Below, Randy wrote about C. Everett Koop, the former surgeon general:
Modern Reformation - Print Friendly
I highly recommend the periodical along with the Confessional Presbyterian. Here is an excerpt from the article:
If you haven't ever seen this article in Modern Reformation then check it out if you have access:Ah yes...the Navy when they still allowed beards.
In January of 1985 only one man had a beard that wore a Navy uniform. Admiral C. Everett Koop. And I don't think he ever shaved it. He was a Presbyterian btw. And loved a good mixed drink.
Modern Reformation - Print Friendly
I highly recommend the periodical along with the Confessional Presbyterian. Here is an excerpt from the article:
I don't know how many operations I performed in my surgical career. I know that I performed 17,000 of one particular type, and 7,000 of another. I practiced surgery for thirty-nine years, so perhaps I performed 50,000 operations. I was successful, and patients were coming to me from all over the world. And one of the things that endeared me to the parents of my patients was the way my incisions healed. No one likes big scars, but they are especially upsetting to mothers when they appear on their children. So I set out early on to make my scars small, as short and as thin as possible. These "invisible" scars became my trademark. But was I a healer?
The secret of thin scars is to make the incision precise-no feathered edges-and in the closing, to get the edges of the skin in exact apposition. I would do this by sewing the stitches inside the skin, but not through it, and the knots were tied on the bottom. All you have to figure out is how I crawled out after doing that.
I was the one who put the edges together, but it was God who coagulated the serum. It was God who sent the fiberblasts out across the skin edges. It was God who had the fiberblasts make collagen, and there were probably about fifty other complicated processes involved about which you and I will never know. But did God come down and instruct the fiberblasts to behave that way? In a sense, he did. But he did it through his natural laws, just the way he makes the grass grow, the rain fall, the earth quake. The question, then, is not, Does God heal? Of course he heals! We are concerned with this question: Granted that God heals, is it normally according to natural laws or an interruption of those laws (i.e., a miracle)?
Ordinary Providence
It is God's providence that keeps the sea at the edge of the shore, or an airplane in the sky, or that makes cats out of kittens. When the twenty-three chromosomes of the sperm and the twenty-three chromosomes of the egg are put together, it is God's ordinary activity that forms a baby. It is his ordinary activity that grows a baby into a child, a child into an adolescent, an adolescent into an adult, and an adult into an elderly person. It is also his ordinary providence that brings about the death of a person, set off by one phenomenon or another. Nevertheless, the phenomenon is part of God's natural law. Can you interrupt or alter God's law of nature? It may indeed appear that you can. You might accelerate the process or slow it, but you cannot avoid it. Whatever happens, it is according to God's providence.
Suppose you get tonsillitis. Your doctor recommends penicillin, and your condition improves. You say to your doctor, "You're a magician!" Not so. He was an instrument, just as I was an instrument in stitching the skin together. I used instruments to do it, but I was an instrument in so doing. You might say at this point, "What makes you so special?" And the reply is, "I'm not." Nothing makes me special. God uses instruments who will spend eternity with him. I'm one of those instruments. But he also uses instruments who curse him and people who never even acknowledge him.
I remember well an incident that occurred during my days in training. A woman was recovering from gall bladder surgery. She said to her surgeon as he made his rounds, "I thank God for making me well." The surgeon angrily grabbed the foot of the bed with both hands and shouted, "God didn't do that; I did!" But whether this doctor acknowledged it or not, he was an instrument of God's providence....
