The Disease is the Cure

I am not sure if you read the news last week, but the cause toward curing cancer has taken a major step forward. I was so blown away by this discovery I wanted to post about this last week, but at the same time did not want to interrupt my “Post-Modern Christianity Week.” So here goes. The following is taken from an article posted on wired.com:
“Researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles have tweaked HIV to create a gene therapy that attacks cancer tumors in mice.

The UCLA AIDS Institute scientists genetically altered HIV and folded it into an envelope made of another virus called sindbis, which typically infects insects and birds. That turned the altered HIV into a missile that hunted down metastasized melanoma cells in the lungs of living mice.”

In case you didn’t read closely, and even if you did, let me repeat—scientists have used HIV to kill cancer cells. The two most scourges of cellular destruction are intertwined? Unbelievable. At my time as a chaplain in the hospital I saw some of the effects that HIV ravaged on the body. And to think, a benign strain of this awful virus can be used to cure another illness that does equally destructive things, well that boggles the mind.

Such a reversal of the normal nature of things reminds me of the passage in 1 Corinthians 15:55-57:
“‘Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?’
The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.”

When Christ took sin upon himself, and he also became our death. He searched out the sin and death in all of us, and destroyed it. Christ has turned sin, death, and destruction on their head. They hold no more sway over us. God has achieved the unexpected (our salvation) by means of the unexpected (becoming what he loathes--He uses sin to destroy sin. God’s methodology may be unorthodox, but his love is even more astounding.