Your hands have made me and fashioned me,
An intricate unity;
Yet You would destroy me.
Remember, I pray, that You have made me like clay.
And will You turn me into dust again?
—Job 10:8-9 (NKJV)
When I received news yesterday of an acquaintance’s being diagnosed with and treated for cancer, that verse in Job 10 came to me.
When Job received news that all his children had died on one day, he replied, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; ” When he was struck with painful sores all over his body, he replied, “Shall we indeed accept good from God, and shall we not accept adversity?” To me as a theist, it is the most rational response to illness and mortality. I cannot agree nor sympathize with those who blame the Creator for the loss of their loved ones, as if He owed them the life He had given them as a gift in the first place.
One the other hand, I cannot observe the devastating effects of illness on a healthy and beautiful body, and what is more painful, experience in a loved one the degenerative deterioration of a brilliant mind, without the helpless feeling that evil has somehow triumphed over good.
Death might be easy to accept when it happens at a ripe old age, or as it is written in the Scripture, when grains are gathered at harvest time. What troubles me is the seeming senselessness and untimeliness of the deaths, when there seem to be so much to be fulfilled and resolved that have been left unfulfilled and unresolved.
Besides physical illness and death, a more serious problem confronting Christians is moral frailty and depravation. For sickness of the soul is sin, and the end of sin is death. When I’m confronted with my own corruption, I feel what Peter must have felt when he denied his beloved Lord three times in one day, just before the latter’s Crucifixion.
Matthaus Passion – 39. Aria A – Erbarme dich Johann Sebastian Bach
Erbarme dich, mein Gott
um meiner Zähren willen!
Schaue hier, Herz und Auge
weint vor dir bitterlich
Erbarme dich, mein Gott
Have mercy, my God,
for the sake of my tears!
See here, before you
heart and eyes weep bitterly.
Have mercy, my God.