Objection: God Is Far More Interested in Your Character Than in Your Comfort

The faulty conclusion is that God will let you be uncomfortable through sickness so that you can reach a “higher” goal – the development of your character.  Or, restated, that God uses the devil’s oppression to perfect you.  This is a variation of the “God builds character through sickness” objection handled elsewhere, but with a slight twist that we’ll deal with here. 

When Jesus walked the earth, it was very clear that He had mercy on those who were in “dis-ease” (discomfort) because His will was for those who were in discomfort to be physically comfortable.  To make people’s comfort seem relatively unimportant is to deny God’s mercy on mankind.  God is interested in both your character and your comfort!  It makes little sense to try to “rank” things that are God’s will.  Someone could come out with a statement that God is far more interested in having you walk in love than He is in you reading your Bible, but again, it is senseless to “rank” things that are BOTH the explicit will of God for you, as if one really isn’t as important to Him.

Your comfort is important enough to God that He sent Jesus to bear your diseases so that you would not have to do so.  If you take the objection at face value, it leaves you with the impression that God really doesn’t care about your comfort; it’s somehow of secondary importance to Him as long as you’re a godly person.  This is not what Scripture teaches.  He wants you to enjoy abundant life, walking in both character and comfort.  Neither is unimportant and neither should be minimized.  God does not have a “Suck it up, Buttercup” attitude toward sickness and pain, which Jesus made clear when He went around healing those whom the devil had oppressed (Acts 10:38).

The other problem is that this objection makes the false assumption that the development of your character depends on you being uncomfortable!  Why not read the Word and believe what it says about the fruit of the Spirit and act out what the Bible portrays as love?  That does NOT have to involve discomfort on your part.  The Word will build you up and cause you to be a person of better character without the devil having to get involved.

Besides, if you’ve spent any time around sick people, have you found that they get sweeter and sweeter as the days go by and full of better character as their pain level increases?  That hasn’t been my experience.  Usually, sick people are more irritable due to their discomfort.  Consider the last time you got sick – did you find that your happiness increased and your character blossomed as a result?  I doubt it.

So when you really consider what this objection says, you have to conclude that it doesn’t make sense as an argument against divine healing, and it makes God look a lot less merciful than He really is.