God Is Not Punishing You

I’ve sat with enough women to know the question usually comes out quietly. Sometimes it’s whispered. Sometimes it’s never said out loud at all, but it’s written all over her face.

This past weekend we held our No Longer Bound healing retreat, and God moved in that room the way He always does. Somewhere in the middle of it, a woman asked me the question I have heard more times than I can count. She had an abortion years ago. She has repented. She has done the work. And she has not been able to conceive. She asked it like she had been asking it for years, and nobody had ever given her an answer.

“Is this God punishing me?”

She had an abortion years ago. She confessed it. She cried over it. She may have walked through a recovery program and believed, at least for a season, that she was free. Then came the trying. The negative tests. The doctor’s appointments. Maybe a miscarriage. And somewhere in that silence, a voice started building a case against her. The charge was the abortion. The sentence is the empty nursery.

Some of you have never said it to anybody. Not a husband, not a pastor, not your best friend. It doesn’t come up in Bible study. It comes up in the grocery store when a young mother walks by with a stroller. It comes up at baby showers. It comes up on Mother’s Day, when the pastor asks the mothers to stand and you stay in your seat. Nobody else in the room sees it. Underneath that pain, it feels like you are sitting on a verdict.

If that’s you, that voice is not God. And Scripture doesn’t leave this question open.

Jesus Already Answered This Question

The idea that suffering always points back to a specific sin is old. Jesus’ own disciples believed it. When they passed a man who had been blind from birth, they asked, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” (John 9:2, NIV).

Jesus didn’t accept the premise. “Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” He said, “but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him” (John 9:3, NIV).

On another occasion, people brought up the eighteen who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them. Were they more guilty than everyone else in Jerusalem? Jesus answered, “I tell you, no!” (Luke 13:4-5, NIV).

Go back further, to Job. His friends built their entire argument on one idea: you’re suffering, so you must have sinned. God’s verdict on those men was blunt. “You have not spoken the truth about me, as my servant Job has” (Job 42:7, NIV).

The belief that God is punishing you with infertility is Job’s friends’ theology in modern clothes. God rejected it then. He hasn’t changed His mind.

Where the Voice Comes From

So where does that voice come from? Scripture names it. “For the accuser of our brothers and sisters, who accuses them before our God day and night, has been hurled down” (Revelation 12:10, NIV).

Day and night. That is the rhythm of your torment. It shows up at 2 a.m. It shows up when the test comes back negative one more time and you are so tired of buying tests you want to quit altogether. I get it. That voice that whispers those dark thoughts has a source, and it is not your heavenly Father.

The Women Who Couldn’t Conceive Were the Faithful Ones

This one is personal for me. My wife and I walked through more than a decade of this very pain, the waiting and the yearning you know too well. I know what I’m talking about.

If barrenness were God’s way of marking the guilty, you’d expect the Bible’s barren women to be its villains. Look at who they actually were.

Sarah. Rebekah. Rachel. The mothers of Israel all faced barrenness. “Isaac prayed to the LORD on behalf of his wife, because she was childless” (Genesis 25:21, NIV). Scripture never pins their barrenness on a sin in their lives.

Hannah went up to the house of the Lord year after year while her rival provoked her until she wept and would not eat. Listen to how Scripture describes her husband’s heart and God’s hand in the same sentence: “But to Hannah he gave a double portion because he loved her, and the Lord had closed her womb” (1 Samuel 1:5, NIV). Love and a closed womb, side by side. No charge. No offense. No guilty verdict. God was writing a story, and at the end of it stood Samuel, the prophet who would anoint Israel’s kings.

Then there’s Elizabeth, and her story settles the matter. Luke tells us that she and Zechariah “were righteous in the sight of God, observing all the Lord’s commands and decrees blamelessly. But they were childless because Elizabeth was not able to conceive” (Luke 1:6-7, NIV).

Blameless and childless in the same breath. God put those two words side by side so you would never confuse them.

I’ll be honest with you. There are a few places in the Old Testament where God closed wombs in a specific situation, like the household of Abimelech in Genesis 20. Those are particular events God chose to record. Scripture never turns them into a rule that hangs over every woman who comes after.

For some of the women we serve, the case feels airtight because the accuser holds up a second exhibit: a miscarriage, maybe more than one. “There’s your proof,” he says. “God is collecting.” A miscarriage is a loss, a real one worth grieving. It is not evidence, and it is not a second sentence from the same judge.

The Cross Already Carried the Sentence

Now suppose the guilt is real. You made the decision, and you know it. Here’s what the gospel says about that.

“He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed.” (Isaiah 53:5, NIV)

The punishment was on Him. Not part of it. Not on a payment plan.

I spent a lot of years in courtrooms. A court does not sentence a person twice for the same offense. Once the sentence is carried out, the matter is closed for good.

A judge doesn’t punish twice for the same offense. If Christ bore the punishment, God is not collecting it again from a woman’s body.

Paul puts it without any hedging: “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1, NIV). David writes that God “does not treat us as our sins deserve” and has removed our transgressions “as far as the east is from the west” (Psalm 103:10, 12, NIV). And the Lord says of His people, “Their sins and lawless acts I will remember no more” (Hebrews 10:17, NIV).

God does correct His children. Hebrews 12 is clear about that. But it also tells us what His correction is for. It “produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it” (Hebrews 12:11, NIV). Discipline aims at growth. It is not a life sentence carried in your body.

If you’re dealing with physical effects from a past procedure, that’s a medical question, and your doctor is the right person to help you with it. A physical consequence is not the same thing as God’s wrath.

A while back we did an episode called You Can’t Forgive Yourself. The point was simple. You are not the offended party in your own sin, so you don’t have standing to pardon yourself. And if you don’t have standing to pardon your sin, you don’t have standing to keep punishing yourself for it either. The woman who believes infertility is her sentence has handed the gavel to the accuser and let him keep open a case God closed at the cross.

What Freedom Looks Like

I won’t promise you a baby. I can’t, and neither can anyone who loves you honestly. Some women walk out of this lie and go on to have children. Some don’t. Either way, God’s love for you is not measured by what your body can or cannot produce.

To people who felt cut off from family and future, God made this promise: “I will give within my temple and its walls a memorial and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that will endure forever” (Isaiah 56:5, NIV).

Better than sons and daughters. God doesn’t treat the childless as an afterthought. He gives them a name that outlasts every family tree on earth.

You may still grieve. Letting go of the lie doesn’t erase the longing, and you’re allowed to mourn. The next time a young mother walks by with a baby in a stroller, you may still feel that ache. That’s allowed. You just don’t have to mourn as someone on trial. The verdict that said “guilty” is gone.

Jesus stood in the synagogue in Nazareth and read that He had been sent “to set the oppressed free” (Luke 4:18, NIV). That includes you. The case against you has been dismissed, and the One who dismissed it is not coming back to reopen it.