Deadraiser: The Movie (Part 2)

In my last post, I examined a new documentary film, called Deadraiser, that profiles a team of men who travel around the world and seek to raise people from the dead. In this post, I want to share two personal reactions I had while watching the film.No One Is Raised From the DeadThere is a huge, glaring problem with the film: it does not show a single person being physically healed or raised from the dead. We see the team walking around a park in Boulder, Colorado, praying for sick people--none of whom get healed. We see them traveling to a country in Southeast Asia--the Philippines?--and laying hands on a dead man's body and praying in tongues while a grieving woman stands nearby. Is he raised? We don't know, as the scene fades and transitions to another story. But I think I'm safe in assuming that he wasn't raised.And the climax of the film is not someone being raised from the dead--as one might expect in a film about raising the dead. Rather, it is the five members of the team sharing their feelings at the site where a 16-year-old previously drowned and, apparently, was not raised from the dead.The title Deadraiser is misleading. It doesn't deliver.There Is Collateral DamageI felt sad for the families of the sick and dead people. The Deadraiser team members visited the hospital room of a quadriplegic man on his wife's birthday. They gave the couple the hope of complete physical healing, praying for the man to be "restored to way stronger than before the accident." But they left with his status unchanged.In another story, a team of "dead raisers" spent three days at a funeral home, praying for a person to come back to life. When the person wasn't resurrected, they admitted their disappointment.And another one of the "dead raisers" profiled shared a heartbreaking story of how the fervent prayers of him and his own family went unanswered in a hospital room, when they pleaded for over an hour for God to raise his 14-year-old son from the dead.What are people to think when they are promised that God shows His love through physical healing and raising the dead, but then He doesn't come through?I'm all for God performing miracles whenever He decides to. But Christians get into trouble when they hold out false promises that Scripture doesn't back up.(See my next post on the Deadraiser film.)-- Holly Pivec