(Ver 1.3)  This is Part 2 in a series of Bible lessons about where Sickness and Disease Came From.   If you have not read this series of lessons from the beginning, then I would suggest that you go back to Part 1 and start there.  In the first lesson I taught that God did not create the world originally with sickness or disease present therefore, I concluded you can see these did not originate with God and they were not a part of the original plan of God at any time.  There are many Christians who would certainly disagree with me based upon a narrow minded interpretation of some Old Testament scriptures that conflict with a New Testament revelation that sickness comes from Satan.   I showed you one of these Old Testament verse in the first lesson and how it was poorly translated to accuse God of putting sickness on the Egyptians.  However, I also showed you two prominent witnesses found in the New Testament that said sickness came from the devil (Acts 10:38) and Jesus even called it satanic bondage (Luke 13:16).  So we have a major conflict between opposing scriptures brewing.  You have Old Testament verses that seem to say that God caused people to be sick and you have New Testament verses that clearly say Satan causes people to be sick.  Since the Bible does not ever contradict itself in the true interpretation of the text, we must resolve the question of the cause of the sickness found in people in order to correctly determine who causes people to be healed.  There are only a limited number of technical possibilities to answer these questions and they are quite complex in their relationships of responsibilities.    Here is the list of possible solutions for where sickness comes from and I’ll talk about each of these in the following paragraphs:

1. God causes sickness and God heals sickness
2. Satan causes sickness and Satan heals sickness
3. God causes sickness and Satan heals sickness
4. Satan causes sickness and God heals sickness
5. Some other possible cause and effect?

First we could say God controls everything and causes all people to be sick sometimes and then God heals people sometimes and that would be what many ignorant sovereign God theologians would want you to believe.  This interpretation conflicts with several scriptures like “God does not change” (Mal 3:6), with God there is no variableness nor shadow of turning (Jas 1:17) and when Jesus said “When you have seen me you have seen the Father” (John 14:9).  Since Jesus never made anyone sick while he was here physically on the earth we can clearly understand Jesus was the revealed will of God in full manifestation.  We must therefore conclude that God while in heaven never made anyone sick either.  You of course can disagree if you would like to.

Mat 4:23  And Jesus went about all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing all manner of sickness and all manner of disease among the people.

However, when you read the gospels closely you will never see Jesus doing anything, but healing the people.  Jesus would heal every type of sickness and every type of disease this verse says.  You can clearly see that this was the will of God being revealed to men first hand.   Here is God in the flesh walking among us and doing what He could only do in person.  If God wanted to teach men that sickness came from Him, He missed a golden opportunity to teach us this in person to dismiss the controversy.   When you see God healing people and never making them sick you finally begin to understand the character of God, the goodness of God, the love of God, the mercy of God and the compassion of God.  You finally begin to understand how much God wants you to be well and whole.

Mat 9:36  But when he saw the multitudes, he was moved with compassion on them, because they fainted, and were scattered abroad, as sheep having no shepherd.

You can find that when Jesus walked among us, He exhibited divine compassion.  He demonstrated Godly mercy and He did not come to judge anyone.  Were people in those days just better sinners then they are now?  Too many Christians in the world think that people have gotten to be worse sinners today so they accuse God of sending judgment upon the earth in the form of earthquakes and plagues of sicknesses and diseases.  Some have accused God of killing sinners and Christians in massive Tsunamis and natural disasters.  One group of highly confused Christians held up signs at a recent funeral of a woman who died with cancer thanking God for her cancer.  I do not understand how you can follow a God who would do such a thing.  I guess it is purely out of fear and self-righteousness that these people do such things.  Because they feel like they are not sinners they accuse God of killing people who they claim are sinners.  How ignorant is that?  In my opinion if you are afraid of God, it is only because you do not know God and if you are not afraid of God it is only because you do not know Him either.   It is a paradox of a spiritual nature that is supremely complex.   The Bible says “The fear of the Lord is beginning of wisdom” (Prov 9:10).  However, this is the respect of God’s power and not the terror that God is going to hurt you.   I am not afraid of God, because I have the love of God shed abroad in my heart and I know Him (Rom 5:5).  You see my Bible says “Where sin abounds, grace does much more abound” (Rom 5:20).  That verse does not say anything about the judgment of God, it says God’s grace is what dominates Him to do good to sinners and the Bible says it is “The goodness of God that leads men to repentance” (Rom 2:4).   Don’t get me wrong, there is a coming judgment of God and it is coming soon.  But, this is not what is happening right now in the world.  When you finally see the judgment of God you will know the difference between what is happening now and it will be nothing compared to the real judgments of God.   People today, who have accused God of making people sick, have done so out of ignorance.  They clearly do not know the love of God and they ignore Bible verses about God’s love.  A loving God does not make His children sick because they made a mistake.  Therefore, I have ruled out God as both causing sickness and healing people in order to harmonize scriptures of God’s love, mercy, compassion and grace.

You could also theorize that Satan causes people to be sick and Satan heals people and again this is a very wrong teaching based upon scriptures taught directly by Jesus.  When Jesus would heal people, many times Jesus would cast out the evil spirits that were causing the sickness (Mark 1:23-26, Mark 5:2-8, Mark 7:25, Luke 9:42).  Jesus was even accused of casting devils out by the power of Satan (Mat 9:34).  But, Jesus said in Matthew 12:26 “How can Satan cast out Satan, his house would be divided and his kingdom would not stand”?   This is actually a very important verse to understand and it contains a lot of spiritual information that you better know.  Jesus was clearly saying no kingdom working against itself will prevail.  Therefore, God will never make people sick and then change to make them well again or His kingdom would be divided.  Jesus tells you very clearly that Satan also has a kingdom.  This is not the kingdom of God and this is not the kingdom of Heaven.   So this is a separate spiritual kingdom that Christians must come to understand that it exists.  This spiritual kingdom is called the kingdom of darkness.  In Colossians 1:13 it says “Christ has delivered us from the power of darkness…”.  To be delivered is a salvation from a place we did not even realize that we were in.  If you are not a Christian today, you are in this kingdom of darkness.  If you are a Christian then you have been set free from the kingdom of darkness by the power found in Jesus.  These are all Bible truths that are essential to understand.  If you do not understand this then you can easily stray into false teachings that claims God is in control of everything.  Jesus clearly taught us that there is an opposing spiritual kingdom in existence and it is not the Kingdom of God.  Based upon this information and the words of Jesus it is impossible for Satan to make people sick and to heal them simultaneously.  This information also transfers to God’s kingdom and it says that it is impossible for God to make people sick and then to heal them, or His kingdom would be divided.  God is saying you cannot have it both ways.  Jesus is teaching you that one kingdom makes you sick and one kingdom heals exclusively and that is the only definition of an undivided Kingdom that fits.

Next we could say God makes people sick and Satan heals them, but this is clearly shot down by many of the scriptures that I have given you already.  Acts 10:38 said Jesus healed those that were oppressed by the devil.  So sickness can never be attributed to God and healing can never be attributed to Satan.  This is just basic Bible interpretations of the Gospels and the New Testament that makes it very clear.  I have by direct scripture references ruled this possibility out completely.  There are just no supporting scriptures for this possibility that exists.  I mean you can find scriptures in the Old Testament that imply that God causes sickness, but I have never seen a scripture that implies Satan heals people.

Next, you could say that Satan causes people to be sick and God heals them and this theory is more scripturally accurate based upon the verses that I have shown you today already, but, it cannot be the complete and total truth since there is not any mention of the involvement or the contribution of the human factor.  If you believe that man has no choices to make or no ability to exercise their freewill, then you believe in a theory based upon God’s sovereignty and a false teaching called “Predestination”.   This teaching claims God has caused everything in the world to happen with a preset outcome.  This teaching claims that some people were created to go to hell and some people were created to go to heaven.   You could further claim that some people were designed to be sick and some people were designed to be well.  There are many problems with this erroneous teaching and you have to ignore vast numbers of scriptures that teach against it in order to believe in it.  If you have read my series of lessons on Understanding Bible Faith you should understand that Jesus always claimed it was the person’s faith that caused them to receive healing.   Jesus would never point us to any other factor as being the cause for their healing.  This did not mean that this person healed themself; it only means that it was their faith that allowed the power of God to flow into them to resolve their situation.  In the Gospels, there was always a direct partnership between a man’s faith and God’s divine power and grace that resulted in any person receiving their healing, salvation or deliverance.   Therefore, we can very easily conclude that if human faith was a necessary determining factor for a person’s healing to be made manifest, we must also conclude by reverse applied logic or implied antithesis truth that it must have been another human factor like something that the person believed, said or did to allow sickness to come into their bodies in the first place.

Think with me again about the factor of faith allowing God’s power to heal them in the Gospels.   Then take this knowledge and look back into time to see how a sickness might be allowed into a human condition.   Take for instance the factor of fear.  If fear is one opposite of faith, then it might have been possible for someone’s fear to allow Satan to put the sickness on them.  In other words I believe that it is almost always the choice of the person on the earth to determine what happens to them.  This belief is based upon what God said to people in Deuteronomy 30 that we read earlier.  God said very clearly I set before you life and death, therefore choose life that you and your seed may live.   Whose choice was it for you to live, God’s or yours?  I think you can see this makes it our choice.

However, it is certainly more complex than that simple statement.  For example, a person is not all knowing and can be deceived into allowing things to happen and not realize the consequences to what they have done until it is too late.  Someone might have gotten hot and sweaty playing a sport in the middle of winter and then walked outside without a jacket and they will probably regret that choice before they make it home.  It could also be that someone has a casual one night stand with someone that they just met in a bar and a few weeks later they find out they got a sexually transmitted disease and they only have themselves to blame.  It is mostly out of ignorance that people do things that they are extremely sorry for doing after they see the consequences.  God says “My people are destroyed (made sick, weak, killed, hurt) for a lack of knowledge” (Hosea 4:6).  So making ignorant decisions can result in some catastrophic circumstances.  Another known factor that is thrown into the mix is the presence of evil in the world.  Sometimes things happen to you just because people are bad and want to do what they want to do regardless of what you want them to do.  When a woman is raped, that is not what she had in mind for a good time like the man was thinking.  Therefore, she could get a sickness passed upon her by something that was not her choice.  You soon begin to see that life is very complex and there are many possible factors that can contribute to anyone being sick.  So regardless of what I teach you today, there are other factors that could be involved in the things that you are experiencing.  So having said all of that there is a spiritual law that is very applicable to our subject today and I will introduce you to it now:

Gal 6:7  Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.

You see God says that people will always reap what they have sown in life.  So we need to figure out if sickness is a fruit of a seed that we have sown.  You might recall in the last lesson I showed you in Deuteronomy 30 where God said “I have set before you a choice, life or death, blessing or cursing, therefore choose life…”.  God appears to place the responsibility for sickness on man as well as for healing, so we must learn how to choose wisely.  Could it be that we just need to learn to plant the right seeds for healing?  This is a very tough lesson to teach, because there are so many factors and even unknowns that you can never say that everybody’s sickness was caused by only one specific thing.  In fact many times sickness is caused by a combination of things and I may have time to talk about that later.  Sowing and reaping is a cause and effect reality.  You plant seeds and you get crops to harvest.   So this truth is certainly heavily involved in the rest of this lesson.  What I want to do is to explore what Jesus emphasized in the Gospels as being a potential cause or we could say the seed for the sickness of certain people.  Jesus did teach us that there were some special contributing key factors to at least some sicknesses and I will attempt to talk about these today and you can make up your own mind to what the truth is.

If Satan causes sickness to come on people we must determine what permitted or allowed this to occur or can Satan just make anyone sick that he wants to at any time?  If you read the book of Job many have concluded that Satan must ask God for permission and then when God says OK, it is Satan’s responsibility to go and carry out the sickness.  However, this is a very bad interpretation of the truth and a clearly ignorant man can easily jump to this conclusion on a surface only reading of the text, but the truth of God is almost always deeper than that found normally on the surface.   You can see this is a tough subject to teach, but I believe it is one that is certainly important for you to understand, so keep reading.  We know from Acts 10:38 and Luke 13:6 that Satan causes sickness, so I will not debate that fact anymore.  I have accepted this as the truth of the Bible and I will move on with determining why this occurs.

Mat 9:2  And, behold, they brought to him a man sick of the palsy, lying on a bed: and Jesus seeing their faith said unto the sick of the palsy; Son, be of good cheer; thy sins be forgiven thee.

Here is a sick lame man being brought to Jesus for healing and Jesus says something that is very profound and difficult to accept for many Christians.  Jesus looks at the lame man and tells him “your sins are forgiven”.  Why does Jesus say this and what do we need to understand about this statement?   Were this man’s sins a contributing factor for his sickness?  This man is asking for physical healing and Jesus is speaking to him about his sins.  Do you understand the difference between spiritual things and natural physical things?  There are many people who do not.  People look at the external actions of a man and focus only on what people have done and God looks at the internal and focuses on why people do what they do.  The lame man was interested only in a natural thing that he thought would solve his problems, and Jesus was focused on the spiritual root cause of the problem.   It is also interesting to note that Jesus does not cast out an evil spirit or even blame the sickness on a spirit as the cause.  Now we know from Acts 10:38 that whoever Jesus healed was called someone who was oppressed of the devil, but this is not where Jesus is focused in on in today’s lesson.  You see there is more than one truth in the Bible and this is some people’s greatest problem with understanding the Bible; they only want to learn one thing and ignore the rest.  That would be way too simple if that is all that is required.  I have no doubt that this man’s infirmity was caused by Satan, but that does not mean that this is the entire story.  Jesus is pointing us to a sin factor that allowed Satan to come in and bring the sickness on the man.   This is actually the same conclusion that I came to when I studied the book of Genesis and the creation account.  God created everything and called it all “very good” and therefore there was no sickness or disease in the earth before Adam sinned.  However, after Adam sinned things started to change in the world and therefore we can conclude it was sin that allowed sickness and disease to enter into the world.  I cannot come up with any other basic event in Genesis other than man’s sin that would have caused this evil to occur.  Maybe you can go through the Bible and find something else and I would be happy to hear about.   Here is God’s commentary on the cause of sin, sickness and death in our world:

Rom 5:12  Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned:

You can clearly read that it was the actions of one man that caused sin and death to pass to every man on the planet.   If you are smart enough you understand that sickness and disease is just a form of diminished life before death occurs.  Therefore, it was Adam who allowed sickness to enter into the world by his sin.  So that is another interesting contributing factor.  Your current sickness could have been caused by your ancestor’s sin.  You see God speaks of a generational cursed upon families in scriptures found in Exodus 20:5, Exodus 34:7, Numbers 14:18, and Deuteronomy 5:9 that speaks of the sins of the fathers being passed down three or four generations.  I will not teach on this directly today, but I do want you to be aware of it as a factor.  You see it does not have to be your sin that causes you to have a sickness.  In fact in John 9 the disciples asked Jesus “Who sinned, this man or his parents that he was born blind”.  You can see by the question that the disciples were looking at the effect and trying to determine the cause.   They also said it could have been caused by the sin of the parents and Jesus did not dispute or contradict them, he just didn’t answer their question.  If you do not understand this story of the blind man in John 9, please take the time and read my lesson on this healing called “Who Sinned”.

Let’s get back to Matthew 9 and to what Jesus was telling the lame man.  Go and read Matthew 9:2 and the surrounding context verses.  Jesus continues to say “which is easier to say rise take up your bed and walk or to say your sins are forgiven”?  Jesus then looks at the religious leaders and says “So that you will know that the Son of Man has power on earth to forgive sins, rise, take up your bed and walk”.  In other words Jesus was teaching a fact that these are interchangeable events or words.  If you are forgiven you ought to be healed.   If you are healed then you are forgiven.  Wow, that is probably one of the most important things that I have said so far today, but you need to hear again.  If you have been forgiven of your sins, then you ought to be healed.  Are you forgiven by God?  Let’s move on to another story found in the Gospels:

Joh 5:14  Afterward Jesus findeth him in the temple, and said unto him, Behold, thou art made whole: sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee.

Here is another major story of healing that has some very profound spiritual truths associated with it.  Jesus has just healed another paralyzed cripple man and He tells him something that is very important to note.  Jesus basically says “Stop sinning or something else worse could come on you”.  Do you understand the connection being tied in here between sickness and sin?  Jesus is teaching the direct cause and effect of a spiritual reality.  It would appear that sin is an opening of the door for sickness to come in.  This of course is very tricky since the Bible says that we are all sinners (Rom 3:23) and we can see that not everyone is sick in the world.   Nevertheless we can still learn a potential cause and effect law being demonstrated to us.  Do you understand the laws of Physics?  An object in motion tends to remain in motion and an object at rest tends to stay at rest.  Then there is the law that states for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.  There are just too many natural laws that demonstrate to us the cause and the resulting effect of a natural force, for me to talk about them all.  According to laws never is there an effect without a cause.  Never is there a cause without a resulting effect.  Never is the resulting effect greater than the cause.  It would be like getting a crop without planting the seeds, it just doesn’t happen that way.  These are just a few of the basics surrounding physical laws.

Rom 8:2  For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death.

We can see two spiritual realities being outlined and compared in this verse.  These are two spiritual laws of opposing force being revealed.  In the natural realm it is kind of like the Law of Aerodynamics has set me free from the Law of Gravity reality.  However, Romans 8:2 is the spiritual law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set us free from the law of sin and death.  You can clearly see that sin is the cause and death is the effect.  What is the definition of death?  In the natural realm it is a secession or termination of life.   Then what is the definition of sickness?  To be sick is a state of un-wholeness, incompleteness, or even just a state of physical weakness.   Jesus when healing people in the Gospels would tell them “your faith has made you whole”.  So being whole is a state of health where no sickness exists and being un-whole a state of sickness.  Therefore I have concluded that sickness is just a lesser stage of death in operation but not in full conclusion.   So when God told Adam don’t eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for in the day that you do, you shall surely die, I believe God was warning of the coming of sickness into the world but this does not mean that God sent it.  Here is a simple verse that is basically saying what I am trying to teach you about sickness:

Mat 9:12  But when Jesus heard that, he said unto them, They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick.

Jesus is saying there are two different states of the human condition; this is either wholeness or incompleteness.   Jesus is calling the state of not being whole a sickness.  This Greek word translated as whole has a meaning to be healthy, well, sound, and even true.  I can clearly understand based upon this definition that there are direct opposite truths to each of these statements.    Sick, infirmed, weak, and even false are all words that demonstrate the state of sickness.  The Bible calls sickness the opposite of good which is healing and health.

I have given you around three examples in the Bible of people that Jesus encountered and Jesus attributed a sin cause to the effect of their sickness.  I also showed you that it does not necessarily have to be your sin that is the cause, but it could have been one of your ancestors.  However, there are more complex factors than that found in the Bible, but I have gone long enough in this lesson for today.  I will wrap this up by reemphasizing that Jesus basically taught that if you are forgiven you ought to be healed.  If you need forgiveness, then repent and ask for it and do it fast to begin to receive healing.  Do not over simplify anything that I have taught today and say I said it is only sin that causes sickness because that is NOT what I said.   In fact I gave you several other potential reasons for the existence of sickness, one was ignorance, another was the presence of evil, another is sowing wrong seeds, then I could go on and on with other factors that I have not mentioned.  In order for us not to be destroyed by Satan in the world we need to achieve to a higher level of knowledge of the truth.  So we still have a lot to learn, including me!  I hope you come back and read the next lesson about Where Sickness Comes From.  God Bless!

If you would like to continue reading in this series of lessons you can go to “Part 3“.