A listener named Leland writes in to ask this, "Pastor John, today I listened to your TGC podcast panel discussion that you moderated. You, David Platt, and Matt Chandler discussed the comfort of knowing that our good and sovereign God has ordained the suffering that people experience. Matt Chandler spoke movingly about how his view of God's sovereignty in ordaining his cancer helped him through the awful side effects of chemotherapy.

Here's my question though, if our sovereign God ordains cancer for his glory and a Christian person's good, Romans 8 28, why isn't the appropriate Christian response either to hope in God to glorify himself by healing the person miraculously or to rejoice in the glory of God in a life ended by cancer?

Why is it not a sin to use chemotherapy and other modern medicine to interfere with the natural progression of a disease God ordains for his glory and for a person's good? The answer is that it may be sin to pursue chemotherapy and it may be sin not to pursue chemotherapy.

It isn't the use of human science or ingenuity in relationship to the creation that makes an action sin or not. It's the way we think about it and the way it relates to God and the way it relates to faith and the way it relates to love. Perhaps it will make this a little more clear if I point out that the problem Leland sees in relation to chemotherapy also applies to prayer and supernatural healing.

In other words, if God ordains that I get prostate cancer, which I believe he did, then I could ask in relation to prayer and supernatural healing the same thing that Leland asks in regard to chemotherapy. Why interfere by prayer? Why interfere by prayer with the natural progression of a disease that God ordains for his glory?

So it isn't just chemotherapy that creates the issue, but any kind of intervention on our part, including prayer. Prayer for healing would be a human intrusion, and the use of medicine would be a human intrusion. So I think what would be most helpful for me to do here is to suggest five passages of Scripture that give us guidance in both of these kinds of intrusions, prayer and chemotherapy, which sometimes may be right and sometimes may be wrong.

And prayer may become eventually wrong. So first, here's five quick texts. Second Corinthians 12, 7-9. So to keep me from being conceited because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, a thorn was given to me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan, to harass me, to keep me from becoming conceited.

Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me, but he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you. My power is made perfect in weakness. Therefore I will boast all the more gladly in my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me." This text points out the obvious, that God has ordained for us to pray about our needs because we don't know at the outset whether our circumstances are intended to last or be temporary.

God bids us to pray and says in James 4, "We have not because we ask not," often. He doesn't treat prayer as an intrusion upon his sovereignty. He invites it as part of his sovereignty. It's part of his sovereign plan for ruling the world. In some cases, he will make it plain that he does not intend to take away the thorn in the flesh.

And we should say, even though it's a messenger of Satan, God is the one overruling it because he's talking about the sanctification of Paul through it. Instead, he intends to glorify his sustaining grace through suffering rather than his healing grace in that case. And we don't know whether that's the case ahead of time, so we're invited to pray and to be a part of the causality of what God's sovereign will is.

Second, 2 Corinthians 16, 12, "In the thirty-ninth year of his reign, Asa, the king, was diseased in his feet, and his disease became severe. Yet even in his disease he did not seek the Lord, but sought help from physicians." Now, in that case, God intended Asa's foot disease to lead him back to God so that he would seek him, seek help from God.

But Asa proved to be so indifferent to his relation to God and so saturated with a this-worldly mindset and all of the resources of the world that it didn't even seem important to him at all to seek God's help, and he went straight to doctors without consulting God at all, and he was clearly wrong to do it.

So therefore, I think we are sometimes wrong by failing to pray for healing before we take an aspirin or go to the doctor. That's why I said at the beginning that sometimes the pursuit of chemotherapy may be wrong, may not be wrong, may be wrong. It doesn't follow that it's right or wrong just that you are doing or can do it.

It may be wrong, especially if it betrays you have no interest in seeking God's help whatsoever and you're not going to rely on him at all and you don't love him and trust him at all. Well, then, whatever you do is going to be wrong. But it may not be wrong.

If you fly to chemotherapy with no reference to God, no love for God, no dependence on God, no prayer to God, you're in the same situation as Asa was in. Third, Colossians 4.14, "Luke, the beloved physician, greets you as does Demas." Now evidently Paul was quite happy to have an attendant physician traveling with him.

He didn't have to draw attention to the fact that Luke was a physician when he wrote Colossians. He could have dropped that with a kind of embarrassment. "Oh dear, I don't want to give the impression that I'm not relying on the Lord," and by referring to my good friend Luke as a physician as though people will think that I need a physician, he didn't drop the name.

He called him a beloved physician. But he wasn't embarrassed about it. He didn't seem to think that the work of a physician was intruding upon the sovereign plan of God for his health. Rather, it seems as though he regarded Luke's skill as a physician as a gift from God.

Fourth, 1 Timothy 5.23, Paul says to Timothy, "No longer drink only water, but use a little wine for the sake of your stomach and your frequent ailments." So it seems that Paul not only valued the work of his physician, Luke, but also he valued some of the therapies that he had learned along the way from whomever, namely that in Timothy's case, his chronic stomach problems found relief not just through prayer, but through a wise use of wine.

And if someone objects that there's a huge difference between wine and chemotherapy, my response is, "Well, actually there's not. The line between natural remedies and less natural remedies is not all that clear." And when you think about it, those lines become very blurry. But perhaps even more important is the next passage, the last one I'm going to refer to because this text says it doesn't really make any difference what the lines are between the natural and the human invented.

So here I am at Genesis 1, verse 28, "God blessed them, and God said to them, 'Adam and Eve, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and the heavens and every living thing that moves.'" Now, what does Moses mean when he writes, "Subdue the earth"?

Subdue the earth. It's a remarkable statement because it's given before the fall when everything in the earth and the world was perfect. Perfect. Well, what in the world does he mean by subduing what's perfect? Shouldn't you just leave it alone? No, you shouldn't just leave it alone. It means many things, Adam and Eve, as you find them in nature, are not yet perfectly suited for your maximal use.

They are perfectly suited for your change. They're perfectly suited as raw materials. So you need to take them as you find them, give thanks, and then by means of your craft and your art and your labor, change them, change them into a form where they are maximally beneficial to you.

So you might cut down a tree, cut it into boards, and build a house to keep the sun off and the rain off. Or you might pick grapes and crush them under your feet and store them in a cool place and make wine out of them, which in some cases would be called medicine.

Or you might take the flight of electrons around the nucleus and so alter them that you create a beam which kills cancer cells on the other side of the fall. So the upshot of these five passages of Scripture, it seems to me, is that God has provided an endless array of strategies for subduing this world and making it serve our maximal usefulness and fruitfulness to his glory.

And the key is, are we seeking the Lord? Are we depending on the Lord, trusting the Lord, praying to the Lord, loving the Lord in all of this? Are we praying, trusting, loving, seeking to submit ourselves deeply to his sovereign will? For there's no doubt, his sovereign will will in fact be done.

It will be done through prayer and through miracles and through medical intervention. And what God is looking for is not the least intrusive strategy of dealing with disease. He's looking for the deepest, most joyful submission to his sovereign will, however we deal with our suffering. That's a really fascinating biblical theology of medicine of faith.

Thank you, Pastor John. We have a bunch of episodes on suffering in the podcast archive. If that's where you find yourself or if you have a follow-up question about what we talked about today, check out our past episodes in the Ask Pastor John archive. You can find that in the app for Apple and Android devices or at our web home at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.

Well tomorrow we're going to talk about the end times, at least the urgency of the end times and our anticipation of Christ's soon return to earth. How then shall we live now? That's the question tomorrow on the table on the Ask Pastor John podcast with longtime pastor and author John Piper.

I'm your host Tony Reinke, we'll see you then.