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Does God send sickness?

“Then great multitudes came to Him …and he healed them.” (Matthew 15:30) There are questions that rise from hospital corridors and gravesides like steam from winter pavement: Did God do this? Is this His will? Is He teaching me something? Some read fragments of the Old Testament and conclude that God must be the author of disease—that suffering is dispatched like a stern tutor, that infection is a sermon, that pain is a curriculum for humility. But when we turn to the Gospels, something startling happens. The fog lifts. The character of God steps out of shadow and into flesh. Crowds came to Jesus—limping, blind, convulsing, bleeding, grieving—and He healed them. Not some of them. Not the morally impressive. Not only those who had passed a test of faith. Matthew does not hedge his language. They came, and He healed them. If Jesus is the perfect revelation of the Father, then healing is not a footnote in the story of God. It is central to it. We must be careful here. A question cannot cancel a revelation. The Old Testament contains wrestling, lament, covenant warning, prophetic thunder, and poetry that aches. But in Christ, we do not have a riddle; we have a face. “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.” The life Jesus lived was not an exception to the rule of heaven. It is the rule made visible. So what do we do with Job? Job is the question. Jesus is the answer. Job sits in ashes, scraping his wounds, demanding audience with the Almighty. His friends offer neat theology, tidy explanations, confident causation. They are certain suffering must be deserved, assigned, orchestrated for correction. And God rebukes them. The book of Job refuses to let us domesticate pain into a formula. But the story does not end in ashes. It bends toward encounter. If we read Job and it does not lead us to Jesus—Jesus who touches lepers, who stops for beggars, who weeps at graves, who calls sickness an enemy to be rebuked—then we have misunderstood the question. Sickness was never sent so that we would become more holy. The cross does not reveal a God who wounds in order to sanctify. It reveals a God who absorbs violence, who enters suffering, who takes disease and death into Himself and breaks their final word. Holiness grows from love, from surrender, from union—not from infection. “All the law and the prophets” prepared Israel for a Saviour. They created hunger, awareness of need, a cry for mercy. To return to the law as the final word—bypassing the revelation of God in Christ—is to step back into control. It is easier, perhaps, to explain suffering than to confront it. Easier to say “God sent this” than to pray, “Your kingdom come.” But Jesus did not send the sick away with explanations. He laid hands on them. The ministry of Jesus was not a temporary demonstration—an impressive preview before returning to business as usual. “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” This is not an invitation to safe religion. It is a commissioning into costly love. It is not complicated. It is just expensive. To follow Christ into the world’s pain means relinquishing tidy answers. It means refusing to blame the wounded. It means resisting the arrogance of thinking we can manage God with doctrine while ignoring His example. It means praying for healing with boldness, even when we do not see it. It means standing in hospital rooms as signs of another kingdom. Jesus began something. We are to continue it. We are sent to confront sickness not with accusation but with compassion. Not with speculation but with presence. Not with control but with surrender. I do not need to understand every mystery of suffering in order to know what to do when I meet it. I look at Jesus. I do what I see Him doing. He moves toward the broken.He touches what others avoid.He speaks life over what looks lost.He sets captives free. And so I set my face to do my Master’s will. Not because it is easy. Not because it is guaranteed to make sense. But because He has shown me the Father, and I cannot unsee that face. If God’s heart is revealed in Christ, then sickness is not a divine tool to polish our virtue. It is an intruder in a creation God intends to restore. And wherever restoration breaks in—through medicine, through prayer, through community, through courage—we are witnessing the kingdom. This is our destiny: to embody the compassion of God in a world that aches. It costs everything. But it is the only life that makes sense once you have seen Him.