What Did I Do to Deserve This Sickness?

This is the wrong question to ask if you’re sick, but I’ll give you a right answer that might shock you.

Pick a sin, ANY sin!  If you’ve committed ANY sin, you deserve to get sick.  Deuteronomy 28:61 makes it clear that ALL sicknesses are part of the curse for not keeping ALL the Lord’s commandments and statutes.  If you want to be right with God on your own merits, you have to be completely sinless, because violating one point of the Law is as bad as violating the entire Law as far righteousness goes (James 2:10).  So if you want to link your ability to stay in health to your personal track record, you’re up Sick Creek with no paddle.

Fortunately for you, that’s not the end of the matter.  Because your sin deserves the physical punishment of sickness, Jesus had to be physically punished Himself in order to redeem you.  He took the punishment for your sins, so you don’t have to bear that punishment yourself.  He had to be wounded for your transgressions, bruised for your iniquities, smitten and afflicted.  It wasn’t enough for Him to suffer spiritually; He had to suffer physically because that is what your sins deserve.  But because He took the sicknesses and pains on Himself that you deserve for your sins, He legally redeemed you from having to bear those punishments for sin in your own body.

So based on your own track record, you deserve the sickness.  But based on what Christ did for you, you don’t deserve that sickness anymore because He redeemed you from your sins that deserved it. There is no point in two people being punished for the same crime.  Jesus was already punished for your sins, so you get to live in health as if you’d never violated any of God’s commandments.

If you think for a while about the question at the top of this section, you’ll realize that it comes from a Law-based mentality that thinks that if you’re doing a pretty good job at not sinning as much as other people, you don’t deserve sickness, but if you’re doing a crummier job at not sinning, you deserve sickness.  You need to throw out your own Law-based righteousness and walk in the righteousness that you have received as a gift from God (Romans 5:17).

That is why you never want to ask this question defiantly, as if to challenge God about His justice.  It will not help you to try to tell God that He was unfair to “allow” the sickness.  From a justice perspective, you deserve to be sick.  So you should be glad that you are under grace and not under the Law.

One New Testament illustration of sin deserving sickness is found in Romans 1:26-27, where same-sex partners reap the due penalty for their error in their bodies.  I say this not to condemn them, but to point out that the New Testament indicates that sin still deserves the physical punishment of sickness.  Jesus came so that people in “LGBT” relationships (and everyone else) could be set free from their sins and NOT have to suffer the punishment that those sins deserve.  We don’t have to preach the BAD news, true as it may be (“You DESERVE what you got in your body”) when we can preach the GOOD news (“You can receive both forgiveness for your sins and healing for your body because Jesus bore the penalty for everything you’ve done”).  You don’t want to get into a condemning mentality when after all, there are sins in YOUR life that would make YOU deserve sickness too if you had to deal with God on the basis of your own merits.

There are other cases in the discussion Sickness as Chastening and Judgment in the New Testament showing New Testament links between sins and sickness.  However, the chances are slim that you fall into any of the extreme categories in that discussion.  (You can read it just to be sure.)

You can waste a lot of time going on a “witch hunt” for sins in your life when you come down with something.  There may not be any specific sin that relates to that specific illness!  People get colds, flus and similar contagious diseases just by living in a fallen world where these diseases exist.  You can do more harm than good engaging in endless introspection, trying to figure out what it is you did that “let the devil in.”  Adam let the devil in.  Our focus should be to run the devil’s work out of our bodies.  Rather than focusing on sin and the disease, it would be better to focus on the gift of righteousness you have received (Romans 5:17) and your authority over sickness in Christ.

If you are a believer, you have been washed clean from your sins.  You do not “deserve” to be sick anymore!  So the question “What did I do to deserve this sickness?” is inappropriate because the real issue is “What did Jesus do for you so that you don’t have to have the sickness that your sins deserve?”