Dr Ndukwe has been a consultant surgeon at a teaching hospital in Benin City for nineteen years. He is also an elder in his local church, the kind of man who arrives early to pray with the ushers and still finds time to run the youth Bible quiz. Before every operation, if the patient agrees, he takes their hand in the pre-operative ward and prays a short prayer. Most patients agree. Some cry.
One Tuesday afternoon a man named Erebi came for his consultation. He was fifty-two, a marine engineer who had worked offshore for most of his career, a big man with a quiet voice. A scan had found a mass in his abdomen. The tests suggested it needed to be removed, and soon. Dr Ndukwe explained the operation carefully, drew a diagram on the back of a folder, and answered every question.
Then Erebi asked one more. “Doctor, are you a Christian?”
“I am.”
Erebi looked at his hands for a while. “My prayer group says I should not do this operation. They say that if I go under the knife, I am agreeing with the devil’s report. They say a man of faith should stand on the word and refuse the surgery. My wife’s prayer partner has already had a vision that I am healed.” He looked up. “So I want to ask you, as a brother. Should I even be here?”
Dr Ndukwe told me that he had been asked that question, in one form or another, more times than he could count. Sometimes by patients. Sometimes by their families in the corridor. Once by a pastor who had come to take a church member home against medical advice. And every time he heard it, he felt the same sorrow, because the question assumes that the believer must choose. Either you trust God, or you go to the hospital. Either you have faith, or you have treatment.
Is that really what Scripture teaches?
They that are whole need not a physician
Begin with something Jesus said almost in passing. Levi the tax collector had just left his booth to follow Jesus, and he threw a feast for his old colleagues so they could meet his new Master:
And Levi made him a great feast in his own house: and there was a great company of publicans and of others that sat down with them. But their scribes and Pharisees murmured against his disciples, saying, Why do ye eat and drink with publicans and sinners? And Jesus answering said unto them, They that are whole need not a physician; but they that are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.
The religious leaders were offended that Jesus would share a table with such people. His answer used an image every listener understood. “They that are whole need not a physician; but they that are sick.” Of course the sick go to the physician. That is what physicians are for. Jesus was making a spiritual point about why He spent time with sinners, but the force of the illustration depends on the plain good sense of the picture. Nobody in the room thought a sick man who called a doctor was showing a lack of faith. Jesus took it for granted that this is what sensible people do, and He compared His own mission to it.
He used similar language elsewhere. In the synagogue at Nazareth He anticipated the crowd’s challenge with a proverb: “Physician, heal thyself” (Luke 4:23). Jesus was content to be compared to a doctor. He never once spoke of physicians as rivals to God.
That alone should loosen the knot in Erebi’s stomach. The Lord who healed lepers with a touch also spoke of physicians as a normal and fitting part of life in a broken world.
The Lord that healeth thee
The Old Testament gives God one of His great names in a story about bitter water. Three days after the Red Sea, Israel came to Marah, and the water was undrinkable:
And he cried unto the LORD ; and the LORD shewed him a tree, which when he had cast into the waters, the waters were made sweet: there he made for them a statute and an ordinance, and there he proved them, And said, If thou wilt diligently hearken to the voice of the LORD thy God, and wilt do that which is right in his sight, and wilt give ear to his commandments, and keep all his statutes, I will put none of these diseases upon thee, which I have brought upon the Egyptians: for I am the LORD that healeth thee.
“I am the LORD that healeth thee.” In Hebrew, Jehovah Rapha. God reveals Himself as the Healer of His people. This is a precious name, and believers have rightly sung it for centuries. All healing, ultimately, comes from Him.
But look at how the first healing in the story happened. Moses cried to the Lord, “and the LORD shewed him a tree, which when he had cast into the waters, the waters were made sweet.” God healed the water through a means. He pointed to something in the created world and told Moses to use it. The Healer revealed His name in the same moment that He provided a remedy.
That pattern runs through Scripture. God told Naaman to wash in the Jordan (2 Kings 5:10). Jesus made clay with His spittle, anointed a blind man’s eyes and told him to go and wash (John 9:6-7). When Hezekiah was dying, God gave him a promise of fifteen more years, and Isaiah told the servants to prepare a poultice of figs (Isaiah 38:21), as we noted in an earlier teaching on discernment. God’s power and God’s means are not competitors. Sometimes He heals without any means at all. Often He heals through them.
Jeremiah, grieving over his people, asked a question that assumes the same thing: “Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there? why then is not the health of the daughter of my people recovered?” (Jeremiah 8:22). Gilead was famous for its healing balm. Jeremiah’s lament makes sense only if balm and physicians were good things that should have been used. Even the vision of the age to come includes trees whose leaves are “for medicine” (Ezekiel 47:12) and “for the healing of the nations” (Revelation 22:2).
Medicine, at its best, is the careful study of the world God made. When a researcher discovers how a particular compound lowers blood pressure, or how an infection can be stopped, he is uncovering properties God built into creation. “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above” (James 1:17). An effective medicine is a good gift. A skilled surgeon’s hands are a good gift. The believer who receives them with thanksgiving is receiving from his Father.
PunchlineGod’s power and God’s means are not rivals. The Lord who healed the waters of Marah did it by showing Moses a tree.
Luke, the beloved physician
When Paul closed his letter to the Colossians, he sent greetings from his companions, and one line has been quoted by Christian doctors and nurses ever since: “Luke, the beloved physician, and Demas, greet you” (Colossians 4:14).
Luke was a doctor. He was also the author of the Gospel that bears his name and of the book of Acts, which together make up more than a quarter of the New Testament. He travelled with Paul on long stretches of his missionary journeys; you can see it in the passages of Acts where the narrative suddenly shifts from “they” to “we,” beginning when Paul received the call to Macedonia and Luke writes, “immediately we endeavoured to go into Macedonia” (Acts 16:10). When Paul was in prison near the end of his life, abandoned by many, he wrote, “Only Luke is with me” (2 Timothy 4:11).
Paul did not call him “Luke, the former physician,” as if he had left medicine behind when he came to Christ. He called him “the beloved physician.” His profession was part of how Paul knew him and loved him. Some have suggested that Luke’s medical skill helped Paul through the physical toll of his travels, beatings and imprisonments. We cannot prove that, but it is easy to imagine.
Now look at a scene Luke himself recorded, after the shipwreck on the island of Malta:
In the same quarters were possessions of the chief man of the island, whose name was Publius; who received us, and lodged us three days courteously. And it came to pass, that the father of Publius lay sick of a fever and of a bloody flux: to whom Paul entered in, and prayed, and laid his hands on him, and healed him. So when this was done, others also, which had diseases in the island, came, and were healed: Who also honoured us with many honours; and when we departed, they laded us with such things as were necessary.
Paul prayed, laid his hands on the father of Publius, and he was healed. Then many others with diseases came and were healed. Luke was there, writing “us” and “we” throughout. The apostle who prayed for the sick and the physician who wrote the account were travelling together, and Luke records both the miracle and the honour the islanders gave them. There is no hint of tension between the two men. The gift of healing through prayer and the skill of medicine sat in the same boat, ate at the same table and served the same Lord.
If Paul saw no contradiction, neither need we.
What Asa got wrong
Some believers, sincerely troubled, point to one verse in particular as proof that going to doctors shows a lack of faith:
And Asa in the thirty and ninth year of his reign was diseased in his feet, until his disease was 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.
At first glance it might seem that Asa’s sin was consulting physicians. But read the verse carefully. “Yet in his disease he sought not to the LORD, but to the physicians.” The problem was what Asa did not do. He did not seek the Lord.
The context makes this clear. Earlier in his reign, Asa had relied on God in a great battle and seen a mighty deliverance (2 Chronicles 14:11). But later, threatened by the king of Israel, he took silver and gold out of the temple treasury and bought an alliance with the pagan king of Syria. When a prophet rebuked him for relying on a foreign king instead of the Lord, Asa threw the prophet in prison (2 Chronicles 16:7-10). His illness came at the end of a long drift from trust. He had stopped seeking God about anything. The physicians in that story may well have been practitioners of the pagan healing arts common at the time, but either way the verdict falls on Asa’s heart, not on the existence of doctors.
So Asa is a warning. But the warning cuts in a direction many people do not expect. It is a warning against trusting doctors instead of God, as if prayer were unnecessary and the Lord had nothing to do with our healing. There are believers who fall into exactly that error. They pray about their exams and their visa applications, but when they fall sick they go straight to the hospital and never think to ask the Lord or call the elders. The cure for Asa’s error is not to stop seeing physicians. It is to seek the Lord as well, and first.
There is a similar misunderstanding about the woman with the issue of blood, who “had suffered many things of many physicians, and had spent all that she had, and was nothing bettered, but rather grew worse” (Mark 5:26). Mark is honest that her doctors had failed her, and some of the remedies of the time were painful and useless. But when Jesus healed her, He did not rebuke her for having seen them. He called her “Daughter.” Her years of seeking help were not a sin. They were the history of a desperate woman who finally found the One she needed.
Prayer and oil together
James gives the church its instruction for the sick, a passage we have looked at closely in the previous teaching. “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).
Notice the oil. In the ancient world, olive oil was one of the most common medical treatments available. It was rubbed into wounds, used for aches and applied to the skin. When the Good Samaritan found the wounded man on the Jericho road, he “bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine” (Luke 10:34). Isaiah described untreated injuries as wounds that had not been “bound up, neither mollified with ointment” (Isaiah 1:6).
Christians have understood the oil in James in different ways. Some see it as primarily medicinal: James is telling the elders to pray and to use the best ordinary care available. Others see it as a sign of the Holy Spirit and of consecration to God, set apart from medical use. Sincere believers hold both views, and many hold something of both. But neither reading pits prayer against ordinary care. On the medicinal reading, James explicitly combines them. On the symbolic reading, James is describing what the church brings to the sickbed, and he says nothing against what the physician brings.
James also says, “Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed” (James 5:16). Healing happens in community, among honest people who keep praying. A church that prays faithfully for its sick members and also helps them get to the clinic, pays a hospital bill or sits with them through a long night on the ward is doing exactly what James describes.
Faith does not need to be proven by refusal
NuggetWhy, then, do so many believers feel pressure to refuse medical help? The pressure comes from several directions.
Sometimes it comes from teaching. A preacher declares that medicine is a confession of doubt, and that a real believer will throw away his tablets. Sometimes it comes from testimony culture. In some churches the most admired testimonies are those in which the doctor was proved wrong, and people quietly learn to leave the hospital out of their stories. Sometimes it comes from prayer groups and prophetic words, like the vision Erebi’s wife’s prayer partner had. Sometimes it comes from family, who fear what people will say if a pastor’s wife is seen at the clinic. And sometimes it comes from our own hearts, because refusing treatment can feel like the bravest, most spiritual thing we could do.
Here we need to remember the second temptation of Jesus in the wilderness. The devil took Him to the pinnacle of the temple and invited Him to throw Himself down, quoting a promise from Psalm 91 that the angels would catch Him. Jesus replied, “It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God” (Matthew 4:7). Jesus refused to manufacture a crisis in order to prove that God would come through. He trusted His Father too much to test Him that way.
Refusing necessary treatment in order to demonstrate faith can be a version of the same temptation. It places God under pressure to perform on our terms. Real faith does not need to stage a test. It rests in God, and it is free to use whatever good means He has placed within reach. “By faith Noah, being warned of God of things not seen as yet, moved with fear, prepared an ark to the saving of his house” (Hebrews 11:7). Noah’s faith built a boat. It did not stand in the rain to prove a point.
A word to those of us who lead. James warns, “My brethren, be not many masters, knowing that we shall receive the greater condemnation” (James 3:1). Teachers carry a heavier responsibility because their words shape other people’s choices. When a preacher tells a congregation to throw away their medicines, he will not be the one lying in a clinic bed a few days later. Jesus rebuked leaders who “bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men’s shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers” (Matthew 23:4). And through Ezekiel God rebuked shepherds who had not “healed that which was sick” nor “bound up that which was broken” (Ezekiel 34:4). A shepherd’s task is to bind up the sick, never to add a weight of guilt to their illness. If you are a pastor, preach healing boldly. Then make it equally clear from the pulpit that no one in your care should stop treatment without their doctor.
And a word to those who carry regret. Some readers have refused treatment in the past, or watched a loved one do so, and have lived with the consequences. Some have lost someone. If that is your story, hear the gentleness of God. You were trying to honour Him, perhaps under great pressure from people you trusted. “The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart” (Psalm 34:18). Bring your grief and your questions to Him. He does not stand over you with an accusation. Let His comfort reach you, and let the truth set you free for whatever decisions still lie ahead.
So let me say it plainly. Taking your medication is not a confession of doubt. Going for surgery is not agreeing with the devil. Receiving chemotherapy, dialysis, insulin or a course of antibiotics is not a failure of faith. And no believer ever needs to prove his trust in God by refusing the care his doctors recommend.
Go and show yourselves
There is a moment in Luke’s Gospel that speaks directly to those who believe God has healed them:
And as he entered into a certain village, there met him ten men that were lepers, which stood afar off: And they lifted up their voices, and said, Jesus, Master, have mercy on us. And when he saw them , he said unto them, Go shew yourselves unto the priests. And it came to pass, that, as they went, they were cleansed.
Jesus sent the lepers to the priests. Under the law of Moses, the priest was the one who examined skin diseases, declared a person clean and restored him to the community. He functioned, in part, as the health inspector of Israel. Jesus honoured that process. He did it with the leper in Luke 5 as well: “go, and shew thyself to the priest” (Luke 5:14). The healing was real, and it was confirmed by the appropriate authority.
That gives us a wise principle for today. If you believe God has healed you, go back to your doctor. Let the tests confirm it. Continue your treatment until the person qualified to change it decides that it can be changed. If God has healed you, the tests will show it, and your doctor will rejoice with you. Nothing about that dishonours God. It is exactly what Jesus told the lepers to do.
A few further pieces of counsel belong here, given with pastoral care rather than medical authority.
- Never stop prescribed treatment because of a sermon, a prophecy or a feeling. Speak to your doctor first.
- Treatment decisions belong to you and your qualified medical team. Pastors, prophets and prayer groups can pray, encourage and counsel, but they should not issue medical instructions.
- If you are unsure about a diagnosis or a recommended treatment, ask questions and, if you wish, seek a second opinion from another qualified doctor. That is wisdom, and “in the multitude of counsellors there is safety” (Proverbs 11:14).
- Be cautious about “miracle” products, herbal mixtures or anointed remedies sold with spiritual claims and no reliable evidence. Tell your doctor about anything you are taking.
- Pray before every appointment, and thank God after every good result.
A church where doctors and elders pray together
What would it look like for a church to hold faith and medicine together well?
It would pray for the sick boldly and often, laying hands on them, anointing them and expecting God to heal. It would also pray regularly for the doctors, nurses, pharmacists and laboratory scientists in the congregation, recognising their work as a calling from God. It would encourage members to go for check-ups and to take their health seriously. It would visit the hospital wards as well as the homes. It would welcome testimonies that include the surgeon and the pharmacist, giving God the glory for every means He uses. And it would never shame a member for taking medication, or quietly treat a hospital admission as a spiritual failure.
Such a church would also be honest about the limits of medicine. Doctors are not gods. They make mistakes, they run out of options, and they cannot raise the dead. Our trust is in the Lord, not in the hospital. But it is the Lord who made the hospital possible, who gave the surgeon her skill and the researcher his insight. To use them with gratitude is to trust Him.
Dr Ndukwe did not tell Erebi what to decide. He explained the risks of surgery and the risks of waiting, and said the choice was his. Then he said, “You asked me as a brother, so let me answer as a brother. God heals. I have seen Him do it in this hospital, sometimes in ways I could not explain. And God also gave me these hands. I do not think He is embarrassed by them.” He suggested that Erebi ask his pastor and the elders of his church to come and pray for him before the operation, as James says.
PunchlineErebi went home and thought about it for three days. Then he called the hospital and booked the surgery.
On the morning of the operation, his pastor and two elders came to the ward at six o’clock. They anointed him with oil and prayed over him in the name of the Lord. At half past seven, Dr Ndukwe came in, took his hand and prayed too. The surgery went well. The mass was removed. Erebi was home in under a week, and his recovery was quicker than expected.
A few weeks later he gave his testimony in church. He thanked God first, and then he thanked his elders and his surgeon by name. Afterwards someone in the car park muttered that it was not really a miracle, since a doctor had done it.
Erebi turned around. “My brother,” he said quietly, “is God’s hand too short to hold a scalpel?”
Teaching Companion
For Reflection
- Have you ever felt that you had to choose between trusting God and receiving medical care? Where did that pressure come from?
- What does the story of Marah teach about how God’s healing power and His means relate to each other?
- How does a careful reading of 2 Chronicles 16 change the way the story of Asa is often used?
- Why might refusing treatment to prove faith resemble the temptation Jesus refused in Matthew 4?
- How could your church better support both prayer for the sick and good medical care?
This Week
This week, pray specifically for the medical workers you know by name: doctors, nurses, pharmacists, laboratory staff, community health workers. If you can, tell one of them that you are praying for them and thank them for their work. If you are currently taking treatment, thank God each time you take it, and ask Him to bless the means He has provided. If you have been delaying a medical appointment out of fear or spiritual pressure, book it, and ask a trusted believer to pray with you before you go.
A Prayer
Father, You are the Lord that heals me. Thank You for every way You bring healing: by Your word, by the prayers of Your people, by the gifts of Your Spirit, and by the skill of doctors and nurses and the medicines You have hidden in Your creation. Forgive me for the times I have trusted the hospital without seeking You, and for the times I have despised the help You placed within my reach. Free me and Your church from the pressure to prove faith by refusing care. Bless every physician, nurse and health worker, and let them know their work is a calling from You. Heal the sick among us, and receive the glory for every means You use. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Truth received brings freedom. Truth believed establishes the heart.
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version. · Illustrations using first names only are composites unless stated otherwise.