Big Healing Book - Did God PUT Sickness on Old Testament People or ALLOW the Devil to Do It?

Did God PUT Sickness on Old Testament People or ALLOW the Devil to Do It?

Three popular lines of reasoning indicate the latter:

1. “In the Hebrew, the verbs are in the permissive sense rather than the causative sense. Therefore, God allowed the sicknesses, but He did not actually send them Himself.”

2. “God is good and the devil is bad. The devil is the one who steals, kills and destroys. So God merely permitted the devil to make disobedient people sick.”

3. “God doesn’t have any sicknesses to give out. There is no sickness in heaven. He would have to steal sicknesses from the devil. Therefore, any sicknesses must have come from the devil.”

However, I will risk possibly contradicting your favorite faith teacher by stating that I believe God actually PUT sicknesses on rebellious people. Moreover, that will continue in the New Testament in the times foretold in the book of Revelation. It can even happen in extreme cases in the Church Age, as we will see. Thus, I don’t believe that any of the arguments above hold up upon further scrutiny.

I decided to investigate the first claim myself, not being one to just take someone else’s word for anything. One problem with written Hebrew is that it was customary to leave out the vowels. However, it would be these vowels that would allow a distinction. When I looked into individual cases, I found that the same original Hebrew letters in the Bible could indicate either a causative sense or a permissive sense. There was no way to make a clear case either way. I had heard it claimed in faith circles that the Hebrew was definitely in the permissive sense, but I have never seen any credible evidence to back that claim. It sounds nice but my own research demonstrated otherwise. Perhaps modern faith teachers fear that if we really think God DID these things, He would not be “good all the time,” and that would wreck half of their messages.

However, please note that I am not claiming that the Hebrew proves that God CAUSED these things either. I cannot see any proof EITHER way just by reading the original text.

Now perhaps someone who knows Hebrew better than I do or has studied more such verses will have a better answer. But I don’t see that you can prove anything either way, so your reading of such verses would have to be based on other Bible evidence.

This brings us to the second assertion that it is the devil who destroys. That is an oversimplification when it comes to punishing sin. Jesus warned to fear God who is able to destroy body and soul in hell. Clearly, God is not going to “allow” the devil to destroy people in hell, because the devil will himself be the #1 recipient of the wrath of God in the everlasting destruction of the lake of fire. So it is clearly God who will destroy the wicked in hell. That doesn’t mean destruction in the sense of causing something to cease to exist; otherwise it would not be everlasting destruction (2 Thessalonians 1:8-9). This proves that the devil is not the only one who could engage in destruction. Even in the New Testament, God says that HE will destroy anyone who destroys the temple of God (the Church) (1 Corinthians 3:16-17).

Another problem with the “devil did it” explanation is that it turns the devil into God’s faithful henchman, sent to do His dirty work. This would make it appear that God and the devil have some kind of partnership going, and if that were really true (it isn’t), the devil should get a reward at the end of time for faithfully executing God’s judgments rather than reaping eternal torment. But the devil is completely anti-God and has been sinning since the beginning. He hasn’t changed to become a servant of the Most High God since then.

An even more severe problem occurs when you read the Old Testament in its entirety. There are MANY passages where God vows to punish sin with sickness and states that He did so after the fact. (For a typical example, you could start with Numbers 11:33-34.) While it might be nice public relations on God’s behalf to assert that He is only good and didn’t do any of if Himself, you just don’t get that sense when you read of God’s outpoured wrath against various nations in the Old Testament. To me, God obviously caused the judgments to take place. I don’t know how you can believe a multitude of Old Testament judgment prophesies and conclude otherwise.

Just take Deuteronomy 28:15-68 as one example and see if you still think that God’s relationship to the threatened sicknesses is merely permissive as opposed to causal. I think that you will have to agree that the threatened illnesses are very clearly the Lord’s doing: “The LORD shall make the pestilence cleave unto thee…The LORD shall smite thee with a consumption, and with a fever, and with an inflammation, and with an extreme burning…The LORD will smite thee with the botch of Egypt, and with the emerods, and with the scab, and with the itch, whereof thou canst not be healed…The LORD shall smite thee with madness, and blindness, and astonishment of heart…The LORD shall smite thee in the knees, and in the legs, with a sore botch that cannot be healed, from the sole of thy foot unto the top of thy head…Then the LORD will make thy plagues wonderful, and the plagues of thy seed, even great plagues, and of long continuance, and sore sicknesses, and of long continuance…Moreover he will bring upon thee all the diseases of Egypt, which thou wast afraid of; and they shall cleave unto thee…Also every sickness, and every plague, which is not written in the book of this law, them will the LORD bring upon thee, until thou be destroyed…the LORD shall give thee there a trembling heart, and failing of eyes, and sorrow of mind.”

We sometimes forget that Leviticus 26:14-39 is also a curse written in the Law that parallels Deuteronomy 28:15-68. This contains other similar statements: “I will even appoint over you terror, consumption, and the burning ague, that shall consume the eyes, and cause sorrow of heart…And I will set my face against you…I will punish you seven times more for your sins: And I will break the pride of your power; and I will make your heaven as iron, and your earth as brass…I will bring seven times more plagues upon you…I will also send wild beasts among you…I will also walk contrary to you, and will punish you yet seven times for your sins. And I will bring a sword among you…I will send the pestilence among you…when I have broken the staff of your bread…I will walk contrary to you also in fury; and I, even I, will chastise you seven times for your sins…I will destroy your high places…I will make your cities waste, and bring your sanctuaries into desolation…I will bring the land into desolation…I will scatter you among the heathen, and will draw out a sword after you…I will send a faintness into their hearts…”

God says that vengeance is His (Romans 12:19 and elsewhere). I see no evidence that He has ever subcontracted it to Satan. Isaiah’s account of Jesus’ crucifixion confirms that God is the punisher of sin. God, not Satan, “made Jesus sick” and it pleased God to bruise Him (Isaiah 53:10). Thus, God, not Satan, is the one who bruised Jesus. Jesus was “afflicted by God” and not “afflicted by Satan” for our sins. If God is the Punisher of sin, it would be inconsistent to have Satan be the punisher at other times. Satan is a thief who wants to steal God’s exclusive right to vengeance.

If you hired someone to replace your front door and bedroom window, and that contractor put the door in your bedroom wall and the window in your roof, would you keep using that contractor? You would not want to use an unreliable contractor who goes against your instructions. Neither would God! The devil is the biggest sinner anywhere, meaning that he fails to follow God’s instructions more than anyone. God isn’t stupid; He isn’t going to hire out work to someone unreliable who will fail to follow His exact instructions.

Also, if you believe that only the devil would ever make someone sick, you must not believe Acts 12:21-23, where it is an angel of the Lord who takes Herod out as punishment for accepting the kind of adulation from men that only belongs to God.

The third statement that there is no sickness in heaven is slightly inaccurate. The vials of God’s wrath in the book of Revelation will be poured out from heaven, not from hell, and part of the miseries with which the wicked will be judged are sicknesses (sores are mentioned in particular) and intense pain.

These awful judgments will not come from Satan, because Satan will be on the earth at the time, not in heaven.

Because there is no crying or pain in heaven, we know that no one there is sick. So you won’t ever have to deal with sickness or pain again once you get there. In that sense, it is correct that there is no sickness in heaven. Given the presence of the vials of God’s wrath, it would be accurate to say that there is no sickness in manifestation in heaven. For eternity, once the wrath of God is complete, there will no sickness either in manifestation or out of manifestation in heaven.

When it comes to your life as a Christian, you do not need to fear God as the Punisher of your sins because they were paid off when God (not Satan) punished Jesus for your sins. So it is indeed Satan, not God, who tries to afflict Christians. (When it comes to hypocrites posing as Christians who try to harm Christ’s body, God can and will take such people out even in the age of grace, as is covered sufficiently elsewhere in this book.) The idea that GOD punishes sin with sickness should actually further enlighten you to divine healing, as you realize that you are not under punishment and condemnation when you are in Christ. Any sickness that comes your way is clearly illegal and from the devil, as God has cleared your name in heaven. You do not deserve sickness, so God would not send it to you.