1. Does God ever cause sickness?
2. Does God ever choose not to heal?
3. What was Paul’s thorn in the flesh?
Does God ever cause sickness? JC was sleeping in the bottom of the boat in the middle of a life-threatening storm. He was sleeping cos the world He was living in had no storm. He was living in a realm of Kingdom reality – He was actually living in a realm called peace. They woke Him up and he looked at the storm and He released peace over the storm. How did He release peace. He had it to give. We know He had it to give cos He slept in the storm. You can only give away what you have. Can God give away sickness? No He’s not sick. You cant give cancer if you don’t have it.
Does God ever choose not to heal? No. God chose 2000 years ago to make a purchase. Bill bought a new car last year and now, a year later it had 10 000 miles on the clock. What if he now went back to the dealer and said, “I’ve decided not to buy the car! He’s going to laugh at Bill. He’s going to say, you can park it, you can burn it, you can sell it, you can give it, but you cannot decide not to buy it, cos you’ve already bought it! How can you decide not to buy it if you’ve already paid for it? 2000 years ago Jesus made a purchase. He does not decide not to heal people today, the decision was made 2000 years ago to heal. Either the payment was sufficient for all sin, or no sin. Either the payment was sufficient for all sickness, or for no sickness. Healing and forgiveness work in tandem throughout the scriptures. You’ll find them in the same phrase consistently, because it’s the same basic payment – the stripes that He bore, the blood that He shed that dealt with sickness as well as forgiveness. There’s a third element thrown it – the word poverty. The word evil, in Matthew we read “Deliver us from evil – the word comes from the word pain and the word pain comes from the root word poor. So the brush stroke of God’s redemption was to wipe out the root of sin, the root of sickness, and the root of poverty. So….does He choose not to heal? No, He chose to do it long ago
What was Paul’s thorn in the flesh? I don’t know what it was, but I don’t believe it was sickness. Remember the Bible is not Western Culture, it’s Asian, it’s Middle eastern, and he’s using an eastern idiom, or proverb or phrase, and we take it to mean that he had an eye disease. Randy – Paul was trained as a rabi and they really knew the Bible. In the OT there are only 2 references to thorns in the flesh, and neither time is it referring to sickness. Both times it is a person opposing something.