Objection: God Sometimes Has an Older Person Get Sick to Make That Person Want to Come Home to Heaven

The only reason that old wives’ tales like this manage to circulate is that people don’t read their Bibles.  Actually, an old wife who didn’t read the Bible was the first to tell me this one!  This is right up there with “God wanted another little angel in His choir” in the ludicrous false comfort department.

Aside from being completely ignorant, this also slanders God’s character.  The real God is not so cruel that He would say, “I’ll make you really suffer so that you just can’t take it anymore and you’ll finally ‘cry Uncle’ and decide that going to heaven is better than enduring the awful ailment I inflicted on you.”

Like most objections, this fails the “where do you see Jesus do it” test.  Jesus is the same yesterday, today and forever (Hebrews 13:8), so if this horrible objection is true, there should be many cases where Jesus says to someone, “I won’t heal you – this particular illness was sent from God to make you so miserable that you want to commit Satan-assisted suicide by just letting yourself die from it.”  But you will never find anything like that in Scripture.  Jesus went about healing all who oppressed by the DEVIL (Acts 10:38), not oppressed by GOD.  ANYONE who wanted to be healed could be healed.  That would include older people.  Jesus never hinted that someone was “supposed to die” from an illness and could not be healed.  If He did not do that in the four gospels, He will never do it today.

Jesus bore OUR sicknesses and OUR pains.  That includes whatever you have.  That means that you are legally redeemed from it and you need not suffer it so that you want to bail out of your earthly body early.

Jesus came to give us all “abundant life” (John 10:10).  That includes older people.  A life that you want to escape because you’re so miserable cannot qualify as abundant life.  Jesus and His Father are never the source of something that tears down your life and makes you miserable.  Be very sure that Jesus and His Father would never afflict you to make you want to leave the planet.

SATAN is the one who wants you to be so miserable that you want to leave the earth.  The sooner you leave, the sooner you can’t be a problem for him anymore.