Wow, I shoulod come on at this time more often, no children, only grown ups

Well except tudders, of course

I'm writing this sort of thing, Otto

I could not follow what you were trying to say on pages 160-161. First you say “Preachers who say that it is always God’s will to heal simply have no theology of suffering.” Then you say “Let’s be absolutely clear: While suffering is part and parcel of the Christian life, God hates it as much as we do.” I ended up simply not understanding what you were saying, since the second sentence (with which I agree) contradicts the first (with which I profoundly disagree).

The reason that I disagree so strongly with the first assertion is that it is implicit within it that sometimes it is God’s will that people are ill. To say that it is His “will” involves saying that it is His desire. His aim, His intention, His purpose. A statement that He wants people to have cancer, or Alzheimers, or MS. Or indeed brain tumours and epilepsy.

I can’t accept that, and I do not think that there is anything wrong with my theology of suffering. I believe that God made the world free from these sicknesses and all other evils; I believe that the world as we know it is not as He intended it to be; and I believe that the world is going to be recreated in the form in which He intended it to be (Hosea 2:18; Isaiah 11:6-9). All this is perfectly orthodox (“Orthodoxy is my doxy”, of course, as some ancient Bishop of Gloucester remarked, “and heterodoxy is another man’s doxy”.) In other words, God intends when His kingdom comes to restore the world to its original state, and therefore intends to banish all sickness. How, then, shall we say that it is ever His desire that anyone suffer illness? How can illness ever be anything but an abomination in His eyes? How can it ever be other than His will that people are healed?

Of course it may be that from time to time God does something amazing through someone’s illness. I have friend with chronic kidney disease. He would tell you that what he has been through (the failed transplant from his mother, the medical bafflement, the endless hours of pain, the non-functioning body, the unanswered prayers and so on) have brought him many blessings. Does that mean that God wanted him to have chronic kidney disease? No. It means that evil may be harnessed by God; it does not mean that evil is in harmony with God. I once came across a useful analogy of a rose growing up a ruined building, hiding its ugliness and covering it in flowers (it might have been from Nicky Gumbel; I can’t remember). The benefits that have come to my friend are the flowers over the ruin. God grows the flowers, but He does not ruin the building in the first place.

People who do not believe that it is always God’s will to heal must be rather baffled by the ministry of Jesus (our living example of God’s will, after all). So far as I am aware, there is no recorded instance of Jesus coming across a sick person and saying “Oh well, tough luck, God wants you to be ill.” He simply healed the sick, eagerly, indiscriminately, with compassion brimming over. He seems to have regarded sickness as something to be banished from the Kingdom.

I wonder if you might be confusing a belief that it is always God’s will to heal (which I believe) with a belief that God will always heal in answer to prayer (which I do not believe). At any rate, that is the only thesis advanced in your quotation from Dr Lloyd-Jones: he seems to argue that we have to deduce from the fact that healing does not always occur when we prayer that sometimes God wants people to be ill. But this is a glaring spiritual non-sequitur. As soon as one understands that God does not always get His own way on earth (which we should appreciate from Genesis 1 onwards), one knows that there are going to be examples of fallen-ness littered around us.

Posted By: Old Git on November 23rd 2007 at 00:04:00

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