Should Christians use doctors?

Question 11096

Should Christians use doctors, or does going to the surgery show a shortage of faith? I have been asked this more often than you might expect, usually in a low voice by someone who has been told by a well-meaning friend that real believers trust God rather than the NHS. The question deserves a straight answer, because the wrong answer has cost lives.

Let me give the conclusion first and then show my working. Yes. Christians use doctors, and there is nothing in Scripture that suggests otherwise. Medicine is one of the ordinary ways God cares for his creatures, and using it is an act of gratitude rather than an act of unbelief.

Scripture is remarkably relaxed about medicine

Start with the plainest evidence. Paul’s travelling companion Luke, who wrote a Gospel and the book of Acts, is described in Colossians 4:14 as the beloved physician. The Greek word is iatros, an ordinary term for a medical practitioner. Paul does not describe him as a former physician, nor apologise for the association. The man’s profession is mentioned with warmth.

Then there is Paul’s advice to Timothy in 1 Timothy 5:23, telling him to stop drinking only water and to use a little wine for the sake of his stomach and his frequent ailments. That is a prescription. Paul, who had healed the sick by the power of the Spirit, tells his closest younger colleague to treat a recurring physical complaint with a physical remedy. If ever there were a moment for the apostle to say that Christians use doctors at the expense of their faith, this was it. He says the opposite.

Add to that Isaiah applying a cake of figs to Hezekiah’s boil, the good Samaritan pouring oil and wine on wounds in a parable Jesus told approvingly, and the proverb that a joyful heart is good medicine. Scripture treats treatment as normal. It never sets remedy against trust.

Jesus himself made the point

When the Pharisees objected to the company Jesus kept, his reply was that those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. The whole force of the illustration depends on it being obvious and uncontroversial that sick people should see a doctor. If his hearers had believed that seeking treatment was faithless, the analogy would have collapsed.

That is a small detail and I think it is a telling one. Jesus draws his picture of God’s mercy from the ordinary practice of medicine. He does not correct the practice. He commends it by using it.

So when someone asks whether Christians use doctors, the honest reply is that the Lord Jesus assumed they would. The burden of proof lies entirely with those who say otherwise, and I have never seen them discharge it from the text.

Where the confusion comes from

The usual proof text is King Asa in 2 Chronicles 16:12, who in his illness sought help from physicians and not from the Lord. Notice the wording. The complaint is not that he consulted physicians. It is the phrase that follows, that he did not seek the Lord. Asa’s problem was a pattern of self-reliance running through his whole reign, and the chronicler had already criticised him for relying on the king of Syria rather than on God in a military crisis.

The other source of confusion is the woman with the flow of blood who had suffered much under many physicians and was no better but rather grew worse. That is a comment on the medicine of the first century, which was frequently useless and often harmful. It is not a doctrinal prohibition. Mark is explaining why she was desperate, not warning us off the clinic.

Behind both misreadings sits a false alternative. The choice is never between God and medicine, as though he were one option on a list. He is the one who made the body that heals, gave the mind that discovered the treatment, and sustains the surgeon’s hands. Christians use doctors precisely because they believe God works through means.

Faith and means belong together

We accept this everywhere else without a murmur. You pray for your daily bread and you also go to work and to the supermarket. You trust God to keep your family safe and you also fit a smoke alarm. Nobody accuses the farmer of unbelief for ploughing the field. The idea that medicine alone must be refused in order to prove sincerity is arbitrary, and I suspect it survives because illness frightens us and we look for something to control.

James 5:14 tells the sick to call for the elders of the church to pray and anoint with oil, and I take that seriously and practise it. But notice that it is an addition, not a substitution. The passage does not say to cancel the appointment. Prayer and treatment run on parallel tracks, and there is no competition between them.

I would go further. Refusing treatment in order to demonstrate faith is closer to testing God than to trusting him, which is precisely what Jesus refused to do when Satan invited him to jump from the temple. Christians use doctors and pray at the same time, and I have never found the two to interfere with one another. On the harder cases, see my answer on why some prayers for healing fail.

The pastoral damage of the other view

I want to be direct here, because this is not an academic question. When people are taught that Christians use doctors only when their faith fails, three things follow, and I have watched all three. Believers delay treatment for conditions that were curable when caught early. Parents make decisions for children who have no say in them. And those who do not recover are left believing their illness is a verdict on their spiritual state.

That last one is the cruellest. A woman sitting in an oncology ward should not have to wonder whether her tumour is evidence that she never really believed. There is no such equation in Scripture. Paul left Trophimus ill at Miletus. Epaphroditus nearly died. Timothy had frequent ailments. Paul himself carried a thorn in the flesh that God declined to remove.

If someone has laid that burden on you, please put it down. It was not given to you by God. Related questions are handled in my answers on whether Christians should take medication and on alternative medicine.

Christians use doctors with wisdom, not credulity

Saying that Christians use doctors is not saying that doctors are infallible or that every recommendation must be accepted without thought. Medicine is a human discipline practised by fallible people, and second opinions exist for good reason. There are genuine ethical questions where a believer may need to decline what is offered, particularly at the beginning and end of life.

What I am arguing against is the blanket refusal, the principled avoidance of medicine as a category. Weigh individual treatments, ask questions, pray for wisdom, and involve people who love you in the decision. That is discernment. Refusing the whole enterprise is not discernment, it is superstition wearing a spiritual coat.

And do remember to thank God for the treatment when it works. We are quick to pray when we are ill and slow to give credit when we recover, as though only the dramatic recoveries count. The antibiotic that cleared the infection came from the same hand as the miracle. Christians use doctors and then thank the Lord, which seems to me the right order of things.

One more thought for those in the medical professions who are believers. Your work is a genuine ministry, whatever anyone tells you about full-time Christian service. Luke’s Gospel exists because a doctor investigated carefully and wrote accurately, and the same habits of observation and honesty that make a good clinician made him a reliable historian. You are not doing a second-class job while other people do the spiritual work. You are standing where suffering is, week after week, doing something about it in the name of the God who made bodies and intends to raise them.

So, now what?

If you have been putting off an appointment out of some vague sense that faith requires it, make the appointment today rather than at some point when you feel more settled about it. Then pray about it on the way, and ask your elders to pray too. Both, not one. The question of whether Christians use doctors is answered every time a believer walks into a waiting room in the ordinary confidence that God is not offended by competence.

If you know somebody who is being pressed by others to refuse treatment, speak up gently and early. It is far easier to have that conversation before a crisis than during one. And if you are the person who has been doing the pressing, might this be the moment to ask where that teaching actually came from?

No longer drink only water, but use a little wine for the sake of your stomach and your frequent ailments. (1 Timothy 5:23, ESV)