Did God create cancer? We’ve got a very difficult question to try to answer today regarding the origin of sickness, and where it is coming from.
Did God create sickness? Or does the Devil have the creative power to create disease and germs that plague and afflict so many people? What’s behind it?
People have been pondering that question for a long, long time. When you look into the Bible, you get some answers, but I can’t say that I’m totally satisfied with the answers that I’ve read or come up with myself so far.
What the Bible Says About Sickness
I think it’s safe to assume that in the Garden of Eden there was no sickness or disease. I mean, Adam and Eve, we understand, would have lived forever had they not sinned. Even after they sinned, there was still the potential for them to live forever, and that’s why God forbade from getting access to the tree of life, lest they eat and live forever. I can’t believe that sickness and disease was originally part of God’s plan, so it came as a result of the fall and came as a result of sin.
We certainly see sickness and disease characterized in the Bible as something negative, something undesirable, something associated often times as judgment for sin. But not at all times, like in the case of Job.
Job suffered maladies, and it wasn’t because of his sin at all, was it?
We see that the basic attitude of Jesus towards sickness and disease was one of compassion, and love, and healing because He healed all who came to Him asking for healing. He was the exact representation of the Father’s nature. He only did what the Father told Him to do and what He saw the Father do.
So, we get the idea that God is a healer. Of course, we get that in the Old Covenant as well, the many times that God healed people and God even revealed himself as Jehovah Rophe to the people of Israel, “the Lord who heals you.”
The Origin of Sickness and Disease
Let’s go back to the original question. What about the origin of sickness and disease? Still isn’t so clear, because do we believe that the devil has the power to create germs? God has placed into all of our bodies this amazing immune system, so God has designed us to fight these very things that invade our bodies and sometimes make us ill, and that our immune systems often triumph.
In fact, most times, isn’t it true, our immune system and the natural healing process that God put in our body triumphs over the sickness. You cut your finger and a few days later, it’s not cut any longer. It’s healed itself. The regenerative abilities of our body are just absolutely amazing.
It is difficult to believe that sickness has its origin from God. Yet nobody can deny that it’s been allowed and permitted by God, right? Or else it wouldn’t exist at all. I don’t know if anyone has come up with, as I said, with some completely satisfactory answer. Because if God created sickness, gave the Devil some degree of authority over it…
Some References From the New Testament
Because we can read in Scripture about the old woman who was bent over in Luke 13. Jesus heals her. Then, He says, “Should this woman not have been healed? She’s a daughter of Abraham whom Satan has afflicted all these years.” Jesus gave the blame to Satan.
In Acts 10, Peter preached, “You know how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth, how He went about doing good and healing all those who are oppressed by the Devil.”
So there’s two testimonies in Scripture crediting Satan. Paul, this is a mysterious scripture in some sense, talked about a guy that is a sinner within the church and bringing a stain and reproach on the church. “We’ve decided to turn this one over to Satan for the destruction of his flesh that his spirit might be saved in the day of our Lord Jesus” (see 1 Corinthians 5:5).
God Reveals Himself As the Healer
All right, so the best I can do in a short answer is that God has revealed himself, generally speaking, as the Healer.
There’s great reason, if you’re afflicted with a sickness, to have hope, and to go beyond hope and to have faith for God to heal you.
James wrote,
Is anyone among you sick? Then he must call for the elders of the church and they are to pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord; and the prayer offered in faith will restore the one who is sick and the Lord will raise him up, and if he has committed sins, they will be forgiven him.- James 5:14-15
The Association Between Sin and Sickness
Again, as I mentioned earlier, we do see some association between sin and sickness.
Whenever I’ve been sick, it’s always caused me to do a spiritual check-up, and to see if I’ve opened the door to the discipline of the Lord somehow.
Whether it’s God who actively put this sickness on me, or whether it’s God who passively allowed the Devil to put this sickness on me, it really doesn’t make a lot difference, does it? The point is that God wants me healed, and perhaps a condition of my being healed is that I need to confess something.
Remember the guy lowered through the roof (see Luke 5)? The first thing Jesus said to him was, “Your sins are forgiven you.” He took care of the most important thing first, and perhaps the guy was doubting that Jesus would heal him because he was so conscious of how he messed up, like all of us have messed up.
Jesus reassured him his sins were forgiven. Then, that gave them confidence to say, “Well, if my sins are forgiven, what would hold God back from healing me?” Well, that’s a faith builder, isn’t it? It sure is.
Divine Healing
Now, there are those within the Church who criticize anybody who speaks positively about divine healing, and encouraging people to have faith. Yet there are so many scriptures where Jesus, for example, said to people whom He healed, “Your faith has healed you.”
So if they had not have had faith, they would not have been healed. As ministers of the New Testament, we ought to be encouraging people to trust God for their healing, and also to gently say to them (making sure, first of all, there’s not a log in our eye) that there is a possibility that if you’re suffering the discipline of the Lord, that you first need to take care of something. And that is Biblical.
All right. I have a little bit more to say about this in our next episode. Thanks for joining me!
