Prayer, miracles and medicine (cancer update 30 June)

 The news from my oncologist continues to be good. He is pleased with the progress of my cancer treatment, which he says is in the top 1% of positive responses. I've not had any bad nausea or side-effects and that's great. At the moment it's just keep going with taking tablets and getting a fortnightly infusion of medication, previously weekly. So our family continues to thank God and I continue to avoid crowds (COVID and flu are never good companions at the best of times).

As anyone who's had contact with cancer knows, good news can turn into bad news quite suddenly, so we here in the house of Cheng are not being complacent about what the future may hold. It is a matter of daily trusting in God's goodness, whatever happens.

Is this a miracle? It feels like it. Yet I hesitate to use such language. Partially at least this is because any improvement comes in clear response to the latest medical treatment, and the extraordinary privilege of having such treatment close to hand and significantly subsidised by the Australian government and administered by amazingly gifted and hardworking medical professionals.

Mainly I would want to insist, along with anyone who reads their Bible carefully and trusts what it says, that God is in control of the smallest detail of life. That includes the efficacy of any medical treatment, and the response of the body he has created to that treatment. To suggest that some good response to cancer treatment is not a miracle is in no way to detract from the power, sovereignty and goodness of God. Rather the opposite. The fact that he controls both the extraordinary and the mundane, the eternal and the quotidian, the miraculous and the daily detail of life--all of this is to credit greater power and authority to his name. He does not merely control the freakish event, and leave the rest of his creation to roll on largely disregarded. Matthew 10 says this:

 Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. 30 But even the hairs of your head are all numbered. 31 Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows. 32 So everyone who acknowledges me before men, I also will acknowledge before my Father who is in heaven, 33 but whoever denies me before men, I also will deny before my Father who is in heaven. (Matthew 10:29-33)

Indeed the extent of God's power and authority over our lives gives us grounds for an even greater (and right and proper) fear of what he is able to do. That same passage says, in the previous verse "And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell." (Matthew 10:28)

He is a good God, and a loving God who would gladly give his own Son to death on a cross to reconcile us to his eternal grace. Yet alongside this he is a holy God with the power to cause or cure cancer, and use all events for our good and his glory. One day we will face him as judge. May we also cling to him as our Saviour; whether from cancer or a far worse fate. And may we joyfully rejoice that he is inclined to save us not only from cancer but from our sin.

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 Ja sorry about font and background colour madness. I'm having trouble figuring it out. Here for your consolation is a sermon I preached on Sunday, the best sermon (from me) on Ecclesiastes 1 you will ever hear, unless you heard the one I preached before that on the same passage or maybe someone else's sermon. There's a Bible reading from about the 35 minute mark followed by talk.