Sickness and health are opposite ends of a
continuum within which we live our physical lives. I suspect that we are never entirely sick –
there are always healthy processes going on in the body – and that we are never
fully healthy this side of heaven.
Obviously, where you are on that continuum between sickness and health
makes all the difference in the world.
If your sickness consists of having a hangnail you probably feel a lot
better than the guy who needs to have his gall bladder removed.
That being said, hangnail and gall bladder
removal do have common cause. Illness,
along with all of the sorrows and suffering s in the world flow from sin – our
sin, our neighbor’s sin, the overall sinfulness of society, and the sin of the
entire fallen human race.
Our culture’s response to illness has become
disturbing. On the one hand there is an
obsessive pursuit of health (can we say an un-healthly obsession with health?)
through a variety of exercises, supplements, drugs, surgeries, and therapies,
all of which are intended to extend the span of our lives. On the other hand illness has become one of
the world’s greatest evils, and there are those who strongly advocate that a
personal with a debilitating sickness should be able to end her own life. (Which is only a step away from someone else
deciding that a person with a debilitating illness shouldn’t live.)
A friend of mine, Pastor Matt Richards, writing
on free choice and abortion said it this way, “We assess the value of life
based on criteria we think is important. Rather than viewing the value of
life from the Creator to the creature, we creatures have not done so well in
the criteria we have used to determine life's value. Historically we have
really messed this up. Examine for a moment how we have used ethnicity as
a basis for value and ended up with places like Auschwitz and Cambodia and
Croatia and Rwanda. We have used skin color as a basis for value and
ended up with slave trading and civil war. More and more we use health as
a basis for value and end up with assisted suicide and euthanasia. Now we
use criteria such as costs for the potential parents and that newborns are not
capable of contributing to their existence as a basis for value.”
How then do we respond to illness and its
impact on our life? Where do we find our
proper value and our proper place in God’s plan in the midst of illness? This psalm would have us find the answers to
such questions in Jesus. He is the
ultimate remedy for sin and how it impacts us.
He is the one who shows us our value and the value of suffering. As the psalm says, “O LORD, be gracious to
me; heal me, for I have sinned against you!”
The prayer is literally, “heal my soul,” because sickness has as its
root a spiritual cause.
The psalm points us ahead to Jesus’ salvation
as the hope we have in the face of illness and suffering. The words of the psalm bring images of Jesus’
own suffering for our sin to mind. He
speaks of those who slander him and whisper behind his back like the priests
and Pharisees did. He also talks about a
close friend who ate his bread who “lifted his heal” against him – that is, a
friend who later stomped on and betrayed him; a prophecy of what Judas would do
to Jesus. Yet through Jesus’ suffering
for sin, in his endurance of backbiting and betrayal, he won forgiveness for
sin and gave healing and new life to all who suffer from sin’s
consequences.
To be sure we will suffer and become sick
because of sin, but there is life and health in Christ.
Father, I am sick of sin. Heal me in Jesus’ suffering and death and
give me new life in Him. Use my
suffering as a platform to share the hope you have given me with others. Amen.
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