Raising the Dead

by Chauncey W. Crandall

  After Mrs. Marion asked Christ into her life, I ran to get one of my nurses, a woman who is a Baptist, and I had her accompany me back into the exam room. I also grabbed my Bible and some anointing oil from my study. I told the nurse, much to her surprise, that she and I were going to pray for Mrs. Marion and her tumor was going to be healed. I rarely experience unusual sensations when praying for someone’s healing, but that day I felt on fire—the hair on my arms was standing up. I had an unusual conviction about Mrs. Marion’s healing. The nurse had never seen me like this and her eyes were like headlights.

  I laid Mrs. Marion down again on the exam table and pulled her dress up to her neck. I said, “Mrs. Marion, I’m going to pray for you in the name of Jesus. I’m going to command that tumor to go in Jesus’ name. Are you ready, Mrs. Marion?”

  The nurse looked at me as if she wanted to look away but couldn’t.

  I poured the anointing oil on my hands, and I just whacked right down on the tumor. I said, “In the mighty name of Jesus, Lord Father, I cry out for the healing of Mrs. Marion.” I had my hands on the tumor, and I moved it as I prayed (this didn’t cause any pain to the patient). “This tumor must go, in the name of Jesus. I command it to die, in Jesus’ name. Satan, you must loose this woman now in the mighty name of Jesus.” I kept my hold on the tumor, rattling it back and forth across her abdomen.

  Suddenly I felt exhausted as the holy enthusiasm driving me left.

  I sat Mrs. Marion up. She was shaking, whether from pure emotion or another sensation I could not tell.

  As a doctor, even if I had not been a believer, I would have advised her against either chemotherapy or surgery. Both would only have hastened her death, in my opinion. So I was bold in declaring that all that could be done had been. I said, “Mrs. Marion, it’s done.”

  She was puzzled, of course.

  “It’s finished. We’ve done everything the Lord has commanded us to do. You don’t need to see the surgeon or the oncologist for chemotherapy. We’ve prayed for your healing in Jesus’ name, and in your case that’s all I’d advise.”

  Mrs. Marion left. My nurse remained in shock the rest of the day.

  When Mrs. Marion did not return for a long time, I thought she must have died. I do not presume on the Lord’s will—nor would I ever want to. But three months later Mrs. Marion did come back. When my nurse told me she was my next scheduled appointment, I imagined her jaundiced and near death. But then she came walking in wearing one of her floral print dresses, with white low-heeled shoes, accompanied by the estimable Mr. Marion. He walked with a wide shuffle and the help of a cane.

  Mrs. Marion sat on my exam table. She had not lost any weight; she looked fantastic.

  “How are you doing, Mrs. Marion?” I asked.

  “I’m doing great, Dr. Crandall. I just wanted to come by and thank you.”

  I waited for her to explain why.

  “You know, Mr. Marion is getting old, and we’re moving back to South Carolina. But we wanted to come by first and thank you. I didn’t have chemotherapy. I didn’t have surgery. But I was examined a couple of weeks ago and they couldn’t find the tumor anymore. It’s gone. And I’m believing in the name of Jesus, I’m happy to say.”

  “Would you mind if I examined you?” I asked.

  She lay down on the table. Since she had been recently examined, I simply felt the area over the top of her dress. That hard ball of a tumor was gone. No trace of it. I asked her to sit up.

  “You know what I’m going to do now?” she asked. “I’m going to take Mr. Marion home to South Carolina and take care of him.”

  As I was walking them to the door, Mrs. Marion said, looking up at me with a twinkle in her eye, “You know, you saved my life twice.”

  “Twice?”

  “You remember the heart attack, don’t you?”

  I nodded. I expected her to make a reference to her pancreatic cancer, but what she said was far more telling. “You remember when you saved my life a second time, don’t you? That day when I came to your office and accepted Jesus. You saved my life that day for good when I met the Lord.”

  Sinning Believers

  Christians don’t receive as much healing in their lives as they might because of sin. I’m not talking about having what some call the “wrong kind of faith”; I don’t want people twisting themselves into mental contortions trying to figure out if they are believing in just the right way as a means of ensuring God will act as they wish. God accepts our faith at whatever level we have it and only desires to give us more. I have seen people with great faith—like Chad—whom God chooses not to heal. On the other hand, many of the healings I’ve witnessed have been in the lives of people who haven’t quite known what to make of God’s mercy. At times these people are left wondering, Why me? God’s ways are far beyond our own.

  What I am talking about is serious sin that anyone with a basic knowledge of the Ten Commandments can recognize. A young woman came to see me. She had multiple body complaints. Headaches, aching in her joints, a balky digestive system. No one could quite figure out what was wrong. We did a mega-workup on her and everything came back normal.

  With the test results in hand, I sat and talked with her. She was a believer—born again. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but I haven’t found anything yet. Why don’t you tell me more about yourself? Perhaps if we talk for a while, I’ll figure out what I’m missing.”

  “Yes, actually, I’m going away on a trip with my boyfriend.”

  “Where are you staying?”

  “At a hotel, nothing special but close to the beach.”

  “You’re staying at the hotel together?”

  “Sure. We live together.”

  “Can I tell you something? I’ve looked at everything. I can’t find any illness that explains your symptoms. I think you’re under spiritual attack, and until you get out of sin this will continue. Living with your boyfriend, having intercourse with him, that’s not part of God’s plan. You can’t be a born-again believer and be living this way. Christians who know God’s will and deliberately sin against it are the most miserable people on earth. Far more miserable than atheists. So you need to get out of this relationship or make it a chaste one until you’re married. I’m sorry, but you do.”

  She went away sad because she wasn’t willing to change. The truth remains that sin can create illness, psychiatric disorders, heart disease, and many other afflictions. Morality is essentially God’s description of the way He intended things to work. When we neglect His “operating instructions,” our physical health often starts to suffer.

  One of my favorite patients was a salesman named Charles Duke. He was the type who dressed well, could strike up a conversation with anybody, and played a nice round of golf. He was also a charmer and a ladies’ man. He had left his wife—who was a believer—and taken up with a younger woman. They were living what they took to be the good life in Florida.

  Despite all this, he was a believer, albeit a big-time backslider. I took care of him over a number of years, and almost every time I saw him I tried to say something about turning back to the Lord. Once divorced from his wife, he still refused to marry the woman with whom he was living. I told him this wasn’t right. “If you are going to live with her, you need to marry her.”

  “Oh, Chauncey,” he’d say. “I’m just not ready for all that.”

  I had not seen him for more than a year when one day he came to the office, thin, in fact down to skin and bone, his body eaten up and wasted. He brought his X-rays in. “Doc, I’ve got cancer.” He started weeping.

  I looked at his X-rays and saw a big tumor at the top of his left lung. There wasn’t anything left to do for him but pray, and I told him so. “All I can do is take you to a healing service tonight, if you’ll go.”

  He said, “I turned from God, and I can’t believe this happened.”

  “Don’t you think it’s time you started believing again?”

  He said he would go with me that night to t
he healing service. We went to a church close by. During the service, the power of God hit him, and he dropped to his knees crying. A bunch of us were around him, praying for him.

  The following week, he called me up. “Listen, Doc, something happened at that meeting.”

  “I’m sure it did,” I said.

  “No,” he said, “you don’t understand. I’m healed. I know I’m healed. I want you to do another CT scan this week.”

  “It’s too early. Your insurance will not cover another one so soon.”

  “Well, I’m telling you, Doc, I was touched. I was healed.”

  “Okay. When it’s time, you can have another scan and we’ll find out.”

  The following week, on a Thursday, Charles had another scan and showed up in my office without an appointment on Friday, the CT scan results under his arm. He said, “I want you to tell me what happened.”

  I was thinking he wanted me to interpret the scan results, probably in a more positive way than the first doctor, who told him the unhappy truth. I thought the tumor would still be there when I held the image up to the light. But the tumor was gone. Completely gone. His lung tissue looked absolutely normal.

  I said, “Stay here, Charles. Let me go and call the radiologist.” I placed the phone call. “Listen, I’m calling about Duke. Can you pull up the old films on the computer, and the new films, and tell me what’s going on?”

  He went over the old film, which clearly showed an apical cancerous tumor on his left lung.

  “What about the new ones?” I asked.

  “Crandall, there’s no tumor on this X-ray. What did you do to him?”

  I said, “Are you sure? You’re looking at the right guy?”

  “I’m sure. I’ve got the dates and everything right before me.”

  I went back to the exam room where Charles was waiting.

  “What did you find?”

  I looked straight at him. “The blood of Christ has healed you, Charles. Your tumor is gone.”

  He dropped to his knees right there in my exam room, weeping and even shrieking, crying out to God: “Lord, I’m sorry I turned from You! I’m sorry, God!” He was screaming this aloud in my office! He was just totally amazed.

  When he stood up, a little rocky from so much emotion, he mumbled once more, “He healed me. I’ve turned from Him and run from Him for so many years, and all I had to do was cry out to Him and He showed up. Can you believe it?”

  He went home and got married.

  The Gift of Tongues and the Gift of Life

  Personally, I find the greatest thing about participating in God’s healing is the way in which it draws me closer to God; how it deepens my understanding, trust, and love of God. It’s truly a gift to be used by God in this way, and in my case it brought along with it other spiritual gifts as well.

  When Chad was ill, we started going to a church where people prayed in tongues. I started researching this phenomenon in the Bible and praying about it. “Lord, if this is a true gift, please let me receive it. I need it. I’m in a battle.”

  For months and months I was crying out to God with this request. “If it’s real, I want it. If it’s not, that’s okay, too.” I’d be praying as I drove my car to work, and I’d start mumbling and jumbling syllables, hoping to prime the pump. But I knew all of this was coming from me. I had not truly received this baptism of the Holy Spirit. And the more I prayed about it, the more I wanted it. At the same time I had my doubts, because some of the people in our new church were pretty strange. It would be a long time before I had fellowship with other professionals who spoke in tongues, like those who sit on Pat Robertson’s board.

  Then one day I was in the hospital and this lady came into the emergency room with a massive heart attack. They called me. “Listen, Crandall, you need to take her to the operating room. This woman is dying. She’s had a severe anterior wall myocardial infarction.”

  So we sent her to the operating room, and my team and I scrubbed in. In that situation I’m like the conductor of an orchestra. Everyone knows where he or she is supposed to go and what his or her job is, but I have to lead one very hectic orchestra. I was standing over this woman, working catheters through her groin to the heart, inserting stents, trying to get her blood pressure up. We started IVs and hit her with atropine, epinephrine, and the clot-dissolving drugs called thrombolytics. We were trying to abort the heart attack by going in and helping the artery open itself up. But as we worked on her, death entered the operating room and her heart flatlined.

  All of a sudden my hands went up in the air, uncontrollably. There I was with my arms raised, dressed in my scrub suit, with my mask on. I had no control over my arms. And I started speaking this unknown language. This river of a language I didn’t understand started pouring out of my mouth. I thought, I can think, I can see, I can hear, but I have no control over what is coming out of my mouth. And I still had no control over my hands, which were hovering in the air over her body. This was embarrassing and I tried to put my hands down, but I couldn’t. I continued mumbling an uncontrollable river of language that I’m as far from understanding now as I was then. I could only wonder, What is going on?

  I looked at the nurses, and they were sure looking at me. They were waiting for me to give them further instructions, but all I could do was pray in a language I did not understand. I noticed that the words I was speaking came from deep down inside, rolling out, coming out of my belly. My brain did not have anything to do with it. Again, I could think. I could see. I could hear. But I couldn’t control what I was saying and I couldn’t bring my arms down. This went on for what seemed forever, although probably no longer than three to five minutes.

  All this time the heart monitor was sounding the piercing note that declares a patient has flatlined. Then a heartbeat came back. Then another heartbeat, and then the first perfect one. After about a dozen perfect heartbeats, I was able to put my arms down and speak normally. One nurse patted my sweating brow and another asked if I was okay. “What were you doing?” they asked.

  “I was just crying out for this lady’s life, in Jesus’ name.” It was all I could think to say.

  I ran to the head of the table, wanting to look at her eyes to see if they were fixed, dilated. Her eyes were normal. She started to blink. I went back and finished inserting the stents. The patient remained stable.

  In fact, she recovered very well and soon left the hospital. The nurses kept asking me about what had happened. “Listen, I don’t know,” I said. “God must have taken over for a couple of minutes.”

  Some months later, my missionary friend from Colombia, Andrew McMillan, came to see me. We fell into a pattern of watching for revivals breaking out in Florida, and when God seemed to be on the move in one place or another, I’d call Andrew up and we’d go to these meetings whenever possible. I was hungry for the move of God and so was he.

  We were driving across the state of Florida one night, on the central highway known as Alligator Alley. The middle of the state looks just like Africa, with savannah all around and isolated stands of trees. We were headed to the other side of the state where a revival was going on. We started talking about Reinhard Bonnke’s videotape Raised from the Dead, a documentary about a man who came back to life even after having been embalmed. There were few cars on the highway. We had praise music on and felt the spirit of God’s presence. I said, “Wouldn’t it be great if we could pray for someone and see them rise from the dead? It would elevate my faith like nothing else.”

  The Lord spoke to me audibly. This wasn’t a feeling; it was a voice. “Don’t you remember that woman? When you received the gift of tongues?”

  I said, “Yes, Lord.”

  “If I hadn’t been there that day and spoken through you, she would have died. But because you received the gift of ecstatic tongues, she was raised from the dead.”

  Once I had sufficiently recovered to speak at all, I told Andrew about the experience, praying over my patient in tongues while her hear
t flatlined. “Andrew, whenever I’ve thought of that since, I’ve only thought about receiving the gift of tongues. I hadn’t thought until now that I’d seen the dead raised.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Raising the Dead: The Rest

  of the Story

  I’ve been privileged to be part of raising the dead twice, then; the first time at the moment I received the gift of tongues and later in the celebrated case of Jeff Markin, with which we began.

  God’s raising of Jesus is the foundation of the Christian faith. We do find it extraordinary, though, even when we believe in it, because we see God’s purposes too narrowly in terms of our own points of view. That’s why it’s important to say that I’ve been a part—only one part—of God’s raising of the dead. In the case of Jeff Markin, my own understanding of what had transpired in his life kept enlarging over the course of his treatment.

  After Jeff came back to life in the emergency room, we rushed him down to the intensive care unit. The buzz of what had happened filled the place—everywhere people were whispering. “Did you hear what happened? This guy was dead and he came back!” “Look how cyanotic his fingers and toes are. The nurse said she was prepping him for the morgue!” “Crandall comes in, prays over the guy, they hit him with the paddles one more time… and bam! He comes back, after being down more than forty minutes.”

  “Yeah, it’ll be a nice life as a vegetable,” the skeptics wagged.

  “Who knows?” others countered. “Who knows anything after this?”

  The miracle of Jeff’s coming back from the dead occurred on a Friday. I was off that weekend and transferred his care to one of my partners, Gabe. I remember finishing up my orders for his care with a note: “Gabe, this guy came in and died, and I prayed for him, and he came back to life. God must have a call on his life, so there’s nothing you can do to kill him over the weekend.”

  Despite this bravado, I had my doubts and was rattled by what had happened. I had a meeting late Friday afternoon with a banker, a Christian friend, and I couldn’t help spilling out the story. My friend could hardly believe what I was telling him, but I could see he was tucking away the information.