Isaiah 38:21

He shall recover

Christ in the sick room

I. The Holy Ghost shows us a king and ruler of men, a dweller in palaces, a possessor of all that money can obtain, a good man, a friend of God, laid low by disease like the poorest man in the kingdom.

1. This is the old story. After all there is nothing wonderful in this. The tabernacle in which our soul lives is a most frail and complicated machine. I do not wonder so much that we die as that we live so long.

2. But whence comes this liability to sickness, disease, and death? There is only one book that supplies an answer to this question. That book is the Bible, The fall of man at the beginning has brought sin into the world, and sin has brought with it the curse of sickness, suffering, and pain. Here lies one among many proofs that the Bible is given by inspiration of God. It accounts for many things which the Deist cannot explain.

II. Learn from this chapter that sickness is not an unmixed evil. Hezekiah received spiritual benefit from his illness. Sickness ought to do us good. And God sends it in order to do us good.

1. Sickness is meant to make us think, to remind us that we have an immortal soul; and that if this soul is not saved we had better never have been born.

2. Sickness is meant to teach us that there is a world beyond the grave, and that the world we now live in is only a training-place for another dwelling, where there will be no decay, no sorrow, no tears, no misery, and no sin.

3. Sickness is meant to make us look at our past lives honestly, fairly, and conscientiously.

4. Sickness is meant to make us see the emptiness of the world, and its utter inability to satisfy the highest and deepest wants of the soul.

5. Sickness is meant to send us to our Bibles.

6. Sickness is meant to make us pray.

7. Sickness is meant to make us repent and break off our sins.

8. Sickness is meant to draw us to Christ.

9. Sickness is meant to make us sympathising towards others. (Anon.)

A fig-plaster

The application of figs leaves it uncertain whether a boil (bubon) or a carbuncle (charbon) is to be supposed. Figs were a popular emolliens or maturans; they were used to hasten the rising of the swelling, and therefore the mattering-process. (F. Delitzsch, D. D.)