In Jesus’ day, all sickness was seen as a spiritual problem. It reflected the presence of sin. If not in the afflicted one, then maybe the sin could be tied to the parents. But Jesus contemporaries had no doubt: sin was to blame. In the ancient world, healers were almost always religious authorities.
In our day, we tend not to connect sin to sickness. We recognize correlations between drinking and cirrhosis of the liver, smoking and lung cancer, and sexual promiscuity and sexually transmitted diseases, but we tend to view the correlation as pairing cause and effect more than sin and disease. We see disease as a biological problem to be treated by biological experts.
And still we pray.
Most of us have had moments when our prayers for the sick have arisen from a place deep inside us. In guttural cries and in desperate pleading, we object to the weakness of our flesh as human beings. We beg God to intervene. We ask that God would set aside the natural progression of disease and human mortality and heal us or our loved ones.
When we pray such prayers, we are in good company. We find many psalms in which the psalmists ask god to deliver them from sickness. Sickness is frightening. We do not want to die and we do not want to lose those we love to death either. In many cases, death is the real enemy. But there is something especially excruciating about the time we spend in limbo after learning of a disease but before we know whether there will be healing or not.
Even kings in Jerusalem knew the agony of such limbo. They too had no recourse but to plead with God. And like us, those kings got mixed results. Hezekiah prayed for healing when he was sick. He agonized and pleaded with God. As a result, God delivered him from death.
David prayed for the life of his child—the child Bathsheba conceived as a result of their adultery. He pleaded with God just as his descendant Hezekiah would, but, in this instance, the child died
anyway.
Hezekiah seems to have been spared because of his righteousness. David’s child seems to have died because of his sin. That fit the worldview of that time as did it fit that of Jesus’ day. It does not fit ours as well. Sometimes we would like to adopt that old worldview. When a righteous person is sick, we would like that to sway God to heal. Other times, we would prefer God not base his answer to our prayers on our sinfulness.
But regardless of the roles that sin, righteousness, and biology play in sickness and in healing, the Bible teaches us that God is always the appropriate place to take our anxiety, fear, and pain. We pray to God because we trust in God and in his love for us. We do not pray to God in order to control him (as if we could), but to acknowledge that he alone is in control.