Spurgeon on Sickness as a "Greater Gift"

In recent days I have read and heard some unfortunately spoken words to the effect that it is not God's will that anyone be sick.  A friend of my daughter's told her that point blank one day, another dear friend attended a small group meeting where a lady with cancer was being prayed for and the leader of the group introduced the prayer time by saying that this cancer was not God's will for her and that God had no intention of teaching her through this experience.  In other words, deliverance and healing were the only options.  I have also recently read several books by authors claiming that God doesn't want you to be sick, and then finding out that they themselves died of illness.  One even said that we have an appointment with God to die and we need to be prepared to die, but that our appointment with death won't come by way of illness in general or cancer specifically - then I found out that author died of cancer.

How grateful I am for the more wise, mature and carefully considered words of some of our spiritual forefathers.  Here's a few words by and about Charles Spurgeon from Tullian Tchividjian.

Charles Spurgeon once said, “Health is a gift from God, but sickness is a gift greater still.” Throughout his time in this world, Spurgeon suffered with various physical ailments that eventually took his life prematurely. He longed to be well but he recognized the supreme value of being sick and he thanked God for it because it was his pain that caused him to desperately draw near to God.

Comments

[J.]

We don't want to talk of real suffering for fear of sounding blithe or naive. Of course no one wants to court or ask for illness or injury, but when it comes a real thing it can bring is humility. It humbles us.
It can also awaken us by separating us from the world and our default self-image and all the rest that make up a sleep-walking existence in the world.

[Bobby Grow]

Being sick is no fun; I wonder what folks think about Jesus though? He became sick by becoming sin for us, was that not God's will? 'Word faith' theology has gotta go. Great post and quote of Spurgeon.

[Richard]

Michael Horton has written a great book that partially deals with the subject, "Too Good to Be True," which echoes in some parts the "theology of glory" vs. the "theology of the Cross," which Luther wrote about in his Heidelberg Disputation. The book was a great help to my wife and me as we dealt with cancer.

[David Wayne]

Hi Richard. I do have the book and it is in my to be read pile. I hope this means that you have battled or are battling cancer successfully??

[Michele McGinty]

Thanks for the words of Spurgeon. I haven't been particularly thankful for my cancer but I'm sure God understands :-) I'm not sure if I'm closer to him (I clung pretty close as I went through seminary) but I understand it's his will that I go through this at this time. I'm particularly thankful that my cancer is in remission. I see it as the grace of God. I'm thankful it wasn't worse than it was. Ovarian cancer has been easier to deal with than breast cancer would have been.

The fallout of the thinking that God doesn't want us to be ill is sad. A woman thinks God will heal her and therefore lets her cancer grow until it's past the time that she can be saved. This is what happens when we don't understand that it has been granted for us to suffer (Philippians 1:29)

[Louise]

No one can definitively say that illness in any one person's life is God's will. For some perhaps it is, for others perhaps it's not.
Within the context of our own relationships with him and the holy spirit present and communicating in us, surely we can discern on a case by case basis? Maybe it is an opportunity to walk through the suffering towards death together, maybe it's an opportunity to walk through to healing together.

In any case I'm pretty sure God's will for me and him originally was to chill in the garden together and build our relationship. He's still all about our relationship but we're playing it out in a different context.

Can only those things that are God's will happen on Earth in any case? Do things happen that are not? Was it really God's will that we would eat from the tree, or perhaps it was that we wouldn't.

[Alex Jordan]

My wife has been sick for a long time. For a while we were deceived by the message that says that physical healing is found "in the atonement" and therefore healing is pretty much guaranteed in this life to the one who exercises faith. Of course we wanted to believe that physical healing would take place and that God had already provided it and that all we needed to do was just to believe. Who wouldn't? So we did our best to study and apply this teaching-- we attended a church that taught this and read the books that taught this and prayed for healing fervently with the support of the community that also believed these things. Nonetheless my wife was not healed. After a while we had to make a choice-- we could consider the possibility that it might actually be in God's will for my wife to be going through illness at this time-- or we could refuse to accept this, view the illness as the work of the Enemy and our God-given responsibility to never give in to sickness and overcome it and never doubt, all by the strength of continued "faith".

Fortunately we began to think more sensibly and biblically (God opening my eyes through reformed theology). We realized that right there in Scripture people sometimes do get sick through no fault of their own (amazing) and God actually is the one behind it (wow) and He has a purpose in allowing the trial (Job, anyone?).

In Scripture sickness is still a curse and an evil-- yet somehow God's redemptive strategy makes use of all kinds of evil, not excluding sickness, to accomplish spiritual transformation in His called people. It's not a pleasant process and some might even be driven to the brink of utter despair (as Job was) in their trial.

But God is faithful and sovereign and good and powerful and in control. Sickness is not the final word. Someday we may be told all the "whys" behind our particular bouts with illness. For now we do our best to cling to God in trust, placing our hope, not in made-up man-made promises about healing, but in God's word, which assures us that complete and ultimate healing (physical and spiritual) is a sure hope that will not fail because our faithful, all-powerful God does not and cannot fail! (see Romans 8:23-38). Now there's some wonderful, real promises for God's children, ones that all the Benny Hinns, Kenneth Hagins and Oral Roberts of this world should be preaching but don't. Fortunately there are others preaching them, and I aim to be one of them.

[Alex Jordan]

P.S. Thanks David, for sharing testimony about your personal battle with illness and what you've been learning from it. I also appreciated the wisdom from Spurgeon. I've written from time to time on this topic, over at my blog, Jordan's View. For example, you can check out these posts:

Sickness, Healing and the Christian, Pt 1(Dangerous Deceptions)
Sickness, Healing and the Christian, Pt 2 (Biblical Analysis)

Merry Christmas,

Alex

[Richard]

Hi David. God is walking us through cancer. My wife has been cancer free, after a pretty brutal partial radical maesctomy, now for over a year. But we still have our scares of it returning from time to time--even now. Thank you for your writings--I have shared them with our adult Sunday School class and the way in which you have talked about the importance of the theology of the Cross vs that of glory. I actually took Mike Horton's book with me as I waited for the results of my wife's surgery. Flash forward to the day I brought my wife home from surgery--I turned on TV so my wife and I could see Joel Osteen relate a story of a friend who "thought away" his cancer cells through positive thoughts. What a contrast! Thank you for seeing God work in the midst of suffering.