How God Looks at Sickness
Have you ever thought about how God looks at sickness? Many Christians look at sickness as something God has given them. They believe that for some reason, which we humans will not fully understand until we are in heaven, that God has willed for some of His children to bear sickness and even premature death in their lives. What a lie from the pit of hell! Even the world recognizes sickness is an enemy. The world says, “We must fight cancer! We must fight diabetes! We must fight heart disease!” The truth is, sickness is our enemy and only a Christian ignorant of God’s Word and character would believe it is a token of His love.
So how does God look at sickness? He sent Jesus to destroy it! Now, we need to make sure we see it the way God does!
James 1:17 says: Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.
If every good gift and perfect gift is from above and comes to us from the Father of lights, then we can reasonably say that every twisted, evil, and perverted gift comes up from below, from the father of darkness. The devil lies constantly and is ever-deceiving.
Anything Satan brings is never good. Yet, over the years he has convinced many Christians that sickness is from God, and God deems the afflicted one strong enough to “bear the burden” of it. Think about it. If a parent had the ability to put sickness on their child and did so, they would probably be arrested for child abuse!
We must become firmly rooted in the fact that sickness is not from God—never from God.
It’s a tool of the enemy to stop the effectiveness of Christians on the earth.
Acts 10:38: How God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with power: who went about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed of the devil; for God was with him.
This verse says Jesus went about “doing good, and healing….” If healing is good, sickness must be bad. God does not heal us from good things; He heals us from bad things. Just as Jesus always saves sinners, gives eternal life, and just as He takes poverty and gives riches in return, so He heals sickness!
Jesus Takes Sickness Away
Satan cannot produce good. He only produces evil. Satan is the one who brings sickness. Jesus is the One who takes it away. Nowhere in the Word of God is sickness ever called a blessing. It is never called a gift of God. In 1 Corinthians 12, the gifts of the Spirit are listed including “the gifts of healing” and “the working of miracles.” The “gift of sickness” is not found anywhere in the list of the gifts of the Spirit.
Acts 10:38 tells us one of the reasons Jesus was sent into the earth was to heal “all that were oppressed of the devil.” Sickness is satanic oppression. The Greek word for “oppressed” means “to exercise dominion over.” Whenever there is sickness in your body, there is a part of your life Satan is exercising dominion over.
Luke 10:18: And he said unto them, I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven.
Jesus said, “I was there and saw Satan fall.” As deity, Christ has always existed. Long before Adam was created, Lucifer rebelled against God and was cast to the earth as Satan. Christ was a witness to this event.
Authority Over Satan
Luke 10:19: Behold, I give unto you power (authority) to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy: and nothing shall by any means hurt you.
We are to tread on Satan! We have been given authority and dominion over his power. Because of our position in Jesus Christ, we are over Satan and all his evil works.
Ephesians 2:6: And hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus.
Ephesians 1:22-23: And hath put all things under his feet, and gave him to be the head over all things to the church, Which is his body, the fullness of him that filleth all in all.
All dominion, principality, power, and might are under the feet of the Lord Jesus Christ. We are in a position under the head and form everything from the neck down to the feet. He is the head. We are the body. In the body of Christ, we may be the hands or the elbows. We may be the shoulders or the kneecaps. We may even be the foot or the little toe. We might be the underside of the little toe, but the good news is Satan has been placed under the feet of the Body of Christ! Satan is under our authority.
Sickness is a form of Satan’s dominion over us. We need to use our authority and speak to sickness, speak to demons, speak to principalities, and speak to Satan to turn us loose in our body and gain back the dominion which belongs to us.
Sickness should be under our feet--not the other way around!
Sickness is Oppression
In Acts 10:38 we were told sickness is an oppression from the devil. The Greek brings out that oppression means “to exercise dominion over.” Satan tries to dominate our lives by putting sickness and disease in our bodies. Jesus has given us the authority to tread on the power of Satan and over all his evil works.
Luke 13:15-16: The Lord then answered him, and said, Thou hypocrite, doth not each one of you on the sabbath loose his ox or his ass from the stall, and lead him away to watering? And ought not this woman, being a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan hath bound, lo, these eighteen years, be loosed from this bond on the sabbath day?
Jesus showed the hypocrisy of the religious leaders by pointing out they would let their barn animals loose from their stalls on the Sabbath if they needed water but refused to allow a human being to be loosed from a physical bondage on the Sabbath. Sickness is similar to the stall where oxen were kept penned in. Sickness keeps us confined in the pen and it takes someone from the outside to release us. When Jesus went to the cross, He literally opened up the pen for us so we no longer need to stay in the pen of sickness and disease!
Jesus in essence said, “You care more about your oxen than you do about this woman. You would rather keep her in bondage than to see her set free. Isn’t she much more valuable than a few oxen? She is a daughter of Abraham!” In other words, this woman knew Jesus Christ as her Lord and Savior and was a precious child of God!
Sickness is Captivity
Job 42:10: And the Lord turned the captivity of Job, when he prayed for his friends: also the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before.
In this verse, sickness is referred to as “captivity.” Sickness is called “bondage.” Sickness is called “oppression.” Sickness is never called a blessing! It is a curse and is always a curse! Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law and when He redeemed us from the curse, we were also redeemed from sin, sickness, and poverty.
Isaiah 58:6 says God sets the oppressed free and breaks every yoke. Because of Jesus’ work on the cross, we have been set free!
Sickness is a Destruction
Psalm 107:20: He sent his word, and healed them, and delivered them from their destructions.
Sickness is called a “destruction.” In fact, it is just one of many destructions. The ultimate destruction the body can experience is physical death. What many don’t stop to think about is that sickness leads to physical death. Sickness is the destruction of the building, little by little, until eventually the entire body is destroyed.
Some sicknesses are like a wrecking ball and others are like a sledgehammer. There are terminal illnesses which can bring death very rapidly. But there are also sicknesses that begin destroying day by day, week by week, month by month, year by year. Leprosy is an excellent example. It begins with a very small, bright spot that becomes a boil and eventually spreads completely over the body. Leprosy is a perfect type of sickness found in the Word of God because sickness is designed for destruction.
Of course, many other things in life are destructive, such as sin, which usually begins as something small but, if allowed, eventually dominates a person’s life and could eventually lead to death. Both sin and sickness are destructive, but God came in by the power of His Word and set us free from all our destructions.
We are Helpless to Heal Ourselves
Luke was the only disciple to tell this story. In Luke fourteen, Jesus had been invited to the home of a Pharisee to eat bread on the Sabbath day. The Pharisees intended to trap Jesus by setting up the situation so He would violate the law. They brought a sick man and sat him right in front of Jesus to see if He would heal him on the Sabbath day.
Luke 14:1-6: And it came to pass, as he went into the house of one of the chief Pharisees to eat bread on the sabbath day, that they watched him. And, behold, there was a certain man before him which had the dropsy. And Jesus answering spake unto the lawyers and Pharisees, saying, Is it lawful to heal on the sabbath day? And they held their peace. And he took him, and healed him, and let him go; And answered them, saying, Which of you shall have an ass or an ox fallen into a pit, and will not straightway pull him out on the sabbath day? And they could not answer him again to these things.
The Pharisees and lawyers had absolutely no concern or compassion for this sick man. The Greek word for “dropsy” is hudropikos.
Hudro means “water.” This man’s kidneys had failed and his body was filling with waste. He was very bloated and because his digestive system was not operating properly, he was dying. Jesus healed the man and sent him on his way.
Knowing what the Pharisees and lawyers were thinking, Jesus asked them a question. “If you had a donkey or an ox fall into a pit, wouldn’t you rescue the animal even if it was the Sabbath day?” Of course, the obvious answer was “yes.”
The Greek word for “pit” is an interesting word. The actual meaning of the word is a dried-up cistern or a dried-up well. In the ancient world when a well would dry up, the cistern or well was covered, usually with wood. As time passed, the wood would often become rotten, and when an animal would walk across the rotten piece of wood, it would fall into the dry cistern or well. Most of us picture a small hole in the ground when the word “cistern” or “well” is mentioned. But these were huge, gigantic pits and it was very difficult to pull an animal from them. The sides were very high and nearly perpendicular, making it virtually impossible to crawl up the sides.
When a person is fighting a sickness or disease, it is like an animal being in a pit and trying to climb out but being helpless to get free. It takes someone from the outside to help. The good news is, the “somebody” on the outside is Jesus! He went to the cross, died for us, shed His blood and took stripes on His back to free us from any “pit” we may have fallen into!
Jesus Has Pulled You Out
Sickness is called an oppression (Acts 10:38), a bondage (Luke 13:16), a captivity (Job 42:10), and a destruction (Psalm 107:20). At no time is it ever called a blessing or a gift from God. In every case mentioned in the Bible, sickness and disease are evil, foreboding and bring captivity and a yoke to our lives. Most wonderful for every believer is the fact that Jesus walked into the synagogue one day and declared, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed and called me to set the captives free!”
If Satan has his foot on you in the area of sickness, it is time to declare you have been set free by the stripes of Jesus.
It is time to declare Jesus has pulled you from the “pit” of sickness, disease, and destruction. It is time to declare Jesus has redeemed you from the curse which Satan has tried to attach to your body. You don’t need to be oppressed with sickness and disease because Jesus has set you free by the power of God!
