If someone is dying from a dreadful disease, it is not helpful to say how it could have been avoided, even if we know. And we often do not know. Cancer and heart disease, for example, may be most common among smokers: but no one can say for sure that a non-smoker will not get cancer, and a heavy smoker will.

All the doctor can do with the terminally ill is to relieve bodily and mental suffering; and all the gospel message can do is help him to die at peace with his God: and even, perhaps, show him how death need not be the end.

So with the terrifying scourge of AIDS we know that some people suffer from it when not personally responsible. They may have been given blood containing the virus, or used an infected hypodermic needle, or had lawful intercourse with someone who was infected, without either of them knowing it. Or an infected parent may have passed the virus on. Here, too, only relief and comfort, and perhaps peace with God, can be offered to the victim.

We are all sinners. None of us has the right to sit in judgement on others. That is God's prerogative, in God's own time and way. All the same, the spread of AIDS is closely linked with the prevalence of sexual and drug abuse. If these things did not occur the disease would, to say the least, be far less menacing than it is. The world in which it is spreading is one which has to a large extent abandoned the Bible's plain teaching that God wants our sexual powers to be used only between a man and a woman in a stable marriage. As the Lord Jesus said, "He that made them in the beginning made them male and female. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother and shall cleave to his wife, and the two shall be one flesh."


For those who live their lives in accordance with this divine plan, there will be much greater happiness and security now and the fullness of joy in God's Kingdom in the future.