In the video below, Bill Johnson, Senior Pastor of Bethel Church in Redding, California, is asked three important questions: (1) Does God ever cause sickness?; (2) Does God ever choose not to heal?; and (3) What was Paul’s thorn in the flesh?

Does God ever cause sickness? Johnson says, “You can only give away what you have.” So Johnson concludes that God can not give away sickness because He is not sick.

Johnson cleverly sets up the listener to make his conclusion by saying, “You can only give away what you have,” which is not true of God in the Scriptures. Does God ever cause sickness? Yes He does:

then the Lord will bring upon you and your descendants extraordinary plagues—great and prolonged plagues—and serious and prolonged sicknesses. (Deuteronomy 28:59)

Also every sickness and every plague, which is not written in this Book of the Law, will the Lordbring upon you until you are destroyed. (Deuteronomy 28:61)

so that the coming generation of your children who rise up after you, and the foreigner who comes from a far land, would say, when they see the plagues of that land and the sicknesses which the Lord has laid on it: (Deuteronomy 29:22)

And a letter came to him from Elijah the prophet, saying, Thus says the Lord God of your father David: Because you have not walked in the ways of Jehoshaphat your father, or in the ways of Asa king of Judah, but have walked in the way of the kings of Israel, and have made Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem to play the harlot like the harlotry of the house of Ahab, and also have killed your brothers, those of your father’s household, who were better than yourself, behold, the Lord will strike your people with a serious affliction—your children, your wives, and all your possessions; and you will become very sick with a disease of your intestines, until your intestines come out by reason of the sickness, day by day. (2 Chronicles 21:12-15)

Does God ever choose not to heal? No says Johnson because, according to him, “[Jesus] does not decide not to heal people today because the decision two thousand years ago was to heal.” Johnson adds that the blood Jesus shed was to deal with forgiveness of sins and sickness. [Read more...]