I spent a bit of time reading in my Bible today. I was wondering about how God heals us… how He uses supernatural powers when He decides to, but He also sometimes chooses to heal us slowly, naturally, much as a tree heals itself from a cut in its bark. Knowing both sides of the healing coin are true, I wondered where doctors and medicine fit into the picture.
Being a lover of The Strong’s Concordance, I pulled my hefty beast of a book off the shelf and spread it on the kitchen table. I looked up “physicians.” Most of the verses were simply narratives of various characters who needed the services of a doctor. However, a few verses stuck out to me today:
2 Chronicles 16:12-13…
“And [King] Asa in the thirty and ninth year of his reign was diseased in his feet, until his diseasew as exceeding great: yet in his disease he sought not to the LORD, but to the physicians. And Asa slept with his fathers and died in the one and fortieth year of his reign.”
This verse is a reminder to me that in our diseases, we are to seek the Lord first. Physicians are simply tools in the Master’s hand, but healing belongs to our God.
If a tree’s bark heals, all the other trees of the forest would certainly know that it was God that healed the tree and not the tree’s inner wisdom nor the land owner’s intelligence. How often do we fail to acknowledge the silent role God plays in our every day lives? His providence. His compassion. His amazing design of our bodies.
Like the woman with the issue of blood, who had suffered many things of many physicians (Mark 5:26), do we reach out with arms of faith to touch a compassionate God?
“Is any sick among you? let him call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord: And the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up…” (James 5:14-15).
Amen.
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