When you take some medicine, swallow a pill or receive an injection, do you really know what you are getting?
Repeatedly, our society uses an act of faith, that is believing in medicines, to address our illnesses, and rightfully so.
We trust medicines believing that skilled doctors and pharmacists with their extensive training and knowledge, tied with compassion for those struggling with health, will do what is right.
Doctors with the aid of X-rays will look inside to see where problems lie.
With years of experience and many cases, doctors increase their proficiency in diagnosis and treatment. Each medicine given deals with a specific problem.
Doctors have nothing to gain by giving wrong medicine or treatments – and everything to lose in their reputation. Because of who they are we put our trust in them over and over with often very little question.
There is another source of healing and treatment that also requires an act of faith that is just as easy to accept.
The advice and counsel comes from God who is fully aware of what we are dealing with beyond even our own observations.
God knows us personally and all people of the world, from the inside out.
Where even doctors can make misdiagnosis, God is never wrong. At times people do not like their doctors diagnosis and go for a second opinion. Who is to say the second doctor is smarter or more right than the first?
People don’t always like God’s perspective. They can go to other ideas but will usually go with the one they like which can be very wrong.
The Bible in II Peter 1:3 says that, God’s “divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness.”
For whatever ills us, God has remedies. For them to work we too must swallow, or take them in by faith for them to work. God loves us, desiring us to realize life to its fullest. There is nothing gained for Him by giving wrong advice.
There is one whose aim is to steal from us, to kill us or to destroy us. His counsel comes even with hints of truth and wisdom but as an angel of light he looks to deceive us. His counsel is the second opinion that many of the world are following.
Just look at their lives. Are they free, joyful, at peace, or has following his ideas lead to depression, fear and anxiety which is increasingly robbing life from many in our world? Put your faith in Jesus, God’s Son who is the life, the truth, the way to a rich life and an eternal life.
Greg Dalman is a reverend at Maple Ridge Alliance Church.