American dying partakes too much of a fixation on the tree of knowledge. We act as if just knowing enough will enable us to beat the curse of Eden. Better trained doctors and nurses. More pharmaceutical research. Better surgical tools. Knowing more about diet. Better computer systems to track things, to keep more nearly complete records and to keep them available to our fingertips.
No. No. While knowledge isn’t to be disdained as nothing, neither is it everything. It is not sufficient. Knowledge doesn’t give life. God gives life. In the Garden, Satan had us believe that eating of the tree of knowledge was desirable, though it had been forbidden. Knowledge without obedience to God isn’t life. It is a prolongation of death. A medical system – any system – which is set up to run apart from a real, practical, confessed connection to the God of life is vanity.
If you are inside healing arts professionally, do not mistake knowledge as the key to life. Relationship is key. Right relationship to God and right relationship to man, our patients, redeems an otherwise sterile knowledge. Relationship first with God and then with another human being – the patient – is the foundation of medicine. Without it, the finest machinery and chemistry is folly. If you are not in medicine, beware that we who are are steeped in knowledge, but by training systems not only devoid of a dependence upon the gospel, but actively now hostile to it. Medical training is a glutton at the tree of knowledge, but avoids the tree of life. Unless redeemed by explicit and specific biblical instruction, medicine is dangerous to the life of the soul.
Excerpts from "Are We Christians Dying to Meet Him?"
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