Eight Doctors or Nine? (written sermon)
God has always been deeply interested in the health and well-being of His people. Consider Exodus 15:25b-26:
There He made a statute and an ordinance for them, and there He tested them, and said, If you diligently heed the voice of the Lord your God and do what is right in His sight, give ear to His commandments and keep all His statutes, I will put none of the diseases on you which I have brought on the Egyptians. For I am the Lord who heals you.
From the New Testament, Romans 12:1-2:
I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.
To His faithful remnant He gave special counsel concerning health. On the very first page of The Ministry of Healing we read:
Our Lord Jesus Christ came to this world as the unwearied servant of man’s necessity. He ‘took our infirmities, and bare our sicknesses,’ that He might minister to every need of humanity. Matthew 8:17. The burden of disease and wretchedness and sin He came to remove. It was His mission to bring to men complete restoration; He came to give them health and peace and perfection of character.(p. 17)
If it was His mission, it is our mission. And that is why when you become a Seventh-day Adventist Christian, you are automatically issued eight doctors. That’s right; when you join the church, you receive eight doctors who will always help you and never harm you. They are always right. The eight doctors are introduced to us in The Ministry of Healing, p. 127:
Pure air, sunlight, abstemiousness, rest, exercise, proper diet, the use of water, trust in divine power—these are the true remedies. Every person should have a knowledge of nature’s remedial agencies and how to apply them. . . . The use of natural remedies requires an amount of care and effort that many are not willing to give.
Warnings
Jesus warned us, “there will be famines, pestilences, and earthquakes in various places” (Matthew 24:7). And additionally, this warning:
Through spiritualism, Satan appears as a benefactor of the race, healing the diseases of the people and professing to present a new and more exalted system of religious faith; but at the same time he works as a destroyer. His temptations are leading multitudes to ruin. Intemperance dethrones reason; sensual indulgence, strife, and bloodshed follow. . . . While appearing to the children of men as a great physician who can heal all their maladies, he will bring disease and disaster, until populous cities are reduced to ruin and desolation.(The Great Controversy, p. 589)
So, there are nine doctors at work: eight given by the Creator and fitting a creation profile, and one fitting a destruction profile, offering fake healing. Could it be that God, foreseeing the intemperance, self-indulgence, and diseases, even of human design in the last days, armed us with eight doctors to especially to help us survive?
We are continuously harangued by public health officials about certain steps we should take. But if we heed the counsel of these eight doctors, we will be well-positioned to pass through the pestilence now unleashed.
In the last portion of this message we’ll consider the counsel of the ninth doctor. But first, let’s consider the eight doctors to whom God has pointed us.
Dr Pure Air
The very first is Doctor Pure Air. Spending some time outdoors will introduce pure air into our lungs. Inside an automobile, home, or building of any kind, toxins and unhealthful fumes become trapped and build up.
Indoor pollution can include biologicals like pet dander. Do you have pets in your home? It can include mold and mildew, and house dust mites. Formaldehyde is a cancer-causing chemical used in many composite wood products. Very likely your home has composite wood used in its construction. Radon gas is found in many homes and can cause lung cancer. Then there are VOCs: Volatile organic compounds, found in paints and varnishes. Do you have surfaces in your home painted or varnished? There are many additional indoor air problems we could name. Suffice it to say, it is good to open your windows a crack and spend some time outdoors. Almost none of these kinds of issues were widely understood in the time when we were given the eight doctors. But I find it interesting that the very first doctor on the list is pure air. This has implications for anything that would inhibit our breathing pure air.
Dr Sunlight
Next on the list is Doctor Sunlight. Doctor Kellogg wore white clothing because he thought it did the least to inhibit sunlight coming to the body. Sunlight overdone can burn us, but a right exposure to it can help our bodies form the hormone vitamin D. Receiving an appropriate amount of vitamin D could be one an important step to help prevent ourselves from becoming infected with covid-19. A German study suggests that 41% of respiratory disease mortality is statistically attributable to vitamin D deficiency.
Some people need more vitamin D than others: People who live in northern climates, people with dark skin, people who are heavier than they should be, and people of older age.
Sunlight also provides ultraviolet light and experiments have shown that Covid-19 appears to be deactivated more rapidly by UV light than expected. We get very little vitamin D in most of our diets, so supplementation and being outdoors in the right sunlight can help.
Dr Abstemiousness
Third on our list is doctor Abstemiousness. We also use words like temperance and self-control. This is an option available to everyone. The plan is to make sure you do not overeat. But abstemious goes as far as being sparing in eat and drink. The less food you process, the less there is to digest, to slow down and ferment in your gut, or to constipate. The Bible warns us against overeating. Proverbs touches the topic repeatedly.
Modern industrial food science often works directly against a plan to be abstemious. Many dollars have gone into gaining a better understanding of how fat, sugar, salt, and chemicals can combine to give food the most attractive textures and flavors. Thankfully part of the fruit of the Spirit is self-control, most closely related to abstemiousness. Some of us are not practicing abstemiousness too well. We have our favorite foods and we overeat them. Do not ignore the third of the eight doctors, doctor Abstemiousness. He can improve your health dramatically.
Dr Rest
We Seventh-day Adventists should be experts in following the fourth doctor, doctor rest. It is a part of our religious faith to set aside the seventh day of the week for rest and restfulness. We don’t chop wood on sabbath, or go on shopping sprees. The body needs time to restore itself. But this doctor is one of the most ignored of all the doctors. We just keep on going and do not stop. With the widespread use of artificial lighting, we can stay up all night long. Your body won’t thank you for that.
Many of us have electronic devices which emit, it turns out, blue light. But too much blue light at the wrong time of day can suppress your body from generating the hormones it needs to help you sleep. So you can to stop using blue light late at night. You want it dark when you are getting ready to sleep. So you don’t want to do something like watch television, look at a computer screen, or your phone screen late at night. You might even want to get eye protectors to cover your eyes because your eyes are your main light detecting sensors.
Few people get the amount of sleep you should get. In the last several months I have managed to increase the amount of sleep I am getting significantly. How have I done it? Don’t eat late, don’t get blue light in your eyes late, use an eye shield, and go to bed earlier.
Dr Exercise
Exercise is really important. God didn’t give us wheels, He gave us legs. Even if some of us are mobility-limited for various reasons, hopefully we can engage in at least some walking every day. It has been my practice for most of my life to take an extended walk almost every day. More recently, I have begun adding an evening walk to my main morning walk. The treadmill is another option. Of course, there are many forms of exercise, running, biking, swimming, calisthenics.
Some people are worried about cold weather. Absolutely no worries. Just make sure you have some warm clothing and a good coat and hat. Walking is another good way to connect with people, and its safer if you walk with someone. Walk along the side of the road facing oncoming traffic to see automobiles coming. If you are walking in the woods during hunting season, make sure you have brightly colored clothing, and make sure you don’t act very much a like a deer.
Jesus and His disciples did a lot of walking. You can also meet neighbors and other walkers when you are out, and make connections, and get into friendly conversations.
Dr Proper Diet
Be careful not only with diet but very particularly, engage in a proper diet. Eat more healthful foods and less highly processed foods. Adding vitamin supplements is a good idea these days. Two of the most important they say to help your body resist covid infection is vitamin D and zinc. If you are vegan you almost certainly want to make sure you are supplementing with vitamin B-12.
There are differences between natural fats like avocado and processed fats, and differences between highly processed sugars and more natural sugars. Beware of sweets and candies, which can really nuke your immune system. You want to maximize your immune system.
The devil works on us by trying to get us to eat too much. We have foods that we especially like, and they can generate an enormous dopamine hit in the brain. We need self-control. The mouth has about 10,000 tastebuds and five main sensations (sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami or savory). Your nose has millions of receptors and can differentiate 340-380 basic smells along with thousands of more distinct ones. You must control these rather than letting them control you.
Dr Water
Sometimes we just think of water, but here we actually are looking at the proper use of water. Water is used so many different ways by your body. It is necessary for the health of cells, for bathing, for digestion, and for cleansing. You can use hot and cold water to modify your circulation. Water is super important. There are several ways that your body is always losing water, so it is important to drink plenty of it. Headaches can be caused by dehydration. The cells that make up your body all need water to work efficiently.
Dr Trust in Divine Power
We have remembered seven doctors so far, but now we come to doctor Trust In Divine Power. This is different than the previous seven doctors because, while available to all, many choose not to trust in divine power. Instead, they trust in human power. They trust in human expertise, human theories and assertions. But trust in God is very important. When we bear all of our own anxieties, we really are carrying an enormous psychological weight all alone. But when we have done all that we can about a matter, we can trust the rest to God and give it to Him and let the burden fall off our tiny human shoulders onto His broad divine shoulders.
Remember, we are designed to be dependent beings, finite, limited beings, while the God of heaven is an infinite and all-powerful being. It is thus very logical to trust in divine power. If God is real and He loves us and offers us His help, then why not trust in Him? Worrying has never been known to be a very effective therapy.
These eight doctors have one feature in common that makes them unattractive to many people. They are nature’s remedies, they are natural, they harmonize with the human experience, and they really don’t cost very much. They are lifestyle doctors. There is a great deal of choice involved in how we relate to these doctors. These are not pills you can manufacture and make a lot of money selling, so they are not very popular with pharmaceutical megacorporations which prefer to make medicines for pennies on the dollar and sell them at thousands of times inflated prices.
God designed the immune system and He basically gave one to everybody. If you treat your body with respect, as God’s property, as the temple of the Holy Spirit, that has incalculable health benefits. We are still situated in a world of sin, and we are still subject to deterioration and disease because of that. But we can do a very great deal to help ourselves not only be holy and happy, but healthy, which is God’s will for us as living sacrifices. Adventists have been teaching healthful living since our beginnings. Almost the first thing God gave the fledgling Seventh-day Adventist Church was the health message, the eight doctors. So, we have not suddenly become health fanatics because of Covid. Among Christians we have the strongest interest in health and have had it since long before the current situation.
Dr Pharma
We raised the question Eight Doctors or Nine? These days there is a ninth doctor vying for our attention. I’m going to call him doctor Pharma, after a word that occurs in Revelation 18:23, Pharmakeia. Chapter eighteen of Revelation describes at last the judgment and destruction of Babylon the great. What is Babylon the great? Some think of Babylon as strictly describing the doctrinal errors of Roman Catholicism and apostate Protestantism. But if you study Revelation 18 you will find that there is actually a complex combination of merchants, governments, and of false religion in the end-time. They all work together, they are literally described as being in bed together, as profiting together, and as being sorrowful together when final destruction comes.
We know from Revelation 13 that in the end there is a uniting of these agencies so that no person can buy or sell unless he has the mark or the number or the name of the beast. In other words, this combination of merchants, governments, and religion affects what is allowed to enter human bodies. Revelation 18:13 is part of a passage speaking of all the riches that can no longer be bought and sold when Babylon is judged, and very interestingly, it includes in the list the “bodies and souls of men.” There is bondage or slavery of some kind being practiced in the end-time.
Finally, 18:23 says,
The light of a lamp shall not shine in you anymore, and the voice of the bridegroom and bride shall not be heard in you anymore. For your merchants were the great men of the earth, for by your sorcery [pharmakeia] all the nations were deceived.
We find this word and related words in other places, like Revelation 9:21 and 22:15. In Galatians 5:20 sorcery is listed among the works of the flesh. This is related to the word pharmakeuw which means to administer drugs. We cannot read everything about the modern practice of medicine into the ancient practice of sorcery. We know that there were a variety of occultic practices by the peoples of pagan nations. What we know here from the text itself is clear: all the nations are deceived by mystic Babylon’s sorcery. We know there are false miracles performed and that the merchants and governments of the earth come under the effective religious control of Babylon.
We also know that medicine has many remarkable benefits as well as corruption and evil. Like almost everything in our world it is a mixed bag. Many of us owe a lot of the health we have to our personal physicians and other medical doctors. Many good and godly men and women go into medicine to do good, with good intentions, and do much good. Be thankful and pray for our Adventist doctors. The life of a physician is a very busy one and these men and women make enormous sacrifices to be able to practice medicine.
But It is important here to notice a few things, not so much about GPs but some of the people involved with the government and medicine.
In this last section I have to share some very stunning things that have come to light.
Dr Pharma promotes gain of function research. What’s that? Dr Peter Breggin writes,
Gain-of-function is a misleading euphemism for taking viruses out of nature and making them more infectious or virulent, commonly turning harmless viruses into deadly human pathogens capable of causing pandemics. The term should be gain-of-lethal-function.(Peter Breggin and Ginger Ross Breggin, COVID-19 and the Global Predators, p. 6)
You should also understand that
No SARS-CoV has ever been found in nature. Furthermore, no SARS-CoV epidemic or other emergence of SARS-CoV among humans has ever been traced to nature but at least seven have been traced to labs, including SARS-CoV-2.”(Ibid., p. 42)
This means that COVID-19 was man-made, it did not arise in nature. It is a a bioweapon, released either by accident or on purpose.
Then there are the vaccines. I will give only one example. There is the problem of relative risk versus absolute risk. Robert F. Kennedy Jr shares data drawn directly from Pfizer’s trial for its vaccine. Skipping to the numbers, statistically, 22,000 persons must be vaccinated to save a single life from Covid. But Pfizer’s data shows also that in its vaccine trial there were five excess fatal cardiac arrests in vaccinated individuals (a rate of 5/22,000). For every life the vaccine saves, five lives are lost from cardiac arrest. That is “all cause mortality.”(Robert F. Kennedy Jr, The Real Dr Fauci, pp. 77-78)
Kennedy lists several officially held “table-top” pandemic exercises that were conducted in the years leading up to our current Covid-19 pandemic. Most of these involve numerous of participants, sometimes in multiple cities, along with pharmaceutical, governmental, and military officials. Several participants have connections with the CIA.
TOPOFF 2000-2007
Dark Winter 2001
Atlantic Storm 2003
Global Mercury 2003
Atlantic Storm 2005
Lockstep Simulation 2010
MARS 2017
SPARS 2017
Clade X 2018
Crimson Contagion 2019
Event 201
Each of these simulated a deadly pandemic and government responses. For example, Kennedy describes Event 201:
At Gates’s direction, the participants role-played members of a Pandemic Control Council, war-gaming a contagion that serves as pretext for this insurgency against American democracy. They drilled a retinue of psychological warfare techniques for controlling official narratives, silencing dissent, forcibly masking large populations, and leveraging the pandemic to promote mandatory mass vaccinations. Needless to say, there was little talk of building or fortifying immune systems, existing off-the-shelf remedies, or off-patent therapeutic drugs and vitamins. Instead there was abundant palaver about expanding government’s authoritarian powers, imposing draconian restrictions, curtailing traditional civil rights, which might include of rights of assembly, free speech, private property, jury trials, due process, and religious worship, as well as promoting and coercing the uptake of new, patentable, antiviral drugs and vaccines. The participants walked through imaginary global coronavirus contagion scenarios that focused on fear mongering, blanket censorship, mass propaganda, and police state strategies culminating in compulsory mass vaccination.(p. 425)
And finally, with reference to Crimson Contagion 2019, Kennedy writes this:
The New York Times’ takeaway missed altogether the larger and more significant stories: that the Crimson Contagion’s planners precisely predicted every element of the COVID-19 pandemic—from the shortage of masks to specific death numbers—months before COVID-19 was ever identified as a threat and that their overarching countermeasure was the preplanned demolition of the America Constitution by a scrupulously choreographed palace coup. . . . ‘These are brainwashing exercises,’ says former CIA officer and whistleblower Kevin Shipp. ‘Getting all of these thousands of public health and law enforcement officials to participate in blowing up the US Bill of Rights in these exercises, you basically have obtained their prior sign-off on torpedoing the Constitution to overthrow its democracy. They know that none of these participants are going to suddenly start soul-searching when the real thing happens.”(pp. 423, 424-425)
Finally, there’s this guy, Klaus Schwab, the head of the WEF, the World Economic Forum. Here is what he says:
Without delay we need to set in motion the great reset. This is not a ‘nice-to-have’ but an absolute necessity. . . It is incumbent upon us to take the bull by the horns. The pandemic gives us this chance: it ‘presents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine and reset our world.’ (Klaus Schwab, Covid-19: the Great Reset, pp. 243-244)
Conclusion
To conclude then, God foresaw everything that has happened to us these past two years. Long ago He gave this church a special privilege by helping us understand how to employ eight natural doctors so that we might be healthy in His service. Today, a ninth doctor wants us to change what we are doing. His solution is the end of our most essential liberties and force upon us endless booster shots.
Now is the time to become more serious about your personal health. Employ the eight doctors. Please understand, I am not telling you what to do about masks or vaccines. There is a real disease loose in the world and many are having their health impacted and many are dying. But you should be aware that highly credible voices have given us important information about the origin and goals behind this crisis. We are called to follow Jesus in a time when we are learning that authorities we have long trusted have not earned our trust. But Jesus has earned our trust. My personal belief is that what is happening right now is in effect an attempted coup on a global scale. There has never been anything like this in human history. Jesus has given you eight doctors for this very hour. Be encouraged. Our redemption is drawing near!
Presentations:
2021-12-04 Fremont MI SDA church
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