IN Paradise, as you instinctively accept, sickness and disease would have been as unthinkable, as bodily anguish or pain. Your Jesus, during his sojourn on earth among us, lying sick in bed, is a thought, which you cannot connect with His Name. And that upon the new earth, when the glory of the Lord shall penetrate all things, there will still be doctors, to minister to us their medicine, is to you a contradiction in terms, an idea that contradicts itself.
With deeper insight therefore you must of yourself come to the conclusion, which Holy Scripture presents to you, and acknowledge, that all sickness and all pain hang together with the sad fact, that sin hides in our heart, and that all we together are a sinful race.
Without sin no death; but when you sin, though it be but once, death comes surely and certainly, then you must die the death.
Without sin, nothing comes down to this earth but Divine blessing; but after the first sin it reads at once: Cursed is the ground for thy sake, and anguish shall pursue you even in bringing forth children.
All sickness, all pain is a sign of that selfsame destructive power, which once is consummated in your dying.
And therefore it is not enough to acknowledge, that your dying is related to sin.
In like relation to sin stands likewise both sickness and pain.
Not, of course, as though it can be said of every attack of pain or disease, that it came upon you by reason of this definite sin or because of that unrighteousness.
What you have to confess, is, that by sin, curse and death came into the world and upon our race, and that by reason of this you also can have no pain or be sick, except as you undergo a part of the suffering that came upon our race, for the sake of the selfsame sin, for which you too are responsible; wherewith you yourself have been in league; yea, of which you carry about with you the seeds in your own heart.
SOMETIMES this is directly evident, as when by intemperance a man has incurred sickness, or by carelessness has jeopardized his health, not to say anything of those dreadful diseases, which follow in the wake of the sin of drink and lewdness.
But these are exceptions.
Generally the relation between sickness and sin lies not so clearly bare. It is truly there, but it is hidden.
But that it is there, you observe with great pestilences, when the conscience in general is terror stricken, and thousands upon thousands, who had scarcely any thought of God, at once become troubled by reason of their sin.
You see this with diseases as Miriam’s leprosy, of which it is expressly said, that it came upon her as a plague and punishment.
And you also see it, as often as with healing of disease Jesus pronounced absolution, saying: “Thy sins are forgiven thee.”
And do you ask for proof from the present, then observe, that they, who have tenderest knowledge of their own heart, even in ordinary sicknesses feel themselves pricked in the conscience and thirst for atonement, while unspiritual and superficial persons on their sick-bed drowse without spiritual concern.
YET it is important, that this relation between sickness and sin be more closely observed.
Not to say, that a healthy man is virtuous, and that one, who is much troubled with poor health, must be a sinner in the dark.
Leave that false application of Job’s erring friends, and think of the saying of Jesus regarding the man born blind, that that blindness was no punishment for what he or his father had misdone, but an affliction, from which the glorifying of God’s Name had to ripen.
This personal application does not become you, except God makes it in your own conscience.
But just as little does it become you to say, that there never is a causal relation between the transgression of God’s command and a sickly affection in your constitution.
The apostle wrote so positively to the church at Corinth (I, 11, 30), that in the Lord’s Supper they desecrated God’s covenant, and “that for this cause many among them were weak and sickly and some had already died.”
And this same relation, which the apostle thus establishes between spiritual transgression and external suffering, was already known to Solomon.
He too wrote, that the feeling of envy, inward spite and anger, with which all sorts of experience in financial concerns sometimes fill our heart, “is an evil that brings on disease” (Prov. 14, 30).
Also your doctors tell you, that there are all sorts of indispositions, which find their origin in reveries and unhealthy humors of your inner being.
By inworking upon the soul to heal the body, is sometimes the intention, on which they act.
With the insane they seek through the body to work upon the soul, but with these ruffled persons through the soul upon the body.
And in both lies the acknowledgment, that from the tie that binds soul and body together, there arises also a certain relation between sin and sickness.
INVESTIGATIONS in this domain are still of little significance and their result extremely meager; but it is acknowledged that here is a wealth of knowledge, that can become of high significance for the healing of our sick.
At present microbe and bacillus draw almost all attention. But suppose, that indeed in this form we were on the track of the general nature of all disease, the end would not be reached. For there still follows the second inquiry: Whence those microbes? Whence has one this, the other that power? How do they come so suddenly, presently to disappear again? What do they owe their presence to? And above all how do they stand in connection with a man’s person?
If all sickness and death are by reason of sin, you cannot rest, before the common root of all sickness is traced to sin. An investigation in which perhaps we shall never succeed, but which yet should not be neglected.
That by giving vent to his passion, a man can incur a shock, that costs him his life, has been all but too frequently witnessed.
No one indeed denies this.
But the question is, whether there is not some deeper lying relation also, where most people do not look for it.
TO come back to that irascible, passionate man—has not such an hothead by indulgence in his passion, instead of curbing the same, aggravated the evil in his blood that irritated him?
With a passionate man there is something in his blood, that the slow of spirit lacks. Now that evil something in his blood can be fed or starved. Starved by self-control, or fed by indulging passion. And when for years together a man yields to this, and so feeds the evil in his blood, is it then not plain, that in the end the blood becomes too much for him, and ends in a stroke, and costs him his life?
Do not pent-up envy and rancor, have an equally deleterious effect upon our constitution?
The Lord forbids you to hate any man. You shall forgive your brother seventy times seven, and love your enemy, and bless them that curse you.
Now do this, do it honestly, do it with all your heart, and a glad, cheerful sense of victory comes over you, and the blood streams vigorously through your veins. But also, ignore this positive command of your Savior, so that the sun sets upon your wrath, and you go on carrying about with you malicious envy and rancor in your heart against all sorts of persons, yea, that you live in enmity sometimes with brothers, then of course that envy and that anger and that evil rancor poisons your blood; your heart shrinks, your inner equability is disturbed, and presently in all sorts of indisposition and sickness becomes evident the fatal result of your loveless existence.
So people who always sit gazing upon their money. They are always busy with that money. At home, at their work, on the way, even on their bed. It is always one concentration of their heart and their person upon this one point. And of course their whole personal existence suffers under it. And that in turn affects their constitution.
How irregularity of life destroys health and strength, needs no reminder. Such people are like a clock, the hands of which one turns every time again some hours backwards and then again forwards, till finally by this irregularity the clock gives out.
How melancholy, i.e., evil somberness and atrabiliousness has destroyed treasures of courage and joy of life, we still see time and time again on every hand; and, of course, also that melancholy is sin. A sin, that one first indulges in, till at length he is no more able to struggle against it, and of which one becomes a victim.
O, the soul works in so many ways upon our frail and tender body.
And this you should consider, not, of course, that you might say: “Then I will fight against that sin, to protect my body,” as though otherwise that sin could be tolerated, but for the sake of your health must be avoided.
No, but that with slow and with acute sickness every one may learn to enter in upon himself, in God’s presence to ask himself: Is there indeed direct connection?
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