Sickness 681
sickness. What a serious fault it is for Christians, upon having asked
healing of God and having given up hope, then to utter the words,
“May the Lord’s will be done” as if the will of the Lord were
synonymous with sickness and death. God does not will for His
children to be ill. Though He sometimes permits them to be sick for
their profit, His determinate counsel forever is health for His people.
The fact that there is no sickness in heaven fully proves what the will
of God is.
Were we to trace the source of sickness we would be doubly
persuaded to seek for healing. All who were sick “were oppressed by
the devil” (Acts. 10.38). The Lord Jesus described the woman who
was bent over and could not fully straighten herself as one “whom
Satan bound” (Luke 13.16). When He healed Peter’s mother-in-law
He “rebuked he fever” (Luke 4.39) in the same manner as He
rebuked he demons (cf. vv. 31-41). In reading the book of job we
earn that it is the devil who caused job’s sickness (Ch. 1 & 2); but it
is God Who healed him (Ch. 42). The thorn that harassed and
weakened Paul was “a messenger of Satan” (2 Cor. 12.7); the One
Who made him strong is God. He who has the power of death is the
devil (Heb. 2.14). We know illness ripens into death, for it is one of
the facets of death. As Satan has the power of death, he has the
power of sickness too, for death is but the ultimate step beyond
sickness.
We cannot avoid concluding from these passages that sickness
originates with the devil. God permits Satan to attack His children
because they contain some defects in their lives. If they refuse to
forsake what God has demanded and thus allow illness to continue in
their lives, it is as if they have forsaken what God has ordered and
have welcomed sickness instead. In so doing they voluntarily place
themselves under the oppression of Satan. Who is so illogical as to
return to bondage after he has obeyed the revealed will of God?
Realizing that sickness proceeds from the devil, we ought to resist it.
We should be clear that it belongs to our enemy and hence is not to