This is a question which deeply affects our expectancy of God —that expectancy which acts as a ‘lightning rod’ in the heavenly places. This ‘lightning rod’
has to poke up just a little above the roof top and fears that illnesses are life threatening may detract from an undoubting trust in Jesus to solve the problem. When people hear the medical diagnosis that a disease is incurable or life threatening, terror and sadness may come in and become a weighty burden.
Then it is vital to cling to God’s promises —if only as a man clings to a tuft of grass on the cliff edge over which he has just fallen. Our hope may become thinner as time wears on, and our child–like expectancy that God is going to help us smaller than a mustard seed. Our natural reaction to the threat of a dreadful disability is to lower our lightning rods of faith expectancy.
From the point of view of the prayer-giver, the more threatening the illness, the harder we tend to feel we will have to work in prayer, fasting and in ministry.
As all die sometime, despite all our efforts, we become confirmed in our view that some things are going to be harder work for God than others. Cancer is a much bigger nut to crack than a passing headache, we suppose. Here we can see yet more forces at work that would lower our expectancy. The more prayer-givers worry about their own role in what’s going on, the more they wrongly suppose that we carry responsibility for the process. The greater this assumption, the less reliance is placed on God —and the mustard seed may grow yet smaller.
However, this measuring of the severity of an illness flows from our own experience and ideas, rather than the truth about what God can do. The medical profession might, on the evidence of their research, classify some diseases as incurable, but in the kingdom of God no disease presents the Lord with greater difficulty than another. We tend to think about our past experience of prayer and the levels of apparent success and failure we have seen, as the measure of God’s power and willingness to help. But the revelation of God the Father comes only through Jesus, so to really know God’s will and power we must watch the ministry of Jesus in the Gospels — and we see there that he never failed to help anyone on the grounds that the problem was too hard for him. People’s unbelief could be a hindrance but Jesus never let anyone down who came to him for help on the grounds that their problems were too huge, or that God wanted them to suffer or to die before their time. Power was coming out of Jesus and healing all who came to him. The same is true today.
