Article July 24, 1920 Issue

To trust God alone for healing, except as a last resort, is...

Louis A. Gregory

Hastings (Neb.) Tribune

To trust God alone for healing, except as a last resort, is stupendous folly, according to the revivalist whom the Tribune quoted to the effect that praying for the sick without calling a doctor is as presumptuous as was Satan's temptation of Jesus to cast himself down from the pinnacle of the temple and expect God to save him from death. Neither Bible teaching nor practical experience supports such doctrine. An incident typical of Old Testament teaching concerning healing is that of King Asa, of whom the record states: "In his disease he sought not to the Lord but to the physicians ... and died." The only mention of the work of physicians in the New Testament is concerning the woman who, Mark's gospel says, "had suffered many things of many physicians, and had spent all that she had, and was nothing bettered, but rather grew worse." Instead of indicating that she had qualified for healing by exhausting the aid of the physicians, Jesus told her that it was her faith that made her whole. The gospels relate that the Saviour healed great multitudes of all manner of diseases, and there is no intimations that they had to try all the doctors' remedies before he could help them. Never once did he fail to heal because the seeker had not tried all possible medical help. Christ Jesus left nothing to indicate that the healing work, which he promised as one of the signs of his ever presence, must wait until all materialistic means have failed. Obviously it is not Christian teaching to represent that God is as limited, as a healer, as are our famous physicians who do not treat minor cases but deal only with chronic and desperate ones.

Present day, practical proof contradicts the assertion of the revivalist that it is foolish to disregard medical men and their methods and trust God alone for healing. Experience shows that habitual reliance upon drugs and medical methods is a line of education that hinders one from effectively trusting God for healing, even when human means have failed. When an adherent of materia medica finds that its remedies do not help him, and turns to God, he generally does so in desperation, as though he were casting himself down from the pinnacle of the temple, and not in the intelligent and confident trust in God that Jesus taught and exemplified.

Most of those whose first appeal to Christian Science was for physical healing, came to it only as a last resort; but they learn and generally prove that that was not necessary, for this Science is demonstrably most effective as a first and only resort. They are proving that reliance upon doctors and drugs for smaller ills does not prepare them to trust God in a way that heals them of seeming mortal disease. As they demonstrate the psalmist's statement that it is God, "who forgiveth all thine iniquities; who healeth all thy diseases," they learn that there are no degrees of evil or disease in His sight, that seemingly great evils are as readily healed through spiritual power as are any others, and that it is important that the apparently small ones should be rightly corrected.

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