(Ver 1.5)  Today is the beginning of another in-depth spiritual study about “Understanding where sickness and disease came from”.   I have been teaching a lot on the subject of Bible Faith and I got a comment that caused me to back up and think that I was teaching potentially in reverse order.  You see there has been a long theological debate in many churches about the origin of sickness and disease.  I have even heard preachers teach that sickness is a punishment or a correction sent from God.  Of course this is based upon the erroneous assumption that just because God is sovereign that He always gets His will done no matter what.  Also, there has long been a teaching in the some churches that since Paul had a thorn in his flesh that we must endure sickness the same way with great humility.  These people have concluded again in error that Paul’s thorn was a sickness and thus they are wrong without reading what the Bible actually said.  There are really too many false teachings for me to tell you about them all.   What is important for us all to know and learn, is did sickness come from God?  If it is something sent by God, then we should not be trying to get healed and this causes many people to stay sick.  When I taught on faith I said one of the enemies to faith was doubt.  Doubt represents a mental question in an area that you have insufficient knowledge or incorrect knowledge.  For example,  Jesus actually taught us in the Bible that healing does not occur as long as there are questions in our mind to whether healing is the will of God.  Here is the lesson Jesus taught us:

Mat 8:2  And, behold, there came a leper and worshipped him, saying, Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean.

Here is a man that was fully diseased with leprosy.   He believes that Jesus is fully able and powerful enough to heal him, but he does not know if it is the will of God to accomplish this request.  This is a common point of failure to correct Bible faith even today.  We have countless Christians in churches today that are taught the same things.  It is not God’s will to heal today!  God healed through the apostles, but that passed away when they died.  I have heard many ignorant men making excuses for why they have no faith, blaming it either on others or God.  They act like it was the apostles that were healing the people, when it was only God using the apostles to heal the people.  Has God changed since the apostles died or is He still the same today?  No God is the same today as He was yesterday!  Then there are ministers who are like this leprous man, they believe that God is powerful enough to heal people so they pray “Lord if it be your will, heal this man”.  What kind of prayer is that?  It is a questioning or questionable faith full of doubts.  These men who pray that way do not have the question in their mind answered to whether or not we can know the will of God about anything.  But, if that was true then God would not have given us His Word in written form.  We have the basis of proof of the will of God by examining the Word of God.  As soon as God wrote down His spoken words in a book form, He has committed Himself to do what He has said or He will become a liar.   Notice how Jesus answered this question given to Him by the leprous man and see if God is telling you right now what His will is for your healing.

Mat 8:3  And Jesus put forth his hand, and touched him, saying, I will; be thou clean. And immediately his leprosy was cleansed.

You can clearly see the will of God for healing being revealed by the Words of the Most High God.  Jesus when He was physically walking the planet, taught us when you have seen me you have seen the Father (John 14:7).  Jesus further went on to say “I do nothing of my own, but the will of the Father, I do” (John 5:30).  If Jesus Christ is the revealed will of God from heaven, did Jesus ever make anyone sick?  Take the time and go back and reread the Gospels and notice everything that Jesus does.  Write them in a list on a piece of paper if you like, and then know this is the will of God for you.  If you cannot ever find Jesus making anyone sick, then you cannot ever say God made anyone sick even if you have mistranslations in the Old Testament that say otherwise.  I searched the Bible and I found Jesus only healing people after he would preach and teach.  Healing must be the will of God then.  Don’t take my word for it, you go and reread and search for yourself.  It doesn’t take that long to learn the truth if you look for it.  And if you cannot find it in the Gospels where Jesus ever made anyone sick, then this was God’s will for everyone in personal manifestation.  So Jesus by His words and His actions has revealed the will of God is to heal ONLY!  Please be smart enough to see this truth.

One religious man who graduated from a theological cemetery told me his wife had cancer that came from God.  This man had a zeal for God but, no knowledge of God.  If this was true, I will tell you right now that I would not want to follow that kind of God or that kind of religion.  How do you tell people in the world come and get saved so God might give you cancer?  Does that motivate you to want to get close to this God?  Or is this a fear based religion like Islam, where you obey the law or we will cut off your hands.  If God gives people cancer because they sinned, then here in the United States God would be easily convicted in any court of law as being a child abuser.  Yet religious people think that God answers to a different law than man does.  That is a very foolish presumptive thinking.  If cancer is what a loving God does to His children, then what would an evil God do to his children?  You see when the Bible says God is Love, how do you justify that He gave you cancer?  You would have to redefine what Love is and that is a scary way to interpret the Bible.  If I loved my wife so much and then I beat her because she did something wrong, I would be thrown in jail.  Yet this reasoning is OK for a God you cannot see and throw in jail.  It was also very hilarious to me that this man’s wife with cancer from God went to the doctor and received treatment to get out of the will of God for her life on the earth.   Why go to a doctor to cure cancer if God gave you the caner?  In this situation according to this man who was smarter God or the doctor?  Why couldn’t this man go to God for healing instead of the doctor?  It is simply because he thought that it was God that gave his wife the cancer so why pray for healing, just go to the doctor.   It would appear that the doctor was smarter than God according to this man, if the doctor wants to cure people and God does not that is a major problem.  People can truly be blinded by religion and not even know they are wrong.  Let’s go back to the beginning of our world and see what God says to us about the things that He created:

Gen 1:31  And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.

Here is God’s opinion of all of the things that He created.  God looks at everything from the six days of creation and says it is all very good.   What does “very good” mean to you?  Did God create Adam or Eve as a weak or sick man or woman?  Did God create them with cancer and call it good?  I think you can easily conclude that after creation, there was no sickness or disease present in the world.  If nothing else you can see that Adam lived over 900 years on the earth and that does not sound like a sick man at any time.  In fact you cannot even find the words sickness or disease in this book of the bible until near the end of the book and into the next books of the Bible.  The book of Genesis encompasses the first 2000 years of human history and there is barely any mention of sickness or disease in this time period.  It is very clear to me that sickness and disease did not come from God and was not a designed plan of God by what He created in the beginning.  But, you can believe whatever you want.  If you look up the Hebrew word translated as “good” it comes from another word that can also mean “well”.  If you are well, then you are not sick.  If you are well then it is good!  So obviously God thinks being well is good and being sick is bad or evil.  This is not rocket science; surely you can see the truth of God’s word today.

Jas 1:17  Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.

You see if you believe your sickness is God teaching you, correcting you or testing you; then you must conclude that it is something good based upon James 1:17!  Is sickness ever good?  Is wife beating ever good?  Is child abuse ever good?  If you think these are all good things then you are clearly confused and vastly deceived.  I do not know of anything good about sickness.  But, my opinion is the same as your opinion, worthless!  Show me a Bible verse that says sickness is a blessing from God and I will believe it.  It would have to be a blessing in order to qualify for it being good!   Sickness steals your time, it takes your strength, it removes your ability to be a blessing to others, it causes your life to be shortened, it sucks away slowly your ability to do anything positive and your money is wasted in great quantities to get rid of it.  Sickness and disease is a thief and a robber of your well-being, strength, your life and substance; I do not know what else to call it but an impressive evil.  I have only shown you a few Bible verses and I can tell from this information that God did not send you sickness.  If Jesus came to the earth to heal and cure people from sicknesses that God had sent on them, then that would be a house divided (Mat 12:25).  God would have had to have been divided against Himself.  Jesus would have been working against God and not for God.  That would mean that God is schizophrenic, double minded and confused?  God makes them sick and Jesus heals them.  Too many Christians want to believe in a Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde type of God.   Sure God will make you sick so that He can prove His power by healing you.   That is a crazy mixed up Theology!  Why heal them if you were the one that made them sick by your will.  Do you understand the problem with many people’s confusing beliefs?    God cannot be the same one that heals people that causes them to be sick or God would not be consistent and never changing (Mal 3:6), He would instead be the ever changing God.  This is not what the Bible says to us, is it?

Act 10:38  How God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with power: who went about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed of the devil; for God was with him.

You can clearly read from the Bible where sickness comes from, if you want to know the truth.  Here is a verse that I use all of the time because it contains a lot of great spiritual information about good and evil.   This verse is a self-evident claim that doing good is healing and this always comes from God.  Think about it!   How was the human body designed by God?   It was designed with a built in immune system that fights against sickness and disease.  If you get cut or scrapped, you do not have an eternal sore, your body has a built in self-healing machine mechanism.  This was God’s designed plan in action.  So when you read the Gospels did you ever see Jesus making anyone sick, lame, blind, crippled or diseased?  Do you ever see anyone that Jesus said it is not my will to heal you?    If you cannot find Jesus who was God in the flesh doing these things while He was personally here on the earth, then why would think that the same God in heaven does them to people now?   Jesus clearly taught us, “When you have seen me, you have seen the Father”, so whatever we saw Jesus doing is what God does all of the time and Jesus only went about doing GOOD and healing.  Do not make your God an Evil God who goes about doing EVIL and making people sick unless you can find where Jesus did it.

Here is where more people are confused.  They allow Satan to blind their minds to the truth so that he can continue to cause sickness and disease to abide in them.  A man recently told me that Satan is only allowed by God to do what God wants.  So if Satan makes people sick, then it was God’s will for them to be sick.  Again this is just more C.R.A.P.  (Christian Rhetoric Applied Poorly)!   I’m sorry I can be very blunt sometimes and I do not mean it to be hurtful, I only mean it to shock people into seeing the truth.

Where did God say sickness came from in Acts 10:38?  God clearly called sickness satanic oppression in Acts 10:38.  The devil is clearly Satan and sickness is from him and Satan is not God’s policeman sent by God to make people sick.  Therefore sickness and disease is satanic oppression and the direct opposite of God’s definition of good.  Go back and read the Gospels again and see who got healed.  You have blind people seeing (Mat 15:31, Mat 21:14, Mar 10:51, John 9); you have leprous people’ made whole again (Luke 17:17), a woman with the issue of blood (Mat 9:20), a man with the withered hand (Mat 12:13), the dumb to speak (Mat 15:31), the lame to walk (Mat 15:31, Mat 21:14, John 5:9).  These are just a few verses to show you who Jesus healed.  There are many others that I did not mention.  There are even several verses that teach us that Jesus healed every type of disease and infirmity (Mat 9:35) and everyone present (Mat 12:15) so if you did not see your problem being healed it is included in the other all-inclusive category of the type of people and sickneeses that Jesus healed.  What I want you to notice is that God calls all of this satanic oppression.   If it was sent by God then it would be Godly oppression and that is not what the Bible said.  Neither would God have been there to heal them if He had been the one to make them sick.

Luk 13:16  And ought not this woman, being a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan hath bound, lo, these eighteen years, be loosed from this bond on the sabbath day?

Here is another verifiable witness to the fact of the origin of sickness is from Satan.  Jesus is asking a direct question that is still relevant and applicable to you today.  He says that this woman is a daughter of Abraham; therefore she should be freed from this bondage of Satan.  Think with me again and ask yourself this question; are you a son or a daughter of Abraham?   If you are then you should also be freed from the bondage of Satan.  Bondage is being held against your will as a prisoner.  Did you know that was what sickness was?   You could call sickness a spiritual jail cell that has kept you physically locked up from your freedom.  It is clear to me that Jesus is saying you ought to be free today and this is why I say that.

Rom 4:16  Therefore it is of faith, that it might be by grace; to the end the promise might be sure to all the seed; not to that only which is of the law, but to that also which is of the faith of Abraham; who is the father of us all,

According to God we in the church are called Abraham’s spiritual children today by our faith in Jesus Christ.   Therefore what did Jesus say?   Didn’t Jesus just say “ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham be freed from this bondage of Satan?”   When you begin to see who you are in Christ, it should begin to change your perspective on if you should be healed.  According to Jesus, you should be healed even on the Sabbath.   Let’s back up and look at an Old Testament verse to change our perspective.  Many times people look at scriptures in error found in the Old Testament to justify their erroneous beliefs that God makes people sick, so I’ll talk about one of these to potentially help someone:

Exo 15:26  And said, If thou wilt diligently hearken to the voice of the LORD thy God, and wilt do that which is right in his sight, and wilt give ear to his commandments, and keep all his statutes, I will put none of these diseases upon thee, which I have brought upon the Egyptians: for I am the LORD that healeth thee.

You can see a clear conflict in the English translation of this verse.  This is why so many people are confused today.  They do not research the words or study the definitions and they conclude things based upon Old Testament verses that you cannot find repeated in the New Covenant teachings.  Yet, these are tough words to read.  It would appear that God is inconsistent and that God shows favoritism and that God treats one nation differently than the other nation.   If God heals Israelites and makes Egyptians sick then God is not the same to everyone.  That is a major problem to me.  It means that you cannot count on what God said and you cannot trust in God doing anything good for you or to you.   It tells me that the definitions of God and Good are inconsistent and unreliable.  It means the sun might come up in the west tomorrow because we just never know about how God does anything.  Why would God give us a huge book of information about Himself if God did not want us to know who He really was?   It does not make any sense to me.   Let’s get back to the Hebrew words in this verse found in Exodus and become extremely picky to see exactly what God is saying to us.  I want to make one extremely important point up front.  First it does not say that God put the disease on Egypt.  It was the translators that said that.  Look at the Hebrew words translated as “I” will and see that in that statement within the context of Egypt there is no Hebrew word in the verse that can be translated directly as “I”.  Do you understand this?  It is an assumed reference and inserted because the translators thought that God was the one that made people sick.  Now look at the end of verse and see the difference in the last part of that statement.  “I am the Lord that heals you”.   Now God uses a direct Hebrew word that can only be a personal pronoun of who God is and what God does.   If God wanted you to believe that He is the one that puts sickness on people He would have used the same personal pronoun in the other parts of the verse so that you can associate it with Him.  No, sickness does not come from God it only originates there by the minds of men who credit God with everything good or evil.  Here is the same verse with the removal of the words “I” that do not occur in the Hebrew:

Exo 15:26  And said, If thou wilt diligently hearken to the voice of the LORD thy God, and wilt do that which is right in his sight, and wilt give ear to his commandments, and keep all his statutes, will put none of these diseases upon thee, which have brought upon the Egyptians: for I am the LORD that healeth thee.

No you can see that someone still put sicknesses on the Egyptians, but we learned from the New Testament that this was not God, but Satan.  It does not say God put the sicknesses on them.  I am attempting to use the Bible to understand the Bible and to get you to see the subtle differences a few mistranslated words in the Old Testament can make.  This verse still says “I am the LORD that HEALS” very plainly.   So God is attributing healing to His work and not sickness.  You of course can remain in darkness and still believe otherwise.

The major difficulty that people are facing today is the fact that the Bible contains two separate covenants.  The Old Covenant was with a natural nation of people and the New Covenant is with a spiritual nation of people.  In the Old Covenant, God hid the existence of Satan largely in symbolic references, unnamed references and in ways that allowed you to know something was there but not always understand what it was.  In the New Covenant, Satan is revealed for who he is directly.   Yet the majority of people today, who are confused, are those that are focused in only on the law of God and the prophecies of God without interpreting them using the revelations of God in the New Covenant given to the church.  That is a huge mistake, it is no wonder we have so many different opinions in the world.

Let’s ask ourselves some really basic theology questions:

1. Which Covenant are we in today?
2. Which Bible pages and verses should hold more importance to us as Christians?  Genesis or Revelation?  Deuteronomy or Galatians?
3. Are we under the Law or are we now under Grace?

Too many times Christians want to emphasize the Old Covenant and ignore the New Covenant reality.  They only read things in the Old Testament that are important to them thinking that they apply to them.  I can go through your Bible and look at what verses you underline to see what you choose to believe is important.   If you spend more time in the Old Testament than you do reading the letters written to the church directly, then you are living under the Law of Moses and you ignore God’s Grace.  I would strongly recommend that you take the time to go and read Deuteronomy chapter 28 and see what God says about blessing and cursing under the law.  But before you do this go and read what God says about it in chapter 30 first:

Deu 30:15  See, I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil;

God clearly says Life is GOOD and death is EVIL!  These are two different perspectives of contrasting opposite events.  Births are good and deaths are evil.  You could also say healing is good and sickness is evil.  You can go down the list of opposites and clearly see God is teaching you something you should understand clearly.  Then God says this to you:

Deu 30:19  I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live:

It appears the choice to live or die has been placed upon humans.  This goes against a Sovereign Predestination theology that is clearly wrong.   Now go back and read chapter 28 about the blessing and the cursing of the Law of Moses.   If you go and read down the whole chapter you will see many diseases being named by name.  Then in verse 61 you will find this statement:

Deu 28:61  Also every sickness, and every plague, which is not written in the book of this law, them will the LORD bring upon thee, until thou be destroyed.

So the curse of the Law includes “every sickness and every disease” that is not named in this book as well as those that are named.  Do you understand this so far?  What we conclude from this chapter is sickness is a curse and healing and health is a blessing.  What did God tell us to choose?  Was it not life to live?  These are very simple truths found in the Bible yet many people just ignore them.  Here is a New Testament reality that will help you if you can see it:

Gal 3:13  Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us: for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree:

According to God, what were you redeemed from?   You soon learn the difficulty in the teachings of confused people who do not know the truth.   We can very clearly see that if Christ has redeemed us (PAST TENSE) we have been freed from all sicknesses and all diseases that were listed in that chapter 28 of Deuteronomy and even those that were not named directly.    According to God He did not leave out any sicknesses or diseases in that chapter so that means all of them!  If Jesus Christ came to redeem you from sickness and disease then there is NO WAY that God is sending you sickness or disease to kill you.  This would again be God working against Himself and a clear Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde type of theology.

I am attempting to alleviate the questions in your mind that God sent you sickness.  It is a difficult subject for some people to accept because of the things that they have been deceived into believing about God.  I hope if nothing else you will start to go through your Bible and see the Jesus who revealed the true nature of God in the Gospels.  Then go and read the Letters written to the church about how God is Love, the Grace of God, the Goodness of God and the mercy of God.   Learn to see the real God and who He is today in the New Covenant.  If you want to, you can also go through the names of God given to you in the Bible.  The names of God in the Bible always reveal the character of God!  You will see God called “Jehovah Raffa” which means “I am God Your Healer”!  You will never see the name of God called Jehovah Makes You Sick!  Yes there is coming a judgment of God and this will occur during the tribulation and the time shortly thereafter.  But, do not confuse the Judge God with your Father God.  Perhaps I will have time to discuss a balanced approach to understanding the character of God.    Ok, I have a lot more to teach on, but I have gone too long today.  If you want to learn more about where sickness came from in the Bible, please come back and read with me again.  God Bless!

If you want to continue reading in this series about the origin of sickness and disease, please continue with “Part 2“.