Does God use mental disorders as punishment?
Okay, for some context, I have generalized anxiety disorder and ocd. This means my brain releases too much of certain chemicals that cause me to hyper-fixate and overthink things. That’s a very basic explanation, but I’m no scientist so I can’t exactly give you the in-depth one.
About 2 years ago, an older member of my church who I had known for a long time implied that disorders were caused by sin, either mine or someone close to me.
She cited exodus 20:5 in this explanation, but that just didn’t sound right to me. First, was that passage specifically talks about iniquity of the fathers on those who hate God. I don’t hate God and neither does my family, so that doesn’t make much sense. But also, we live under grace, not under law. So why would the punishments of the law apply to someone under grace? Now at the time, I was not a mature enough person or Christian to articulate these thoughts, I was just a dumb teenager who was just coming out of his parents faith and into his own. So, I cast the question to the side and ignored it. That’s a pretty bad habit of mine, ignoring difficult things.
Now more recently, I’ve realized that the pile of stuff I ignored was pretty big, and even worse, it was starting to get in the way of my relationship with God. So I’ve been pulling all those questions out and trying to answer them. But no one has given me a good answer to this one.
So, my question is twofold. Because in order to know if God punishes is in that way, you kinda have to know if God still punishes Christians. (Or anyone for that matter.
So the first half of my question is, does God still punish people?
And if so, does God use mental disabilities to do so?