A Contest on a Mountaintop

Lately, the drought has taken its toll. I'm not talking about lack of rain falling from the sky. I'm talking about spiritual rain. So many days, months, years without the refreshing and nourishing Spirit of God raining down on His people. We've learned to "settle" ... to lower our expectations ... to tighten our belts and to make do. 

And in this atmosphere, sometimes the enemy of our souls brings calamity upon us to try to convince us to give up, to lose faith, to lose confidence in God's love and power. Such a calamity has befallen us lately. A diagnosis of metastatic pancreatic cancer with spread to the liver, stomach, and one of the adrenal glands has sapped my husband of physical strength and wracked his body with daily, persistent pain. 

It is hard to watch, hard to listen to the efforts of people who are dealing with their own anticipatory grief and doing and saying things to make themselves feel better. It's hard to entertain the possibility that this thing will be fatal, with all that entails. Been there, done that. I can't awfulize the future. It's too much.

I've chosen, rather, to believe that God will be glorified through whatever happens, and what happens may just as likely be his healing. I've been speaking healing on his body: death to the cancerous cells, and protection on the healthy cells. 

Yes, he will undergo chemotherapy. Yes, he will fight to stay around as long as he can. And yes, the doctors have given him a timeline. But others have been known to surprise the doctors and go into remission, and I am clinging to the God of wonders, who spoke life into existence. Because God is the only one who knows how this will turn out. And more and more, I am reminded of one particular story from the Old Testament as the diagnoses keep piling on and on.

Elijah - after 3 years of drought - met the prophets of Ba-al (god of fire and darkness) on the top of Mount Carmel. It was a showdown, a contest between their god and his God. Each would prepare a sacrifice, and the god who answered by fire would be the winner.

Most know the story. Ba-al was a shoe-in to win; after all, he was the god of fire!! But Elijah didn't allow them to use any parlor tricks to start fires themselves. And Ba-al didn't answer, even after they cut themselves in their frenzy of begging. Hours they wore themselves ragged from their part in this cosmic contest. Still no fire.

Then it was Elijah's turn. But he didn't pray just yet. He made it harder for his God to answer. He got servants to fetch water from the sea below. Barrels full of water, drenching the sacrifice. It soaked the animal and it soaked the wood. 

Then he spoke just a few words asking God to glorify Himself. 

Free image from Pixabay

And the fire came from the heavens. It consumed the wet animal, even licked up the water on the wood and burned the wood to ash. The answer was impossible to deny. The God of Israel - the same God who extended His grace through Jesus - displayed only a fraction of His power, and the prophets of Ba-al knew their fate was sealed.  They ran. And they didn't get far. 

This is courage written in Scripture for us to realize that the more impossible the barrier, the more glory God gets when He overcomes it. Stories like these give me the courage to stand in the faith of Jesus (see Galatians 2:20, KJV and note the word "OF") and command the sickness to leave in the authority He delegated in Matthew 10:8. I follow the pattern Jesus set: not to pray for healing, but to command the disease to go away. 

Because this horrible disease, this contest between death and life, is impossible with all the knowledge and skill of humans. This disease is stage 4, considered incurable, only treatable - and only to the end of prolonging a very short time-frame. That's the human side of it. But we place our faith in the God of the impossible, the God of the incurable, the God who answered by fire that licked up the water in the wood and the trench they dug around the sacrifice. Yes, THAT God.  

King David's words, given to us early on in this journey, still ring in my head: "I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the LORD." (Psalm 118:17) Focusing on that gives me focus and helps me not to succumb to the daily grinding attitude of hopelessness that surrounds this diagnosis. 

I rest in His faith and speak to this cancer - daily - to shrink, to shrivel and to disappear in Jesus' mighty name. I speak to the pain this disease causes in my husband's back and tell it to leave, so that he has dignity and the mental capacity to choose how to live his life. This is life and death here. And life - and the Giver of life - wins.