Am I Sick Because God Is Mad at Me?
Let’s find out if God is mad at you or not. If He isn’t, then we’ve already answered the question.
Are you saved?
If so, you are already forgiven for ALL your sins! You can see Forgiven People Can Be Healed for a list of some Scriptures that prove this. If you’ve been taught (in error) that you need to confess your individual sins before they can be forgiven, you might want to read through What 1 John 1:9 Really Means to learn otherwise. That discussion has even more proofs that all your sins are forgiven.
Your sins certainly DID make God mad. However, He took out His anger for your sins on Jesus when Jesus willingly took your sins on Himself. Those sins are now paid for, so God will not get mad at you over them now that you have believed that Jesus paid for your sins. That would be like demanding that you pay off a credit card debt that a rich benefactor already paid off on your behalf.
Forgiveness and not being mad go together. If you’ve truly forgiven someone, you don’t walk around mad at that person. It doesn’t mean that you have to be best buddies with that person or even be around that person socially. But if you’re still enraged about what someone did, that is a good indication that you have not forgiven that person.
The New Testament shows God’s gracious attitude toward man:
2 Corinthians 5:19:
To wit, that God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them; and hath committed unto us the word of reconciliation.
The good news – the news of reconciliation – is that God decided not to hold your sins against you, so He reconciled you (past tense) though Christ. That is the “good news” that we have to share with others. (Pointing fingers at sinners and telling them they are going to hell is not the good news. It’s true, but it isn’t the good news, which is the ANSWER to that problem!) “Not imputing your trespasses” basically means that God isn’t mad at you over your sins anymore! You are reconciled to God!
Jesus has saved you from God’s wrath, so He has saved you from God being mad at you!
Romans 5:9:
Much more then, being now justified by His blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him.
It certainly is possible to GRIEVE the Holy Spirit (we’re warned not to do it in Ephesians 4:30), but while grieving the Holy Spirit could lead to missing out on some ways that that the Holy Spirit wants to move, even that does not mean that the Holy Spirit is angry with you. You probably did some things that grieved your parents when you were growing up, but I hope they still loved you and didn’t run you out of the house immediately and disown you. God is a far better parent than you ever had.
So you are NOT sick because God is mad at you – because He isn’t mad at you.
Stern Doesn’t Mean Mad
However, let’s address something that sometimes gets lost in the shuffle in modern teaching. God is not always lovey-dovey to us! When He has to be stern, He is. Jesus was plenty stern with the people in Revelation that were getting out of line. He even said that He had things against them! But that’s different from saying, “I’m MAD at you. I’m holding your sins against you and I’m out to get you!”
As a parent, there are times when have to stern with your children. Is it because you don’t forgive them and you’re mad at them? Now you aren’t God, so you do have flesh, and maybe you DO get mad and have to repent for things that you did in anger rather than in love. In other words, you might dish out punishment out of anger for “what they made you look like” in public rather than out of genuine concern for their social well-being. But God isn’t like that. He doesn’t discipline you because you made Him mad – He disciplines you because He loves you enough to do it.
Scripture is clear that God disciplines believers when they get out of line – Hebrews 12:5-13 talks about the chastening of the Lord. Scripture is clear that He does not always act lovey-dovey toward you when He corrects you. After all, the passage in Hebrews says that discipline is grievous! So it’s not something you will enjoy, though you’ll be glad that He did it in the long run. But there’s a difference between not being lovey-dovey and being full of wrath. The catchphrase “God is good all the time” is biblically correct, but you have to understand that “good all the time” does not mean “sweet and lovey-dovey all the time.” If you err by thinking the latter, you will end up rebuking the Lord when He deals with you because you’ll assume that it must be Satan talking to you because the voice is not coming across as lovey-dovey.
Also, God made what really is a precious promise to you that if you get wrongly-minded, God will reveal that to you (Philippians 3:15). So this does away with extreme ideas that God isn’t aware of your sins or that God won’t deal with you about sin. He certainly dealt with the people in Asia about sin in Revelation, and Jesus wasn’t at all lovey-dovey when He did it!
Even under grace, there are some things that will still provoke God to come down on you hard, but even then He has your best interest in mind. Even in the case where God took out some Corinthians in judgment over their irreverent celebration of the Lord’s Supper, He did it so that the people involved would die saved rather than continue in their error and end up unsaved (1 Corinthians 11:27-32). You can read more about this topic (and examples of the other cases) in Sickness as Chastening and Judgment in the New Testament.
Is it impossible to get God mad at you or to even be in a bad mood with you as a Christian? I guess that depends on your definition of “mad” and “in a bad mood.” I don’t know that I would characterize Jesus’ threat to puke the Laodicean church’s pastor out of His mouth as being made “in a good mood.” But even in speaking to him, Jesus affirmed His love for him by telling him, “As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten” (Revelation 3:19).
Jesus’ threats to kill a church member’s children and make her and her lovers sick (Revelation 2:20-23) sounds pretty “mad” – it’s hard to smile and say soothingly, “Stop doing that or I’ll kill your kids!” But even then, you could debate whether Jesus was angry or just being extremely stern. He certainly was going to protect His Church against the devil’s infiltration. So if you don’t want His anger to point at you like that, don’t try to seduce your fellow church members while claiming to be a prophet.
One thing is for sure though – God does not “have it out for you.” He is FOR you, not AGAINST you (Romans 8:31). So there is no possibility that God is mad in the sense that He has turned against you. Even when He has to correct you sternly, He still loves you and He is still FOR your success. He is not trying to beat you down and preclude your success in anger.
It is certainly possible to exasperate Jesus – He got upset when His disciples didn’t do things that they should have done. But while He rebuked them, you could debate whether that constituted being mad at them. I would not characterize His reaction as anger in such cases.
So while God is not mad at you as a Christian, it doesn’t mean that He won’t rebuke you sternly if you get out of line. But when He does it, it’s for your good, as Hebrews 12:5-13 shows you.
So no, you are not sick because God is mad at you!