Pain and Sickness
The Bible promises us that this life will be punctuated with sickness and pain. For some it will be more chronic than others, but unfortunately for all of us there will be certain seasons of severe and almost unbearable discomfort. While we’d wish that God’s children were exempt, we must remember that for now, Christ has not granted us any such immunity. When sin entered the world God’s universal judgment included a physical reality that would be subject to disease, decay, and ultimately death (Genesis 3:16-19). While that may not sound like good news to our ears, it can certainly assure our hearts when we are tempted to ask, “Why is this happening to me?”
So the next time you are pained, injured or ill, remember that mankind’s rebellion against God was the ultimate cause. And then be quick to remember that Jesus Christ came into the world to rectify the problem by satisfying God’s justice on the cross. This obviously doesn’t mean that we won’t continue to experience the varied effects of sin in this world, but it does mean that by the time God’s kids step into the next one, sin and all its related consequences will be nothing but a distant memory.
Leave a Reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
This is very hard for me to reconcile . As I read scripture I only see Jesus healing and making people whole. I have not seen where someone who is sick being told to stay that way to learn a lesson or being told to stop expecting me(Jesus) to heal you. Yet people,like my husband, die disappointed in God as they were trusting Him for healing. Please help me get understanding.
Hi BJ,
This can be a very difficult topic and I understand why you wrestle with it. Let’s take your comment a section at a time. Yes Jesus healed people in the Bible, but they became sick in the first place and that is the point this devotion is trying to make. As God’s children, we won’t be immune to the pain and sickness of this world because we are in fallen bodies in a fallen world. In fact, Jesus tells us in John 16:33, “In this world you will have tribulation.” So we are to expect trouble, pain, and sickness to come our way and ultimately, even if we are healed of a temporal malady, we will all still eventually physically die.
This is not to say that we are always to just stay in our pain and sickness and accept it. God works through our natural world to accomplish many miracles. As one example, when medical treatment works way better than doctors ever expected, we praise God for his healing. We also see an example of this in the Bible with Paul & Timothy. In 1 Timothy 5:23 we learn that Timothy was suffering from stomach problems and Paul recommends mixing a little wine with water to help with that as this was one of the medical cures of the day. He is not telling Timothy to stay in his sickness, but to seek to cure himself with the natural cure of the day trusting God to heal through that.
But sometimes God doesn’t heal every ailment. Paul himself begged God repeatedly to take away his “thorn in the flesh” in 2 Corinthians 12, but God did not heal him of it. This tells us that sometimes God has his purposes for not fully healing someone, in this case for Paul it was to keep him reliant on God.
We won’t always know the reasons for our ailments, but we should expect them to come. When they do we pray for healing and seek the medical help of the day. God may use that to bring healing and sometimes he may not. But we trust that he is working it out according to his good purposes (Rom. 8:28) and that ultimately when we die will receive perfect bodies and live on a perfect earth.
I hope that helps.