Exodus 15:26
“and he said, “If you will diligently listen to Yahweh your God’s voice, and will do that which is right in his eyes, and will pay attention to his commandments, and keep all his statutes, I will put none of the diseases on you, which I have put on the Egyptians; for I am Yahweh who heals you.””
Where this sits
Said at Marah, three days after the Red Sea, where the people found water they could not drink and complained. God showed Moses a tree that made it sweet.
Reflection
The location matters. Three days after the greatest deliverance in their history, the people arrive at water and cannot drink it, and the complaining begins. Marah means bitter.
So the title God gives himself here is issued at a place named after disappointment, to people who had run out of patience in seventy-two hours.
And it is a title, not an action. I am Yahweh who heals you. He does not say I will heal, on this occasion, as a favour. He names healing as part of who he is — the first of the compound names for God in Scripture, and it arrives attached to a complaint.
The conditions listed before it are extensive: listen diligently, do what is right, pay attention, keep the statutes. They are worth reading honestly rather than skipping. This is a covenant arrangement, addressed to a nation at the moment of its formation, and the promise concerns the diseases of Egypt specifically.
What is not conditional is the name. The conditions govern what the people will experience; the title describes what God is like regardless. Israel broke those conditions repeatedly and the name did not change.
And the healing at Marah itself came through a tree thrown into the water, which is the sort of detail the early church could never leave alone.
- Theme:
- Healing
- Book:
- Exodus