Is My Illness a Punishment From God? A Biblical Answer

Hey, thanks again for sending in questions, either related to our recent sermons or questions you may have about the Bible or Christianity. This last week, we continued our series in the book of John, looking at Jesus’ many miracles. And last Sunday we looked at John 5 when Jesus heals the man at the pool of Bethesda.

And after he heals him, Jesus comes back and tells the man, stop sinning or something worse could happen to you. We said in the course of the sermon, this does not mean that the man’s sin caused his paraplegia. But it does mean that sin can be more damaging in our lives than some kind of disability.

So the question that came in this week is, could sin ever cause some kind of physical malady like this man was paralyzed? And so we want to be very careful and sensitive with this. We know, like later in John 9, Jesus makes explicit when he heals the man who’s been born blind.

He’s been blind from birth. And people ask Jesus, is it this man who sinned or his parents that caused him to be born blind? And Jesus says, neither. We’ll get to the story in a couple of weeks. He says, neither, it was for the glory of God that this man was born blind.

Sin was not the cause of this blindness, either from the man or from his parents. And so we want to put that in place first, because it’s so natural for us, when something goes wrong in our lives, some kind of tragedy, some kind of illness, we’re like, what did we do to cause this?

We kind of look for someone to blame. And in the John 9 story, Jesus makes it very explicit. It’s nobody’s to blame. This happened, and he had a reason for it happening and a purpose for it happening, but it’s not somebody’s fault. It’s so easy, where we get a troubling diagnosis and we say, oh, this must have been because I lied to that person 10 years ago, and now God’s going to come get me for it.

And it’s, hey, there’s nothing like that. Something happens with our kids, one of our kids gets sick or has an illness, and we say, oh, this must have been because of how I didn’t follow God in college, and now my kid is having this problem. It’s like, no, that is not the way that it is. So in any of those kind of contexts, sin did not cause what we are experiencing.

On the other side of this question, people might push back and say, yes, but doesn’t the Bible say God disciplines us, or we reap what we sow, Galatians 6:7? And I would say, absolutely, that’s true. God does discipline us. We do reap what we sow. But first, let’s consider God disciplining us.

Throughout Scripture, God’s called this loving father. And he’s the perfect father, really. And a perfect father, or even a not very good father, would connect discipline to the offense. So if you lie, you might lose the friend that you lied to. That is a clear cause and effect. And a loving father would not, if he sees you lie one day, 10 years later, come slap you on the back of the head with no explanation of, hey, the reason I’m slapping you on the back of the head is because you lied 10 years ago. That’s not what a loving father would do. The loving father would connect very clearly offense to discipline. The same principle applies in that we reap what we sow. Oh, yes, again, you lie to your friend, you might lose that friend.

That is, you are reaping what you sowed. You lied to this person, now you don’t have that person in your life anymore. Okay. But just like crops that we may sow and reap, if we sow corn into the ground, we don’t reap a hurricane. We sow corn, we’re going to get corn. There’s a very clear connection, cause and effect.

And so for those of us who worry like, is the way I acted in college the reason that my kid is sick right now? Absolutely not. Those have no connection to one another whatsoever. That violates the principle of reaping what you sow, and it violates God being a good father.

He’s not going to do that. So coming back to, could an illness ever be the result of sin? In some contexts, yes. We smoke every day for 30 years, we may get lung cancer. That’s cause and effect. The guy who’s born blind or the guy who experienced blindness, we’re like, well, could that be the result of sin?

Well, I mean, he was born this way, so not in his case, but if you and your friends are having some kind of Roman candle war with each other where you’re shooting each other with fireworks and one of them explodes in your eyeball, oh, okay, yes. That was a result of your actions. But this guy who was born blind or this guy who had some kind of paraplegia in our text from this last week, it’s not because they did something to cause that specific thing.

That’s not what Jesus is saying there. And so for the most part, I want us to feel relief from the burden that maybe we have caused, whether it’s an illness or somebody else’s illness in our life. Don’t think that. Be free from that. A loving father wouldn’t do that. Cause and effect would negate that as a possibility.

So thanks for the question. We hope it’s helpful. We’ll see you next time.