November 14, 2023

Isaiah 38: 21 Isaiah had said, “Prepare a poultice of figs and apply it to the boil, and he will recover.” (NIV)

Faith means believing in advance what will only make sense in reverse.*

Before we eat, we ask God to bless our food to the nourishment of our bodies. And we are thankful that he does just that. We don’t tell a hungry person, “If you just have faith, your hunger will be satisfied.” So why is that some people are comfortable – confident, even – telling a sick person to have faith and they will be healed? Why can’t they trust a little bit in modern medicine? Granted, food is almost always going to satisfy your hunger while medicine isn’t guaranteed to heal your illness. But then, not everything that we chew and swallow is nutritious. Ever heard of empty calories?

In this story in Isaiah, we see that “God did not build a wall between faith and using medicine.”* We might say that God used medicine to heal Hezekiah. You see, whether it’s food or medicine or breathing, we employ faith every moment. Faith that our bodies are going to function the way God programmed them to. Until they don’t. Is it because our faith is weak? Is it because God is failing us? Or is it because we live in a cursed world? The world that God created and called good is the same one about which he said, “Cursed is the ground . . .”

After my husband’s pancreatic cancer diagnosis, we were blessed by friends who shared stories about products that claim to heal cancer. My husband showed a list of some of these supposed cures to his oncologist. There was one item on the list that made me snicker – and it turned out to be the only one that the doctor felt might have potential. At this point, it was up to us to decide where we were going to place our faith. Someday, the supposed cure-alls that made me roll my eyes may be the cutting edge in cancer treatment. We chose to trust God first and the doctors second.

Here is my point: we choose where we will put our faith. I choose to have faith in God and then I ask him to direct my other choices. Whether my food is nutritious or not; whether my husband was going to be the recipient of a medical miracle or not, I choose to trust that in all things God works for my good (Romans 8: 28).

The strength of faith lies in its objects.*