Objection: Psalm 41:3 Proves That God Permits Sickness but Gives You Grace to Bear It
The idea is that rather than healing your sickness if you help the poor, God will just “turn your bed,” which the objector is convinced means that He promises to comfort you, not heal you, if you get sick. Does He really mean that He will just give you grace to bear sickness as you resign yourself to it? As in many cases, this argument dissolves when you consider the context. Let’s see this objection fits the context when we look back a couple verses:
Psalm 41:1-3:
Blessed is he that considereth the poor: the LORD will deliver him in time of trouble.
The LORD will preserve him, and keep him alive; and he shall be blessed upon the earth: and thou wilt not deliver him unto the will of his enemies.
The LORD will strengthen him upon the bed of languishing: thou wilt make all his bed in his sickness.
So, speaking of the giver, God says that He will (1) deliver him, (2) preserve him, (3) keep him alive, (4) bless him (5) not deliver him to his enemies’ will (6) strengthen him when he is sick and (7) “make his bed” (literally “turn his bed”) in time of sickness. So right away we know that He is not saying, as some think, that you must waste away, resignedly singing your sweet songs in the night as God kills you with sickness. The Lord will preserve you and keep you alive and deliver you and strengthen you. Already we can see in the context that God does NOT let you die from the illness, refusing to heal you but just giving you grace while you die a miserable death! That conclusion definitely does not fit what God says when you consider the preceding two verses, or even the rest of verse 3 itself.
The phrase “turn his bed” does not appear anywhere else, so we have nothing in the Bible to compare that to, which makes this a little difficult. If you look through modern translations of the Bible, many of them just come out and say that the Lord heals the person in his sickness, which would refute the objection immediately. So it is far from universally accepted that Psalm 41:3 speaks merely of comfort. However, it is not universally accepted that Psalm 41:3 speaks of complete healing rather than comfort, either, so assume for this discussion that He says He will comfort you, as the objector insists. What you have to see here is that even if “make his bed” does mean that God will comfort the person, that is not ALL that He does! He also strengthens him (in the same sentence), which is probably why many translators concluded that the person would get out of his bed rather than just stay there comforted.
In my opinion, the strongest proof is in verse 2 that God does indeed heal rather than merely comfort, though I don’t argue that “the God of all comfort” (2 Corinthians 1:3-4) would comfort you too. David says, “He shall be blessed upon the earth.” It doesn’t say that he will LEAVE the earth because of his sickness, so obviously he gets healed and stays on the earth. To assign a status of “blessed upon the earth” assumes that the sick person is no longer languishing in a sickbed. When is that last time you looked at a sufferer in a “care center” and declared, “Wow, that person is blessed upon the earth!” Never, and no one else in his right mind would think that a person confined to a bed with a chronic unhealed illness is “blessed upon the earth” either. So in my mind, the man in this passage MUST be healed and delivered from his sickbed so that he can be “blessed upon the earth.”
Another strong argument that the Psalmist did not think that the person must just stay sick and be comforted is the fact that Psalm 41 is a Psalm of David, the same David who wrote Psalm 103:3, in which he declares without question that God “heals all your diseases.”
In case you’re now wondering how someone would ever die if God really promised to heal all his diseases, check out the answer to the related objection.