Catherine confirms she is in remission from cancer

Catherine, Princess of Wales, wrote in an Instagram post today, “It is a relief to now be in remission and I remain focused on recovery.” She added, “As anyone who has experienced a cancer diagnosis will know, it takes time to adjust to a new normal. I am however looking forward to a fulfilling year ahead. There is much to look forward to. Thank you to everyone for your continued support.”

Nowhere in her post did she tell us the type of cancer she has been battling.

She did announce last September that she had completed chemotherapy, which narrows the possibilities. Her cancer had been detected after “major abdominal surgery” last January, so her medical team advised a “course of preventative chemotherapy.” Some have speculated that she had uterine or ovarian cancer, but the Princess of Wales has never confirmed the nature of her malignancy.

This is, of course, her right.

America’s odd fascination with British royalty

However, as I read her post and related articles, I found myself wanting to know more. Such curiosity is not limited to Catherine’s health—there is an entire industry in America devoted to the royal family. Books, articles, podcasts, videos, and so on—you could spend all day every day reading the latest news and gossip about them.

All of this strikes me as odd, especially since we Americans waged a war to be free of England’s control and another one three decades later to settle our disagreements. In fact, we ratified the treaty that ended the American Revolution in our favor on this day in 1784, which makes the timing of today’s news from the UK especially interesting.

Why, then, do we want to know more about the royal family than they want to tell us? We could ask the same question of our own celebrities, of course—actors and actresses, musicians, athletes, CEOs, politicians, and so on whose private lives are so often on public display.

Perhaps we feel entitled to such knowledge by virtue of their celebrity, as though this was part of the bargain for which they signed up when they became celebrities. Perhaps we feel empowered by knowing things about powerful people, as though discovering news about their private lives elevates us to their level just a bit.

Unless we are journalists or paparazzi, it’s not as though such knowledge will change anything in our lives on a practical level. If I somehow knew the specific nature of Catharine’s cancer today, what would I do with that information? How would it make my life any different?

But we speculate, nonetheless. And we want to know more than we know, often more than we should know.

Therein lies my point today.

Where did Cain get his wife?

Genesis 4 reports that “Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and bore Enoch” (v. 17). For millennia people have wondered, Where did she come from? The Bible does not say that God created her as he did Adam and Eve. Nor does it say that Eve gave birth to her as she did Cain (in which case he married his sister). Or that God made other people besides Adam and Eve and they then became her parents.

These seem to be the logical options. None of them is confirmed in Scripture, because the question carries no practical merit.

We can ask such questions for the rest of the day: How old is the Earth? How long did God take to create the universe? What happened to the dinosaurs? What did Jesus do between the ages of twelve and thirty? What became of the apostles whose deaths are not recorded in Scripture?

Each is speculative rather than practical. If I could answer these questions for you today, how would this change your life?

Here’s the bottom line: the Bible is a practical rather than speculative book. It doesn’t tell us everything we want to know, but it does tell us everything we need to know.

However, you and I in the West have inherited the Greek worldview, which is highly speculative, abstract, and rational. Read Plato’s dialogues or Aristotle’s discourses and you will discover long-running discourses on issues that are intellectually interesting more than they are practically relevant.

As a result, we want to know what we want to know. But our speculative quest can distract us from practical issues we should be addressing today.

Mark Twain on the Bible

Mark Twain noted, “It ain’t those parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me. It’s the parts that I do understand.”

What parts of the Bible bother you today?

J. I. Packer called the Bible “God preaching.” You and I have not truly heard its truth until that truth changes us in some way. Unless there is something we will do or stop doing as a result of studying God’s word, we have not fully studied God’s word.

But when we think biblically, we are empowered to live redemptively. We discover that “the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and of marrow, discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Hebrews 4:12). And we learn that Scripture is “profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (2 Timothy 3:16–17).

When last did reading God’s word change your life?

Why not today?