Exodus 15:26: And he said: If thou wilt diligently harken unto the voice of God and will do that which is right in His sight, and will give ear to His commandments and keep all His statutes, I will put none of these diseases upon thee.

Faith healers and the Word Faith movement have tried many ways to get around this verse which clearly tells us that God puts diseases upon people. They really hate this verse and will argue quite emotionally that it is not saying with it appears. Their usual explanation of this passage is that God did not say that He would put none of these diseases upon us but that the Hebrew really said: “I will not permit these diseases to come up you.” I have studied this passage every which way but Sunday in the Hebrew and as much as I hate to admit it, there is no getting around that Hebrew word, ‘asim which means to put or set. I cannot twist this around to say that he would only permit or allow these diseases to come upon us.  Clearly in the Hebrew He is putting them on us if we do not harken to the will and voice of God.  Some faith healer or Word Faith teacher got the ball rolling with this theory that the Hebrew says God will only allow the diseases to come upon us and as this teaching passed from teacher to teacher it went through an evolutionary process. Soon teachers began to impress their audiences by throwing out Hebrew terms and of course if you don’t know Hebrew and the old boy has a platform he must be a Hebrew expert and you can’t argue against that. What they started to say was that in the Hebrew this is in a permissive tense.  Say what?  There is no such thing as a permissive tense in Hebrew.

Eventually, these teachers started creating their own Hebrew grammar and taught I that the verb put was in a permissive tense rather than a causative tense but since there was no way to express the permissive tense in English translators put it in the causative tense.  Huh? As their authority they threw out the name of a Hebrew scholar, Dr. Robert Young. When I heard that I began to understand how they came up with this teaching that has a  higher crap content than fertilizer. I made a study of Dr. Young’s work while doing my doctoral dissertation.  He is indeed a distinguished Hebrew scholar.

Dr. Robert Young did a controversial work on the use of the Jussive form in the Hebrew. Unfortunately, his conclusion was picked up by teachers who had no background in the study of Biblical Hebrew but did have a large audience and they applied his theory to Exodus 15:26 which became a sensational hit among faith healers and the Word Faith movement. This misunderstanding got passed on from one faith healer to another who did not check their sources and it eventually evolved to a teaching of a permissive tense and actually began to take on the form of some sort of conspiracy by Bible translators to cover up God’s true intentions with regard to healing.

I know some of you read my studies in the early morning and a lesson in Hebrew grammar is the last thing you want, so I will try to make this simple. In Hebrew there are three volitional forms or three expressions of will – Jussive which is generally found in the first person, Imperative which is found in the 2nd person and Cohortative which is used in a third person. These volitional forms can express a speaker’s desire, wish or command.  The Jussive may occur in the third person when the verb is in an imperfect state. Unfortunately there is nothing to distinguish a Jussive from an imperfect tense.

Dr. Robert Young, presents the idea that the verb put in Exodus 15:16 is in a Jussive form. He made the mistake, and admits to that mistake, of calling it a permissive form. What he meant was that this particular Jussive could be rendered as permissive. Teachers not schooled in Hebrew picked up on this and just to prove their ignorance of the language called it a permissive tense. For one thing we are not talking about a tense, tenses do not exist in Hebrew and as I said there is no such thing as a permissive form in Hebrew.

A Jussive form expresses the will of the speaker, in other words, it is God’s will to put diseases upon people. The status, position and context of the speaker, will determine the nature of the expression of the speaker’s will. It may be a command, a request or a wish. Dr. Young for various reasons determined that this verb put is in a Jussive form expressing permission.

I tend to disagree with Dr. Young as he did not consider the use of the Jussive in other Semitic languages. For instance, the Canaanite dialect which preceded the Hebrew will often derive the Jussive from the short yaqtul form. The verb asim (I will put) is found in the long form and not the short and would thus lay serious question that this is truly a Jussive form. Just because it is in a third person and imperfect tense does not automatically make it Jussive as Dr. Young seems to indicate. I am not the only one here,  most Hebrew scholars take serious issue with Dr. Young in his use of the Jussive.

Secondly, let’s just assume it is in a Jussive form, this would not mean it is permissive, it could simply be an expression of a desire or wish.  You have a lot of hoops to jump  through just to get this to a permissive state. I think we are better off and more grammatically sound to just keep this as the KJV puts it, that is “He will put none of these diseases upon you.”

Ok, not much devotional about this.  My study today grew out of a question someone asked.  However, I wanted to share this as there appears to be a desperation among some teachers to come up with something new and exciting to keep the congregations and audience’s attention.  So desperate are they that they will not check out their sources when they hear something new. They will just run with it, refine it and the more their audiences ooh and ahh it they will embellish all the more just to wow their audience.

We have entered the 21^st Century and saturated it with a world view of Christianity through our mass media of television, radio, print media and recorded media.  Never in the history of Christianity has so much information be given to Christians. Teachers are running out of new material. There does not seem to be enough new revelations to wow the congregations anymore. Maybe this is why some teachers hearing something new will run with it without first checking out the source.

All I can say is that the Word of God is a well that will never run dry. Study it for yourself, you will find plenty of new revelation and do not be the third or fourth generation of a new revelation based upon some misquotation. A medical doctor once said that the safest thing to eat is that which is created by God and not man. In this age of junk food, GMO’s pesticides all the other things created by man that we eat that are harmful to our bodies, ultimately the very substances used by man to create these modified foods were created by God but never intended to be a part of our diet.  In that sense, yeah God is putting these disease upon us because we are using things He created that were never intended to enter our bodies in the first place, just my thought on the issue.