Welcome to a year of reading Richard Sibbes together! The reading plan for the entire year can be accessed here. I encourage you to stick with us, allow yourself time to read, and soak in the riches of this gifted and prolific Puritan preacher. You will be edified and encouraged.
If you have trouble with how Sibbes used words, check out the Lexicons of Early Modern English for definitions from the period.
Summary/Engagement
I have prayed often and much for the sick to be healed. Many friends and family members who suffer from cancer have been prayed over. Others had illnesses, injuries, and viruses. In some cases, these friends and family members died. In other cases, they have healed and continued to live.
In this reading Sibbes relates something that might be problematic at first blush. That all sicknesses are a result of sin, and our duty is to search out what sin is in us and repent, before seeking God’s healing. We can read this and think that all sickness is a direct result of our sin. For instance, because I did not do the speed limit, I now have a cold, etc. That’s not what Sibbes is saying.
All illness is as a result of sin. Through Adam and Eve’s sin in the garden sin entered the world, and death with it. The corruption of sin is more comprehensive than our broken relationship with God and his judgment and wrath on our souls. The whole world has been subjected to the effects of sin. (Romans 8:18-25) Scripture says that creation itself groans as in the pains of childbirth to be set free. Death came from sin. Disease came from sin. Cancer came from sin. We know, in our bitterness and longing and hot tears of grief, that death is not how things should be.
Sibbes is stating that a Sovereign God has control over all things. This includes illness. God can use illness and sickness as a direct result of specific sin, but we have no knowledge of when that is. You or I cannot point in our life and say that because I did this, God has afflicted me with such and such a disease. That is, unless our sin directly correlates to illness, such as contracting a disease as a result of sharing heroin needles, etc.
You or I cannot claim to know or solve the mind of God. We often cannot know when our sickness is a result of the common effects of the fall or our specific actions. However, we can know something of God’s design for suffering.
“But blessed are those sicknesses and infirmities that occasion us to go to God, that makes us cry to God.”
Application / Further Discussion
What is our purpose in living? We have lost it along the way when we cry out to God for deliverance from something and use Him as a means to an end. God is not a magic talisman to be consulted when things don’t go our way and then put away when we are comfortable and well. Yet, so many of us live this way. This is functional unbelief.
Living this way presupposes that we are the main attraction. We are the gods of this world and God is nothing more than our butler to accomplish what we desire when we ask (demand) it of him. Do you live this way? Have you any use for God when you are well, or only when you are sick?
Friends, we’re all desperately sick. Sin has corrupted our very nature. Because we are by nature sinners it can be hard for us to see that we should be something else. A dog born with three legs doesn’t know it ought to have four. We humans born under sin don’t know, or suppress, that we were meant to live in fellowship with God but our nature leaves us separated and justly condemned, awaiting eternal punishment.
God didn’t leave us there. Suffering points us to Him. Suffering humbles us and shows us that we are not gods of this world. We have no power over ourselves, our health, our station in life, or our eternity. C.S. Lewis said “Suffering is God’s megaphone to a deaf world.” He shakes us loose from our drunken stupor, heads spinning on the fumes of sin, and through bleary eyes shows us something of Himself.
We come to know that we are not all there is. God uses suffering to throw cold water in our sin-hungover faces. By His grace He shows us something of Himself. I pray he grants you the gift of faith, and repentance, and salvation. He is the reason we exist, any suffering or grace in this present age is window dressing for the ages to come. This is not all there is to life. Thank God this is merely the beginning of what is to come.
Even when evil men do evil things, can you cry out in the midst of suffering to God for deliverance, comfort, and grace? Can you cry out in the best of times, realizing we are poor, pitiable creatures deserving death before Almighty God? Will you humble yourself and seek His glory above yours?
Suffering is God calling, can you hear Him?
“And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience— among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” (Ephesians 2:1–10, ESV)
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Last week, we had a catch up week.
Next week, we read Josiah’s Reformation.
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