Listener named Leland writes in to ask this, Pastor John, today I listen to your TGC podcast

panel discussion that you moderated.

You David Platte and Matt Chandler discussed the comfort of knowing that our good and

sovereign God has ordained the suffering that people experienced 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

hoping 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

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