before I had seen Mrs. Marion through a massive heart attack. She was now in her mid-eighties, frail but proud.
“I just came from Charleston with my husband, Mr. Marion,” she said with her pleasing formality. “I saw my doctors there and they said I’ve got pancreatic cancer, and I don’t have long to live.”
“Really? That’s what they said?”
“I came to get your advice. One doctor wants to give me chemotherapy.”
Mrs. Marion was already such a wisp of a woman that I doubted she could survive chemotherapy. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” I said.
“The surgeon—proud of his profession, I imagine, you know how they are—he wants to do surgery.”
“Mrs. Marion, I remember what you went through with your heart attack. You won’t survive surgery for pancreatic cancer.”
“That was my thought. But what should I do?”
“Let me examine you.” She lay down on the exam table. I felt her stomach, and she had a tumor the size of a baseball in the middle of her abdomen.
I sat her up. Since she was a Southern belle, I thought she might have a relationship with the Lord, and I asked if she knew Christ. I told her that in my Bible it says that Christians can pray for one another for healing.
“I went to church,” she said. “But I never quite understood what people were talking about when they used that kind of language. Not that I’m against it. I simply did not understand.”
I spoke with her for quite a while about the true meaning of Christianity.
“I’ve never had it explained quite so well before,” she said. “I would like to be that kind of Christian,” she said. “If you’ll help me—pray with me, as you’ve mentioned.”
Raising the Dead Page 15