Sickness Is Not From God

What the Verse Says

"Willingly"

The Hebrew is millibbô — literally "from His heart." God does not afflict from His heart.

That is the whole sentence, and it is remarkable for where it is written. Lamentations is a book of raw devastation — Jerusalem burned, children starving, the temple gone. Jeremiah is not writing a comfortable theology from a safe distance. He is writing it while sitting in the ashes.

And even there, in the middle of the ruin, he says God does not do this from His heart.

The Context of Comfort

And look at what surrounds the verse, because the whole passage is a single argument.

"It is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness" (Lamentations 3:22–23).

Then: "For the Lord will not cast off for ever: But though he cause grief, yet will he have compassion according to the multitude of his mercies. For he doth not afflict willingly nor grieve the children of men" (Lamentations 3:31–33).

So the sequence is mercy, compassion, and then the statement that even the grief He permits is not what He wants.

There is a difference between what God permits in a fallen world and what God authors. Lamentations holds both without embarrassment, and so must we.

"The Children of Men"

That last phrase is broader than it looks. Not "the children of Israel" — the children of men. All of them.

God is not up there distributing cancers by lottery and calling it refining. The verse says the opposite. When grief comes, it does not come from His heart.

Jesus' Own Diagnosis

And then the Gospels put a face on it, and the face is decisive.

Peter, preaching in Cornelius' house, summarised the ministry of Jesus in one sentence: "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" (Acts 10:38).

Read that carefully, because it settles the attribution question in public. Jesus healed those who were oppressed by the devil. God was with Him while He did it.

If sickness were a gift from God, then Jesus spent three years dismantling His Father's gifts. That sentence cannot be made to work.

John's Two Portraits

And Jesus made the distinction explicit, in a single verse that has been quoted in this library before and belongs here.

"The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly" (John 10:10).

Two agents. Two intentions. One takes, one gives.

You do not have to identify the thief by name in every instance to know this: if the effect is stealing, killing, and destroying, you already know which column it belongs in. A tumour does not steal, kill, and destroy by accident. It does what its author does.

James' Absolute Statement

James closes the argument in a way that leaves no room for the "God is teaching me through illness" reading.

"Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man" (James 1:13).

And then: "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" (James 1:17).

Two categories, and no third one. Good gifts come down. Everything else does not. There is no category in James for a harmful gift from a good Father.

Why the Confusion Exists

So why do so many sincere believers think otherwise? Three reasons, and they deserve a hearing.

Discipline language. Hebrews says the Lord chastens whom He loves (Hebrews 12:6). But read what the chastening produces: "the peaceable fruit of righteousness" (Hebrews 12:11). It is moral formation, not disease.

Paul's thorn. 2 Corinthians 12 records a refusal, and it has its own article in this library precisely because it deserves one. But a single permitted messenger is not a pattern of God distributing sickness as pedagogy.

The instinct to comfort. When someone suffers, it is easier to say "God is teaching you something" than to say "this is an intrusion and God hates it too." The first answer sounds reverent. The second one is truer, and it is the one that lets a person pray.

And that is the practical cost of getting this wrong: you cannot ask God to remove what you have decided He sent. A believer who thinks the disease is the Father's will is paralysed in exactly the area where he needs to be most aggressive.

The Refiner's Fire

The obvious objection needs an answer, so here it is: what about the refiner's fire?

Malachi speaks of a refiner purifying silver (Malachi 3:3), and Peter speaks of faith tried in fire (1 Peter 1:7). Those are real.

But notice what a refiner does and does not do. A refiner puts metal in fire to remove the impurity, and he takes it out. He does not put the metal in to damage it; he puts it in to save it.

And here is the distinction that matters: the refiner's fire is not the same as the robber's fire. Both burn. One is aiming at purity, the other at destruction. You can tell them apart by the fruit, and the fruit of a disease is not the peaceable fruit of righteousness.

The Enemy of the Sick

One more angle, because it changes how a sick person should think about himself.

Jesus never once treated sickness as an ally. He rebuked fevers (Luke 4:39). He called a spirit of infirmity a "daughter of Abraham... bound" (Luke 13:16). He wept at a tomb, and the shortest verse in the Bible records it: "Jesus wept" (John 11:35) — right before He raised Lazarus.

If sickness were a teacher, Jesus was a poor student of it. He opposed it everywhere He found it, in every form, on every occasion, on the Sabbath and off it, to the annoyance of the religious.

The Doctor and the Disease

One illustration to hold this together.

Consider a man whose house has been broken into. His friend says, "Perhaps the burglar was sent to teach you about security." And the man replies, "Then why is there a locksmith coming, and why did the burglar take the silver?"

That is the shape of the confusion. You can learn from a break-in without believing the burglar was your father's tutor. God teaches in the aftermath, and He is the One who repairs — but He is not the one who broke in.

Where the Blame Belongs

A word of care, because this teaching has been used badly.

Saying sickness is not from God does not mean it is from your sin, your lack of faith, or your enemy's personal vendetta against you. Jesus was asked whose sin caused a man's blindness and answered, "Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents" (John 9:3). The origin question is often unanswerable, and the disciples' question was the wrong question.

We live in a fallen world with a real adversary and real biology. You do not need to know the postcode of the intruder to call the police.

And wisdom: none of this means refusing treatment. If God is not the author of the disease, then the doctor who fights it is on God's side of the matter, not against Him. Faith and wisdom work together, and the medicine is not an insult to the stripes.

What This Means for You

1. Settle the authorship question once. It determines your prayer, your peace, and your posture toward God when your body fails.

2. Pray against it without apology. If it is an intruder, you may resist it. The Name of Jesus is not a formula for negotiation with something God sent; it is authority over something He did not.

3. Stop thanking God for the disease. Thank Him for His mercy in it, for the people around you, for the recovery — never for the thing itself. Gratitude for the thief is not reverence.

4. Expect wholeness as His disposition. The heart of God toward your body is healing, and the cross is the proof of it. Everything else is an exception to be explained, not the rule to be endured.

5. Do not blame yourself either. The question "why did this come?" is often unanswerable in this life. You are not required to solve it before you may be healed.

Putting It to Work This Week

• Read Lamentations 3:22–41 and mark every word about mercy.
• Read Acts 10:34–43 and note who Jesus healed and who He said oppressed them.
• Write your belief about illness
• Pray for your body