I Will PERMIT None of these Diseases Upon Thee

I Will PERMIT None of these Diseases Upon Thee

By Troy J. Edwards

A printable .pdf copy of this article is available here

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"

https://www.amazon.com/Permissive-Sense-Interpretation-Vindicates-Character/dp/1981812431/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1518281250&sr=1-1&keywords=The+Permissive+sense