We continue today with “Providence over Satan’s Sickness-Causing Power“

“The Bible is vivid with the truth that Satan can cause disease. Acts 10:38 says that Jesus “went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him.” The devil had oppressed people with sickness. In Luke 13 Jesus finds a woman who had been bent over, unable to stand up for eighteen years. He heals her on the Sabbath, and in response to the criticism of the synagogue ruler he says, “Ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen years, be loosed from this bond on the Sabbath day?” (Luke 13:16). There is no doubt that Satan causes much disease.

This is why Christ’s healings are a sign of the in-breaking of the kingdom of God and its final victory over all disease and all the works of Satan. It is right and good to pray for healing. God has purchased it in the death of his Son, with all the other blessings of grace, for all his children (Isa. 53:5; Rom. 8:32). But he has not promised that we get the whole inheritance in this life. And he decides how much, and when.

Beware lest anyone say that Satan is sovereign in our diseases. He is not. When Satan went to God a second time in the book of Job, God gave him permission this time to strike Job’s body. Then the author of the book says, “Satan went out from the presence of the Lord and struck Job with loathsome sores from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head” (Job 2:7). When Job’s wife despaired and said, “Curse God and die” (Job 2:9), Job responded exactly as he did before. He looked past the finite cause of Satan to the ultimate cause of God and said, “Shall we receive good from God, and shall we not receive evil?” (Job 2:10).

Satan is real and full of hate, but he is not sovereign in sickness. God will not give him even that tribute. As he says to Moses at the burning bush, “Who has made man’s mouth? Who makes him mute, or deaf, or seeing, or blind? Is it not I, the Lord?” (Ex. 4:11; see also 2 Cor. 12:7–9).

Providence over Satan’s Use of Animals and Plants
The imagery of Satan as a “roaring lion” in 1 Peter 5:8 and as a “great dragon” in Revelation 12:9 and as the serpent of old in Genesis 3 makes us aware that in his destructive work, Satan can, and no doubt does, employ animals and plants—from the lion in the Colosseum, to the black fly that causes river blindness, to the birds that carry the avian flu virus, to the pit bull that attacks a child, to the bacteria in your belly that doctors Barry Marshall and Robin Warren discovered causes ulcers (winning for them the Nobel Prize in medicine). If Satan can kill and can cause disease, no doubt he has at his disposal many plants and animals—both large and microscopic—to make his weapons.

But he cannot make them do what God forbids them to do. From the giant Leviathan that God made to sport in the sea (Ps. 104:26) to the tiny gnats that he summoned over the land of Egypt (Ex. 8:16–17), God commands the world of animals and plants.

The most vivid demonstrations of God’s control over animals and plants are in the book of Jonah. “The Lord appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah” (Jonah 1:17). And the fish did exactly as he had been appointed. “And the Lord spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah out upon the dry land” (Jonah 2:10). “Now the Lord God appointed a plant and made it come up over Jonah” (Jonah 4:6). “But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the plant, so that it withered” (Jonah 4:7). Fish, plant, worm—all appointed, all obedient. Satan can have a hand here, but it is not a decisive hand. Satan is not sovereign over plants and animals. God’s providence holds final sway.

When God chooses to overcome our rebellion, bring us to repentance, and save us from Satan’s bondage, nothing can stop him”—John Piper

Selah.

Pastor Afolabi Oladele