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| image courtesy of www.freedigitalphotos.net |
Over £440,000 has been raised through the local newspaper appeal to
raise money for a new MRI scanner for King’s Mill Hospital. Even a generous
estimate of the population of the area would indicate that this is more than £2
per person, including children. In those terms it is an enormous amount of
money. CHAD, the local newspaper concerned, said, ‘The new scanner features a
range of hi-tech software allowing doctors to carry out more in-depth scans as
well as facilities to care for cardiac and breast scans’. What a tremendous
achievement! What a significant development this will be for local medical
provision.
I suppose this is an indication of what technology enables us to do in
medicine in 2013. The facilities that we have, and the expertise that we have,
contribute to an improved quality of life for all of us. But this story made my
mind turn to a verse in the Bible. God says, ‘I the Lord search the heart’.
Another Bible verse describes God as ‘a discerner of the thoughts and intents
of the heart’. However good an MRI scanner may be, it cannot discern our
thoughts and intents. Even the greatest technological minds could not devise and
build a device to accomplish that level of scan! I am not seeking to detract
from the tremendous achievement of fund-raising but to put the devices of men’s
creation into perspective.
The more demanding question would be, ‘when God scans our thoughts and
intents, what does He see?’ The real benefit of the high-power scanners is that
they might enable a doctor to see something that would be otherwise hidden –
they reveal what the human eye can’t detect, what remains a mystery to standard
forms of medical diagnosis. What might God see when He scans our minds and
motives? The Bible tells us that He sees us as sinners – those who have, and
will continue to, fail to live up to His standards. No one likes to see a dark
mass that could be a cancer on the results of an X-ray or scan. It could be
something life threatening. In a spiritual sense, sin is every bit as life threatening.
It can deprive us of spiritual life – a hope of heaven and fellowship with God.
It could consign us to a lost eternity. There is no medical solution to sin.
There is no ‘quick fix’. Our only hope as sinners is Jesus Christ. He died to
save us from the consequences of sin, to offer us new life in Him. What will
you do with Jesus Christ? Now you have the results of God’s scan, how will you
respond? Will you believe?
