The phenomenon you describe is all too common. The one area where it particularly bothers me is with my evangelical friends when it comes to serious diseases like cancer and Covid. Four of them have died in the last year because they told me that God would protect them from Covid and that it was not that bad. One of them did so five days after assuring me that God had told him he was protected and having sent me a piece of propaganda allegedly spoken by Henry Kissinger to WHO that vaccines were a way for governments to control the population.
More problematic are those unquestionably faithful people who pray for deliverance from cancer and claim great victories after the first round of treatment when invariably all the scans and tests come back normal. Prayers of Thanksgiving are enthusiastically offered up to God for having healed the patient. Nowhere is it acknowledged the hand that medical science had in the “cure”. As someone with three medical degrees who used to deal with cancer in a clinical setting, I know that no matter how dire the original diagnosis, this almost always happens. The key to determining whether there is likely to be a long term remission is how long the patient goes before reappearance. If the period of time is relatively short, the prognosis is fairly dire. There’s really no way of knowing except to wait. If it is 5 years after the initial diagnosis, one can breathe a sigh of relief. Too often, believers have such faith in the healing power of God that they will totally ignore the likely outcome when someone receives a stage IV cancer diagnosis. Without knowing more, I am fairly certain that that person is not long for this world. The odds of living a long healthy life become remote.
Of course I never say anything. I am the last one to destroy someone’s hope. But often people’s faith in a highly unlikely outcome, affects their decisions regarding their course of treatment. Too often I have seen people hasten their own death because they put their faith in the healing power of God and ignore the tools of modern medicine. Kind of like the anti-VAXors I knew who now litter our graveyards.
Like you, I believe in the healing power of God and I have seen miracles in the face of a hopeless situation. But these incidents are extremely rare and I have no idea why some people live when most die. There are things above my pay grade. Like you I cringe when people claim that they have seen God’s hand at work or have heard his voice. I can applaud their enthusiasm, but I wish they would be a bit more circumspect and use better judgment before making fools of themselves.
