Big Healing Book - David Said That It Was GOOD That He Was Afflicted; So It Can Be

Objection: David Said That It Was GOOD That He Was Afflicted; So It Can Be with Us

This line of “reasoning” goes something like this:

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IT IS GOOD FOR YOU TO GET SICK
by Dolores N. Ferma

David said, “It is good for me that I have been afflicted; that I might learn thy statutes” (Psalm 119:71). He said, “Before I was afflicted I went astray; but now I have kept thy word” (Psalm 119:67). Where did these afflictions come from? God sent them in His love. “I know, O LORD, that thy judgments are right, and that thou in faithfulness hast afflicted me” (Psalm 119:75). David spent much of Psalm 38 enumerating his physical distresses, which he attributed to God (“thine arrows” in Psalm 38:2) and his sin (Psalm 38:3). David learned the valuable lesson that it is a good thing to endure afflictions from God so that you stop sinning. Surely, the stopping of sin will have far greater impact than the temporary “loathsome disease” and “lack of soundness in your flesh” (Psalm 38:7). Therefore, when sickness comes, you should seek to find what lesson God is teaching you, and what sin He is revealing to you. Then thank Him that He did something good for you when He lovingly, in faithfulness, sent sickness your way. You will grow far more than a person who complains that healing is his “covenant right” and protests the very thing (affliction) that David said was good.

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The problem with this objection is that there is enough truth in it to make it attractive as an anti-healing argument. David did say these things, after all, and they are just as much part of the Scriptures as John 3:16. Unquestionably, it was good that David was afflicted. Through physical suffering, David faced his sin and repented of it. He was better off because of it. That does not mean that you have to learn your lessons the way that he did, though. It is far better to stay out of sin and not have to learn things the hard way. The Bible was given to us so that we can learn in the School of the Holy Spirit rather than in the School of Hard Knocks.

What about Psalm 38, where it appears that God sent the sickness to David because of his sin? The idea that only the devil makes people sick conflicts with some Scripture passages where illness is God’s judgment for sin. You can’t read Deuteronomy 28:15-68 without seeing that clearly! God often speaks of sending pestilence to judge sin in the Old Testament. (See Sickness as Chastening and Judgment in the Old Testament.)

The afflictions and sicknesses David endured were clearly the result of sin. He says so himself. It should be obvious that sickness as a judgment is a minority condition under our covenant because most (but not all) people healed in Jesus’ ministry did not need to be spoken to about sin in their lives. (Jesus did tell the man in John 5:2-19 to sin no more lest a worse thing come upon him.) See Sickness as Chastening and Judgment in the New Testament for more New Testament examples of extreme cases.

Sickness can indeed serve as a wake-up call, and it is better to receive this kind of wake-up call than to stay on the road to forsaking the faith. This is really the mercy of God in action. In fact, that seems to be the idea in 1 Corinthians 11:27-32, where judgment falls before people end up condemned with the world.

The problem is the unwarranted conclusion reached at the end. This conclusion is that sickness is God’s way of pointing out sin in your life. That is simply not true. Acts 10:38 could never have been written the way it was if all sicknesses were God’s wake-up calls. There would surely have been some in the crowds who hadn’t heeded the wake-up call yet, but they were all healed anyway.

Under the New Covenant there is still a judgment for sin for the stubbornly unrepentant (see Revelation 2:20-23 for a graphic example.) However, the fact that this does happen does not mean that all sickness is God’s way of pointing out your sins. God gave you a conscience that can point out your sins without any sickness involved. If you are born again and there is sin in your life, you know it. Sin just has an “icky” feeling to a believer because his born-again spirit will always side against sin. You don’t need to wait for a sickness to find out about your sins so that you can repent. And if you do get sick, you should take authority over the sickness and command it to leave your body in the name of Jesus! Don’t go on a “witch hunt” for some awful secret sin if you don’t know of any. That’s the devil’s game to get you to accept sickness. God gave you His Word and His Spirit to teach you; He does not need to use the devil’s crud.

In no case in the gospel did Jesus refuse to heal someone because God “faithfully afflicted that person for his own good.” In fact, Jesus didn’t even decide who could be healed. ANYONE who touched Him could be healed in certain cases. He didn’t pre-screen people to see how bad their sin was before He let them touch Him. Although some were probably sick as a result of sin in their lives, Jesus offered forgiveness and healing as a package. You never see Him say, “God did that to you for your own good to afflict you so that you won’t want to sin. Therefore, it wouldn’t be good for Me to heal you at this time. It is GOOD that you are afflicted.” Since He hasn’t changed, why would you expect Him to deal with any New Testament believer that way? You have to remember that you live under a much better covenant than David ever had. David was not born again. He did not have a new spirit made after God’s image in righteousness and true holiness that would never side in with sin. He never had the victory over sin that you have in Christ. He did not have the Holy Spirit living in him as his Teacher. You do! God can teach you from the inside without having to resort to external, fleshly affliction. Unless you’re trying to destroy the church or actively hinder the gospel, you need not worry about the judgment that fell on some people in the New Testament.

Also, affliction itself is not good, and David never said it was! He said that the result of his affliction was good, but he never once said that affliction itself was good. You would have to be very confused or a modern theologian (which are not necessarily mutually exclusive categories) to reach that conclusion. Read those verses carefully!

If you’re sure that sickness has been sent in faithfulness to point out your sin, just try to figure out what sin you’re being reproved for the next time you come down with the flu. I doubt that you will come across any connection. Also, you might want to note the coincidence that during “flu season,” God “reproves” so many people, sinners and saints alike, at the same time. Then maybe you’ll realize the foolishness of this objection. Maybe you’ll even question some other traditions, start receiving the truth, and then NOT have the latest flu bug that is making the rounds.

Resist sickness rather than embracing it and seeing what you can “learn” from it. You are not in David’s position, and NO good would come out of your affliction unless you’re in such rebellion that your soul is in danger.

Let me give you one more illustration. Sid the Seminarian sent texts to his friends (while driving) about Dolores N. Ferma’s latest bestseller, “God Loved Me Enough to Give Me Lyme Disease.” He missed the fact that a large branch was blowing into the road and he got into a car wreck. He went to get X-rays to see if he was OK. While the car wreck did nothing permanent to him, the X-rays pointed out a tumor in his abdomen that he didn’t know about. The doctors removed the tumor, which otherwise would have grown quickly and become inoperable. Sid then wrote an article entitled “It Was GOOD that I Got into a Car Wreck” in which he shared how the car wreck saved his life. He exhorted the rest of us to realize that car wrecks are GOOD, so we should be glad when they happen because God uses car wrecks to point out other problems in our lives. (A Christian magazine rejected his article and printed a Dolores N. Ferma article instead because it made more business sense to promote her to increase sales of her Lyme Disease book, which the magazine’s publisher also published.) Would you believe that car wrecks are good because of what happened to Sid? If not, you should not believe that being afflicted with sickness is GOOD because of what happened to David.