This post first appeared on Kineti and is authored by Judah Gabriel Himango, one of Tabernacle of David’s teachers.
This week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu received the COVID-19 vaccine and recited the Shehekianu prayer, which blesses God for preserving our lives:
I love this because it recognizes God working through modern medicine. This is a topic I’ve been harping on for decades now: that religious people need to drop faux-medical woo and anti-science conspiracy theories and embrace the great blesssing of medicine.
Or, to put it more accurately, re-embrace medicine. It was pious, devout Christians and Churches who pioneered the very idea of hospitals; a concept largely foreign to the ancient pagan world. Nuns were done of the first nurses. To this day, many hospitals bear Godly and religious names; my two daughters were born at St. Francis hospital, for example, getting it’s name for a pious Christian who spent his life caring for the sick.
Aren’t vaccines harmful?
Many of my Messianic and Hebrew Roots friends scoff at vaccines and promote conspiracy theories about them. To those folks I say, vaccines have wiped out several diseases that played mankind for thousands of years. Smallpox was responsible for great suffering for millennia, claiming nearly 20% of all deaths in 1700s London:
The disease did not relent until a vaccine against it — the first vaccine — was introduced in 1796.
This was no disease of modernity. The mummified remains of Pharaoh Ramses V, who lived 1000 years before Messiah,
was found to be infected with smallpox, likely leading to the royal’s untimely death.
This disease that once afflicted and killed millions, mostly children, is now unheard of in the modern world. Vaccines are the reason.
Polio is another fantastic example. This disease crippled people, often paralyzing one’s ability to breathe. In the early 1900s, children with polio would be forced to live in giant medical machines called iron lungs in order to keep breathing. Imagine that, friends, living your entire life in a big metal box:
Many people who lived during this time are still alive. (Talk to your Grandparents or Great Grandparents about it!)
The reason we no longer suffer with polio, the reason you have never seen an iron lung before, is because of vaccines. The polio vaccine was
created in 1953 by Jonas Salk, and it effectively and quickly eradicated the disease:
Polio has been raised in the US for decades now, and nearly the entire world. The last bastions of the disease are in remote Aftlrican villages where vaccinators are at risk of wars and warlords. And even there, we are the cusp of riding this disease from the world forever.
Can’t we cure these naturally?
Many of my religious friends will ask this. They feel medicine and pharmaceuticals are unnatural, and messing with nature is just bound to go wrong. God made our bodies to fight disease on its own; let it do the job.
This thinking is well-intentioned but terribly wrong.
First, nature is out to kill you. 😊 Natural things include snake venom, harmful bacteria, viruses, and a host of predators microscopic and lion-sized. Nature is not our friend, but a mortal foe that will eventually kill you. This is a result of the Fall in the Garden of Eden.
Second, God commanded us to subdue nature. Humanity has a divine mission to rule over nature:
God blessed them and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, fill the land, and conquer it. Rule over the fish of the sea, the flying creatures of the sky, and over every animal that crawls on the land.”
-Genesis 1:28 – https://ift.tt/3rhHqFj
This absolutely applies to microbiology. It is our responsibility, our divine mission, to eradicate disease, reduce suffering, and subdue nature.
Some believe all-natural elixirs, essential oils, and vitamins are the answer. This is wishful thinking. Just last year, a dear Hebrew Roots friends passed away from cancer…despite going for all natural treatments
