I once visited a woman who was dying of uterine cancer, was very distressed, but not only because of her physical discomfort, she explained that she had an abortion when she was a young woman and that she was convinced that her illness was a direct consequence In short, she believes that cancer was God’s judgment of her.
The common pastoral response to such a distressing question from someone on their deathbed is to say that affliction is not God’s judgment for sin. But I had to be honest, so I told him I didn’t know. It may have been God’s judgment, but maybe it wasn’t. I cannot sound God’s secret counsel or read the invisible hand of His providence, so I did not know the reason for His suffering. However, he knew that whatever the reason, there was an answer to his guilt. We talked about the mercy of Christ and the cross and she died in faith.
- The question that the woman has asked is asked every day by people who suffer afflictions and is gathered in one of the most difficult passages of the New Testament: in John 9 we read: “As Jesus walked.
- She saw a blind man from birth.
- And his disciples asked.
- “Master.
- Who sinned.
- This or his fathers.
- That he may have been born blind?”But was it God’s work to reveal himself in him? (vv.
- 1-3).
Why did Jesus’ disciples assume that the root cause of this man’s blindness was his sin or that of his parents?They certainly had a basis for this hypothesis, for the scriptures, from the annals of the fall, clearly show that the reason why suffering, sickness, and death exist in this world is sin. The disciples were right to say that one way or another sin was involved in this man’s affliction. In addition, there are examples in God’s Bible that cause distress because of specific sins. In ancient Israel, God afflicted leprosy, Moses’ sister, Myriam, because He questioned Moses’ role as God’s spokesman (Numbers 12:1-10). Similarly, God took the life of the bathbaba-born son as a result of David’s sin. (2 Samuel 12:14-18). The child was punished, not for something he did, but as a direct result of God’s judgment of David.
However, the disciples made the mistake of particularizing the general relationship between sin and suffering, assumed that there was a direct correspondence between the sin of the blind and his affliction, did they not read the book of Job, which is about an innocent man, but gravely afflicted by God?The disciples were wrong to reduce the options to two when there was another alternative. They asked their question about Jesus in a way – or this, or that – by making the logical mistake of the false dilemma, assuming that the sin of man or the sin of man’s parents was the cause of his blindness.
The disciples also seem to have assumed that anyone who has affliction suffers in direct proportion of the sin he has committed. Again, the book of Job comes to this conclusion, because the degree of suffering Job was called to endure was astronomical compared to suffering and suffering. afflictions of others far more guilty than him.
We should never rush to the conclusion that a specific incidence of suffering is a direct response or in direct correspondence with a person’s specific sin. The story of the man who was born blind clearly shows it.
Our Lord answered the disciples’ question by correcting their false assumption that man’s blindness was a direct consequence of his parents’ sin. He assured them that man was born blind not because God was punishing man or his parents. There was another reason. And because there is another reason in this case, there can always be another reason for the afflictions god calls us to endure.
Jesus responded to his disciples by saying, “Neither he has sinned nor his parents, but was it God’s work to reveal himself in him?(V. 3). What did he mean? In a simpler way, Jesus said that man was born blind. so that Jesus could heal him at the appointed time, as a testimony of Jesus’ power and divinity. Our Lord has demonstrated his identity as savior and Son of God in this healing.
When we suffer, we must trust that God knows what He does and that He works in and through the pain and afflictions of His people for their own glory and the sanctification of their people. It is difficult to endure prolonged suffering, but the difficulty is greatly mitigated when we hear our Lord explain the mystery of the case of the blind by birth, whom God called for many years of pain for the glory of Jesus.