I will try to state fairly this line of reasoning:


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IT IS GOOD FOR YOU TO GET SICK by Dolores N. Ferma


David said, "It is good for me that I have been afflicted; that I might learn thy statutes" (Psalm 119:71). He said, "Before I was afflicted I went astray; but now I have kept thy word" (Psalm 119:67). Where did these afflictions come from? God sent them in his love. "I know, O LORD, that thy judgments are right, and that thou in faithfulness hast afflicted me" (Psalm 119:75). David spent much of Psalm 38 enumerating his physical distresses, which he attributed to God ("thine arrows" in Psalm 38:2) and his sin (Psalm 38:3). David learned the valuable lesson that it is a good thing to endure afflictions from God so that you stop sinning. Surely, the stopping of sin will be far more beneficial than the temporary "loathsome disease" and "lack of soundness in your flesh" (Psalm 38:7). Therefore, when sickness comes, you should seek to find what lesson God is teaching you, and what sin he is revealing to you. You will grow far more than a person who complains that healing is his "covenant right" and protests the very thing (affliction) that David said was good.

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The problem with this objection is that there is enough truth in it to make it attractive as an anti-healing argument. David did say these things, after all, and they are just as much part of the Scriptures as John 3:16. Unquestionably, it was good that David was afflicted. Through physical suffering, David faced his sin and repented of it. He was better off because of it. That does not mean that you have to learn your lessons the way that he did, though. It is far better to stay out of sin and not have to learn things the hard way.

What about Psalm 38, where it appears that God sent the sickness to David because of his sin? The idea that only the devil makes people sick conflicts with some Scripture passages where illness is God's judgment for sin. You can't read Deuteronomy 28:15-68 without seeing that clearly! Even if the devil is in intermediary in the affair, the fact is that God is behind it, and he speaks often of sending pestilence to judge sin in the Old Testament.


The afflictions and sicknesses David endured were clearly the result of sin, and he says so himself. Therefore, you cannot possibly use these verses (or others like them) to make a case that a believer with an up-to-date relationship with God should ever experience illness. It should be obvious that sickness as a judgment is a minority case under our covenant because most (but not all) people healed in Jesus' ministry did not need to be spoken to about sin in their lives. (The man in John 5:2-19 was told to sin no more lest a worse thing come upon him.)

Sickness can indeed serve as a wake-up call, and it is better to receive this kind of wake-up call than to stay on the road to forsaking the faith. This is really the mercy of God in action.

The problem is the unwarranted conclusion reached at the end. This conclusion is that all sickness is God's judgment for sin. That is simply not true. Acts 10:38 could never have been written the way it was if all sickness were God's judgment. Yes, even under the New Covenant there is still a judgment for sin for the unrepentant (see Revelation 2:22-23 for a graphic example.) The fact that this does happen does not mean that all sickness is God's judgment.


If you are born again, and there is sin in your life, you know it. You don't need to wait for a sickness to find out and repent. And if you do get sick, you should take authority over the sickness and command it to leave your body in the name of Jesus! Don't go on a "witch hunt" for some awful secret sin if you don't know of any. That's the devil's game to keep you sick. God gave you his Word and his Spirit to teach you; he does not need to use the devil's crud.

Also, affliction itself is not good, and David never said it was! He said that the result of his affliction was good, but he never once said that affliction itself was good. (You would have to be an idiot or a modern theologian to reach that conclusion.) Read those verses carefully!

If you are not in known sin, there is no reason that you should be sick, and you should resist the sickness rather than embracing it and seeing what you can "learn" from it. You are not in David's position, and NO good would come out of your affliction.