Well, welcome to Spring Branch Academy's public policy class. We are in the final trimester of this course. We've considered government, we've considered politics and economics, and now we're ready to consider medicine. And if you look at the topics of discussion in our culture, this is basically what our culture likes to talk about, especially make laws about and public policy about. involves our politics, our economics, and our health. To begin with, we're going to start very broad with a definition, the definition of medicine. What is medicine? Now, in a classroom setting, it'd be easy to kind of go around and poll you and find out what your exact answer is. Some of you are going to be thinking of a bottle of pills and I got to take my medicine. Some of you are thinking about maybe someday I'll enter the medical field and I'll pursue or study medicine, which makes it an academic discipline, a body of knowledge. I'm going to suggest that medicine is any physical means that improves physical health. By improvement, we're being pretty broad here. We're not just talking about getting well after being sick. We're also talking about preventative medicine, things that will keep you from getting sick or things that will improve your health, exercising, nutrition, good sleep habits, things like that. And perhaps even we should broaden it out beyond just physical health, maybe even to include mental health. After all, medicine often in our culture includes dealing with mental disorders and anxiety and depression and other psychological illnesses, we say. And so if we look at ourselves more holistically, both body and soul, medicine then becomes very broad. And so again, medicine is a physical means, something that's within human capabilities and powers that will improve health in some dimension. That's a pretty broad definition, but as we go through the next several weeks, I hope you'll see it matches the kind of things that gets brought under the broad umbrella of health in our culture. Well, having defined medicine, what is then a miracle? Now this one is a real challenge. It's been interesting to have discussions in class on defining what a miracle is. I've recorded some of the examples given, and your notes have them. One, and these I think come from past classes, so one example might be an unexpected, unexplainable occurrence, like a healing. And so some patient is not expected to live and the doctors have given up hope and then they're remarkably better. There's a remarkable recovery and the family and the doctors don't know what happened. And oftentimes Christians look at the doctor and say, it's a miracle. I know what happened. God healed my family member. So an unexpected, unexplainable occurrence. Or maybe a miracle is a supernatural event. In other words, something super, beyond, above the powers of nature. I think of Samson's great strength. Obviously, it's supernatural. The Holy Spirit came upon him. Or I think, conversely, of demonic power, demonic possession, like the man among the tombs in Mark chapter 5, that chains could not even keep him bound. There is a power and there are powers in this world that are bigger than just the mere physical powers that we experience, even nuclear. We know that there's great amounts of energy, but there is another realm of spirit that is very strong. Maybe we should define miracle as a direct act of God instead of something indirectly. Indirectly means he would use means. you know, so God chooses to heal me through medicine or he chooses to heal me directly. And so we would say if it's directly, that's a miracle. God did it. And then this sense we would, we would oppose medicine and miracle. He could either use medicine, a means, or he could do it directly and it would be a miracle. Now I hope you can start seeing, this is challenging. Last one is maybe the most common, a miracle is anything that is contrary to the laws of nature. Maybe the most humorous example that comes to mind is the axe head that floats in First Kings 7. The guy borrowed an axe from somebody and you know how axe heads work, they kind of like wedge it on the end of a stick or a shaft and I guess he probably, just like we've all done at some point, kind of held that, swung that thing back and it went whoo in the river. And he says to Elisha, I borrowed it. How are we ever going to pay it back? Because iron was quite valuable then. And so Elisha threw a stick in the water. The stick sank and the axe head floated. I've never been able to do that. I don't know about you. So that would clearly be contrary to the laws of nature. In this case, the laws of gravity. You know, if I was there standing next to you that day on the shoreline of the Jordan River, I think we'd look at each other and say, you know, I think we just saw a miracle happen. Well, unexplainable, unexpected, supernatural, direct act of God, contrary to the laws of nature. Let me just pause by the way here. I read GK Chesterton a little bit of his book Orthodoxy once and to promote faith he was almost saying like every act of nature is miraculous and I don't fault him for wanting us to see that every act of nature is God doing it. You can't read the Psalms without saying God is the one that waters the hills, or the end of Psalm 95 that I think closed the meadows, and God is behind the frost in Isaiah 47, God blows and it all melts. God is the active force within nature, separate from nature, it's not pantheistic, but within nature. But that's in accordance with the laws that by statute, it's by his decree, actually the language of science law comes from theology. The belief that God is the authority over nature and he set things up the way he wanted it and decreed as if everything needs to obey his will, that this is the way you're gonna act and not outside of it. which is the language of Psalm 119 and other places that describe it as a statute, as a law and everything obeys him. And so God set up the world by covenant with laws and nature acts that way. There is, as Oliver O'Donovan, an ethicist says, there is a created order to things. So I want you to know, I believe in the supernatural, but I believe that there is a true created order. There is something in nature, the way nature was made to work within the providence of God that he sustains and upholds and supports. It acts in accordance with those lines and laws. So because it's by his decree, if he wants to decree otherwise, and to go contrary to those laws and raise the dead and restart the world or send gigantic floods and all that his miraculous hand does from axe heads floating and sticks sinking. He has the authority to do so as the sovereign God of the universe. While I'm on this topic, I'm going to throw one other thing in here. It's an interesting side note. While creation has an order to it, history, how the events play out one after another, is utterly beyond calculus. Calculating. We will never come up with a formula for a kind of orderly way that events roll out. Ecclesiastes tells us that will never happen. And so I liked how O'Donovan put the two next to each other. Here we have creation that is utterly predictable, even with all that physics and nobody knows where the electron is on that kind of weird small, small level. Statistically, it's still predictable. It's like the flip of the coin. You don't know exactly the flip each time, but if you count them for thousands of times, it'll end up being 50-50, statistically. And so the whole world sits on marbles, these little electrons. We don't know where they're at. And yet, statistically, the laws of nature always work out in a predictable way. And yet, mysteriously, we can't even predict the weather. Even though we know how the laws of nature work, even though we know how the mechanisms work inside of things, in the big, big scheme of things, in the history of things, we never know what's going to come next. And this is so masterful on God's part in His providence. There is a created order, and yet there is a mystery to the events of life. So if God can do that with just our ordinary events, even our weather, and use the ordinary means that is the created order to create extraordinary things, then we need to be very careful in our definition of miracle. Because on the one hand, it could be a breaking of the laws of nature, something that's ax head floating contrary to gravity, or it could be such a remarkable use of nature that we all pause and wonder how did that event happen? It was so unlikely. And yet if we knew all the workings of it, there was nothing in it that was contrary to the actual laws of nature. The best example I have in scripture of this that comes to mind is when Ahab was told by the prophet Micaiah that you will die in battle. And so he wants to, you know, outdo the word of God, which is never wise. So he dresses up like a regular foot soldier. Has the other king, Jehoshaphat, going to army looking like a king. And of course, they all go after the king. But when the enemy sees, hey, he's not the king we want, they actually turn back. And then the Bible says that some, you know, archer, random archer pulls his bow back and launches an arrow. And it just happens to hit this random Israelite soldier, it's actually King Ahab disguised, right in the spot of armor where he was vulnerable. And so we look at this and go, aha, No laws of physics are being broken here. All the laws of nature are upheld, but this is definitely remarkable providence. Is that a miracle? It's definitely the hand of God and it fulfills the prophet's words. Is that a miracle though? This is challenging then because you have providence and you have miracle and is there a dividing line? Well, I was very helped, and hopefully you're going to be relieved too, with Psalm 107. Psalm 107 describes four scenarios. One, I think, is people lost in a desert, and then they're brought to a city, and oh, they praise God for His redemption. And then another, I think, is a fool that gets sick. Another is a rebel who's in prison. And then there's another one where they're sailors caught at sea and they cry out to heaven for God to save them. And in these four scenarios, and I may not have gotten all the details right, but the refrain is given each time for God's redemption that they should praise God for his wonders, his Nephiloth. That's the Hebrew word from palay. Palay is wonder, things that we can't understand that make us sit back in awe and amazement and go, how did God do that? This is the word that's given, I think, to the deliverance out of Egypt and the plagues and the parting of the Red Sea and the God of wonders. I think it's similarly then in the New Testament, though it's in a different language, but the signs and the wonders. In Psalm 107, I don't think there's anything there that breaks the laws of nature. And yet the healing, the deliverance, the bringing, being brought to safety happened in such a remarkable way that it was definitely due to prayer. And God showed up very, I mean, to say intervened would act like he never does anything except sit back and then gets called into action. He's always active. That's part of what is his, um, his, um, um, omnipotence means. But God in His working responded to prayer and did it in such a way that it was definitely a redemption in a remarkable fashion. And so I'm going to suggest to you that this word wonder is really the Bible's word for miracle and it points to the fact that whether it is an axe head floating, or an arrow randomly hitting the king, whether it is breaking the laws of nature, or it is a remarkable use of providence within the laws of nature, both of them are miracles because both of them cause us to wonder. And that we will never know, necessarily, what it was specifically. Now this can help us because some of the things that science has said, oh, you know, it was God in the gaps. People thought it was, you know, God doing these things. Now we know better. Oh yeah. But the wonder is still not gone. God does wonders in nature and God does wonders above and beyond nature. And so we should worship the God of wonders who gives us that wow factor. That should help us when we look at the doctor and the doctor, you say, you know, I don't know why your loved one is alive. They should have been dead. You know, we already pronounced them dead and yet here they are. And we say, doc, it's a miracle. And he looks at it and says, no, no, no, no, it's not a miracle. I don't want to be offensive here, but if we knew all that was working, you know, underneath, in the molecules, in the cells of this body, we could actually figure out, no, it wasn't a miracle. Look, I say, if you cast dice, you know, a thousand times, and every time it came up on a six, yes, statistically, there's a slim chance that could happen, and it wouldn't break any law of nature. If you could throw it down once, and it's a six, you could throw it down again, and it's a six. But it's so unlikely that it almost looks like it's haunted. There's something going on here. Don't tell me that God didn't do this. This is a wonder. This is a miracle. And having had someone in my family that's the only one in our medical classification that's alive, I may never know if the experimental drugs did it, or the anointing of oil did it, or if it was both. The point is God did it. To God be the glory. We have an example of that actually in Isaiah chapter 38. When Hezekiah, the king that reformed Judah, is told, put your house in order. The sickness that you have is unto death. You will not live. Now, it's one thing for a doctor to tell you that because they might be wrong. It's another thing for the prophet to tell you that. God has diagnosed you. You're not going to live. Now, this terminal illness, the knowledge of this terminal illness, sent Hezekiah to God in deep distress and prayer. He turned his face to the wall and wept bitterly. Oh God, don't you remember all the reforms I've done and how I've loved your name? And please, how can I praise you unless it's in the land of the living? And all these kind of prayers like this. And so God sends the prophet Isaiah back and gives him another 15 more years of life. Now that's interesting. God had pronounced, you're going to die. And now he's going to live. If this doesn't count as a miracle, what does count? God is doing it explicitly. And so the end of the text is so surprising because it tells us that in verse 21 of Isaiah 38, Let them then take a cake of figs and apply it to the boil that he may recover." Now, isn't that interesting? So, a poultice, they call this, a kind of a packing together using figs. Now, nobody's going to come away from this and go, oh, we just have a new medical cure, fig poultices. If anybody's got a boil around here, call Isaiah. He's got the figs. He's going to heal you. No, this is a miracle. The guy should have been dead. He's alive. Did the figs heal him? Well, we wouldn't be that foolish, would we? We would say God healed him. But notice, it is definitely a miracle, it is definitely supernatural, he should have been dead, and yet God used a means to do it. Call it medicine, call it just an arbitrary means, but he used a means to do it. We should not wedge then a dichotomy between the two, as if somehow miracle and medicine are necessarily opposed to each other. So as we go through the next several weeks, I want you to keep this in mind then. There is a necessary interplay, or there is a potential interplay between the two, the interface. In other words, the boundary between medicine and miracle is not sharp, fast, and hard, or impermeable. It may be miracle only, ax head floating, even though there a stick was thrown in, or it may be medicine only, Though there, providence upholds everything that happens in this world. Nothing happens apart from God, not even a sparrow falling to the ground. Or it may be a combination of medicine and miracle. A remarkable recovery and yet figs were used. In either way, let us recognize that God is at work and God heals. And so, as we consider our topic together, we're going to get into some examination on spirit, soul, and body, and some mysterious ways they interplay in mental health. We're going to have to seek some discernment from the Lord to recognize what is a spiritual cause, a soulish cause, a thinking cause, or what is a mere physical cause behind this presentation or manifestation of a sickness. Sometimes we may find it's more than one. Sometimes it's a domino effect. Maybe thinking caused body, then body caused this spiritual condition. We don't know for sure, but we want to understand and appreciate the complexity of it, and we want to come at this with a humble spirit. To introduce then this topic, I'm going to have a couple different assignments for you. Number one, D. Martin Lloyd-Jones was a medical doctor in London before he became a Christian. I'm told he was actually on the way to become quite famous. He was at like the top-notch hospital there in London. He then became a preacher. But for the rest of his life, he continued to read on medicine and was always intrigued by the interface between medicine and miracle. Between, in other words, the body and the spirit and how God handles the health of both. I want you to listen to his address after he retired from the pulpit to the Christian Medical Association. He's going to talk about some of the things that he heard and observed over time, like this man who was a handyman, I think he was a blacksmith or some sort, and was wasting away in a hospital bed. And the doctor gave up on him and said, sure, if you want to go home, I guess go home. And as soon as he got back in his shop, he recovered. or the lady that was always anticipating the doctor's return. That's his nickname, you know, for when he's going to preach every year back in Wales. And, and so it's just like, she was dying and yet all of a sudden she sat up in bed or, or asked, when is he coming? And found out when Lloyd-Jones was coming back into town, and the mere fact that she had something to live for enabled her to recover. It was those kind of things that perplexed him and intrigued him. And so I want you to be intrigued with him. He's a rare find to have somebody in the medical profession as well as the preaching. And so listen intently to his ideas of medicine and miracle. And he was one who believed in the supernatural acts and even gifts of the Holy Spirit. Number two, I also want you to start reading in the book, Margin by Richard A. Swenson. He also was a medical doctor. He didn't become a preacher, but he started devoting his life to preventative medicine. Because as an MD, he realized half of his patients didn't need to be there. If they had just lived more healthy lives, they would have been spared having to see the doctor. And so being concerned about people's health, he says, what's the best way to make people healthy? Let me get into the preventative medicine side. Creating then margin became the goal to create kind of space in life, a cushion both financially and in time that could absorb the unexpected became part of the means of relieving stress, which he claims is the biggest cause, the biggest culprit behind modern diseases. And so by reducing stress through adding margin to life, we can be more healthy. It's interesting to me he claims that it took him two full years to actually transition to that place of life. such an instance himself of the modern hectic lifestyle. I think you're going to enjoy it. It's filled with quotes, anecdotes. It should make you really think about modern life and about your choices and the opportunities as well as dangers that you have in it due to its stresses. And so may the Lord bless us as we consider these topics together in the next several weeks. I thank you. I'm glad you're joining this, and so, Lord bless you, and may God, who is the God of wonders, be praised in all of this. Amen.