What does the Bible say about coping/dealing with a terminal illness?

The trial is sometimes very severe. For instance a fatal disease, throwing the patient into paroxysms of pain night and day, and making death a sure thing in the immediate future, is fairly testing to both the afflicted one, and to the relatives, who watch with breaking hearts the long-drawn-out agony, and in anticipation endure the bereavement. Often the cry is wrung from hearts, Why does God allow all this?

Your case is painfully interesting. We are persuaded that if there be simple faith in waiting upon God, He will heal and restore. He is the Hearer and Answerer of prayer. We recommend you to retire from all creature confidences and cast yourself simply upon the Living God. You have been looking to human cisterns. We also judge you have been over-anxious to get well. Seek grace to lie passive in your Father's hands and know no will but His. When once your heart can say, “Thy will be done,” the great moral end of the discipline is reached. We pray that you may reap a rich harvest of blessing from all the painful exercise through which you are now passing. May God comfort you, dear friend.

We should be with God about our sickness, and after bowing under His mighty hand, we may rest assured that He will raise us up. This is not at all a question of so-called faith cure. There is often more pride in what is called that than in the humble employment of proper means for recovery. God may, and doubtless often does, heal in answer to prayer, and without the use of medicines, just as He often blesses the instrumentalities used. But the point of importance is that recovery is not the first object. What would God have us learn in our sickness? Has there been disobedience for which we are feeling His chastening hand? Or, if there has been no direct act of disobedience, has there been a low, carnal, worldly state, worse than actual outbreaking evil? How foolish to expect or want recovery to bodily health before the soul is healed.

There is a poor thing on a sick bed, lisping praises, and God having an ear to listen to and accept that sacrifice of praise. I was with a dying one who was full of uncertainty as to what would be her end; I said, "Would it not be better to use up the little time remaining to His glory?" "What!" she answered, "I, gasping here, able to do anything for His glory?" "Yes, if you take all you are suffering from His hand, saying to it all, Even so, Father, for so it seemeth good in thy sight, He will settle with His Son all about your end, on the one hand; and on the other hand, be listening for your sacrifice of praise." All love on one hand, and all magnificence on the other.

But it is all that we may be partakers of His holiness, and become fitted to walk with Him while we are still down here in the wilderness; and a broken and contrite heart He will not despise. You and your wife are both in His hand, and while to you the seeing her suffering is a strong and a searching medicine, it is one as full of love to you, and of grace toward His children around you, as it is of love and favour to herself. I look, up for her thus: first, that she may glorify God while in the furnace, and that Christ may be magnified, made to lookers-on to appear bigger than they thought Him, in her body, whether it be by life or by death. But then I look up for myself and us: that she may be restored to us, and that we may not have sorrow upon sorrow. He is pitiful to His children, and I am sure He knows how deeply sorrow would be ours if she were taken now to enter into her joyful rest. His will be done, come what may; and nothing is without Him. As the First and the Last, He is Master of the ground long before we were in being: yet I do hope in Him for her restoration, and for our consolation as well as yours therein.

All goes on here under the Lord; a good deal of discipline in it in some cases, but that is as it should be. They that wait on the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up as on eagles' wings, run and not weary, walk and not faint. The cold, damp winter here seems breaking a little. The Lord has let it reach me, and produce threatening symptoms, but I accept it all from Him. I can say this, that if He should take me home out here, my having come out was rightest of the right; for He has been renewing my soul amid the conflict and trial, and opening Scripture in a most blessed way to me. What is writhing pain, if one can say, "Even so, Father; for so seems it good in Thy sight?" and He has laid upon me "this light affliction, which is but for a moment," etc. (2 Cor. 4:17-18.)

And now an incident by way of illustration. The late Dr. W.T.P.Wolston, of Edinburgh, used to tell of a man whom he once visited in that city. He had suffered for a long time from an incurable and exceedingly irritating and painful disease. The doctor pitied him greatly, and feeling that his words were quite inadequate to help the sufferer in his affliction, suggested that he should pray for him. "All right, doctor," came the astonishing reply, "but let it be maistly praise."

Satan buffeted Paul the Apostle, but the Lord turned the buffetings to blessings, and that fact made Paul endure, sustained as he was in his sufferings by the all-sufficient grace of the Lord. And so it shall be even now. Many of God’s dear children are suffering the buffetings of Satan, some are homeless, some injured, some bereaved, some continually anxious about those who are dearer than life, but in these sufferings they are learning what God is in His sustaining grace and in the strength and courage that His presence gives them. All these things are used of God as chastening, and that does not mean punishment but correction, it is really child-training that we might be partakers of His holiness. “But no chastening for the present seems joyous, but grievous. Nevertheless afterward it yields the peaceable fruits of righteousness to them which are exercised thereby. Wherefore lift up the hands which hang down” (Heb. 12:11-12). The result is assured to us, if we are exercised by the trial, and God will not suffer us to be tried beyond what we are able. Then let faith rear its head in the storm, let it lay hold of God with a strong grip, let it speak out with a confident voice “Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him” (Job 13:15).

(1) The considerate words of comfort used by the Lord are illustrative of that tender compassion of His, ever in active exercise towards those who sought Him in their distress. He knew the intense mental depression which accompanies protracted physical suffering, and especially so when, as in this case, the disease repeatedly baffles human attempts to cure. The heart is sick with oft-deferred hope, and the debilitated frame is further weakened by the added burden of nervous anxiety and worry. But while "heaviness in the heart of a man makes it stoop, a good word makes it glad" (Prov. 12:25).

There are many instances of the Lord removing such feelings of distress by His word. To the trembling woman before Him, whether her fears were the indirect result of the wasting disease from which she had now been freed, or whether they arose from her apprehension that she had offended the Great Physician, He addressed her with the words, both tender and strength-giving, "Daughter, be of good comfort."

Our loved ones pass out of our sight, but He remains. Blessed indeed for all saints at all times to realize that He remains, but never more precious than when in the deep sorrow of bereavement — amid the break-up of earthly homes, and the wreck of earthly hopes — we can look up into His face and say, "Thou remainest." And as He looks down into our stricken hearts, with infinite compassion, He answers back, "I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee."