I Will PERMIT None of
these Diseases Upon Thee
By Troy J. Edwards
If we believe that God afflicts sickness then we will be
less likely to ask Him to heal us. Instead, we will believe that enduring
sickness is submission to His will. This is why our ministry is adamant about
refuting ideas that mischaracterize God as the distributor of sickness and
disease.
Sometimes people dispute our teaching that God does not send
sickness and disease. It is not that they have read any of my books to see our
Biblical evidence for our claims. They simply assume that, because some
passages in our English Bible translations and some "experts" of the
Hebrew language claim that the Bible teaches that God is the sender of sickness
and disease then it is so.
Now I am a believer in the divine inspiration and inerrancy
of the Bible. I believe that the Bible is fully the Word of God. What I DON'T
believe is that men have offered us an unbiased translation in the English.
Most Bible's have been translated with a theological slant, ignorance to
idiomatic language, as well as with the neglect of the different uses of
certain Hebrew conjugations. In Exodus 15:26, apart from recognizing the HIPHIL CONJUGATION that renders many
causative verbs permissively, one gets the false idea of a schizophrenic God
here:
And
said, If thou wilt diligently hearken to the voice of the LORD thy God, and
wilt do that which is right in his sight, and wilt give ear to his
commandments, and keep all his statutes, I will put none of these diseases upon
thee, which I have brought upon the Egyptians: for I am the LORD that healeth
thee. (Ex. 15:26)
Here we have a God who inflicts sickness and heals sickness.
No one would commend a scientist who creates a virus that starts a plague just
because he offered a cure for that same virus. But Christians don't seem to be
troubled by a God that they believe inflicts sickness and might possibly heal
sickness.
God says, "I am the LORD that healeth thee." In
the Hebrew this is the compound name "Yahweh-Rophe". God's Name
represents His nature and being and therefore His nature is "The Lord that
heals" and NOT "the Lord that maketh thee sick." Yet, this same
God who claims that His nature is healer says that He makes people sick in the
same passage, or, does He?
In the earliest books of the Bible we find that Satan
attacked Job's family, servants, and livestock. Later, Satan inflicts Job with
sickness. However, because God PERMITTED Satan to do this He took full
responsibility for what Satan had done as if He had done it Himself (Job 2:3;
42:11). In the New Testament, it was made much clearer that Satan is the only
inflictor of sickness and that God's only supernatural act is to heal and
deliver people from it (Luke 13:16; Acts 10:38; 1 Cor. 5:5).
Therefore, when passages such as Exodus 15:26 says, "I
will put none of these diseases upon thee, which I have brought upon the
Egyptians" we are to understand that, there is hiphil stem connected to
the words "put" and "brought" and this conjugation renders
the words in the permissive sense.
I agree with the late 19th century healing evangelist, John
Alexander Dowie, when he writes the following:
The last clause is properly translated
in the permissive sense: ‘I will permit to be put upon thee none of the
diseases which I have permitted to be put upon the Egyptians: for I am the Lord
that healeth thee.’ (Dowie, Leaves of Healing (Volume 8), 1901, p. 362)
The hiphil conjugation allows for this. That is also why I
can agree with the rendering that the Seventh Day Adventist minister, Dr. Jack
Blanco, offers in his Bible paraphrase:
The Lord said to Moses, “If you will
listen to me and do what is right, if you will keep my commandments and laws, I
will not let any of you come down with the diseases of the Egyptians. I will
heal you for I am the Lord.” (Exodus 15:26; The Clear Word)
When you see that God is not literally the distributor of
sickness and disease, you are less likely to accept but will instead resist it
in the authority and Name of Jesus. God bless.
For more information this, we highly recommend that you get
our book, "The Permissive Sense: Hints and Helps to Bible Interpretation
that Vindicates God’s Character of Love"
