How Christianity Created the Hospital
Medicine was an integral part of the modern mission movement of the 19th century. Because Christianity has always affirmed the importance of the body, hospitals soon followed wherever missionaries went. This is another way the Church has been essential throughout history. Many Christians and critics today are skeptical that the Church is essential or necessary in the modern world. It is.
Far from being an otherworldly religion, Christianity teaches both the importance and goodness of life in this world. In fact, from Jesus’ healing ministry to the work of modern missionary doctors, a consistent feature of the work of the Church in the world has been to care for the sick and needy, and not just point them to the life to come.
The early Church understood Jesus’ ministry to be a paradigm for their own work. So, just as Jesus set believers free from their bondage to sin, early Christians purchased slaves specifically to free them. Whereas Jesus used miraculous power to heal people from physical effects of the Fall, Christians used more ordinary tools to care for the sick and disabled. These activities are not merely good deeds in themselves but serve to advance the Kingdom. Though the Gospel is a message and must be proclaimed, the early Church saw works of mercy and preaching the Gospel as two sides of the same coin.
The first major epidemic faced by the Church was the Antonine Plague (A.D. 166-189). In fear of their lives, the Romans threw the sick out of their homes to die in the streets. Galen, the most prominent physician of the age, knew he could neither heal its victims nor protect himself. So, he fled Rome to stay at his country estate.
Recognizing that all persons were made in the image of God and that Jesus came to make all things new, body and soul, many Christians ran the other direction. They fought the Fall by tending to the sick, at risk (and often at the cost) of their own lives.
Since even basic nursing care can make a significant difference during an epidemic, Christian action saved lives. Their courage and self-sacrifice contributed to the rapid growth of Christianity.
Related Posts:
You Might also like
-
Worship That Is Holy and Heavy
God saved us to make worshippers of us. Thus, the obsession of a regenerated heart should be to bring God a pleasing offering in view of his mercy. But how do we know what will please him? We search the Scriptures. When we do, we find that the Lord loves His own Word. Throughout the Bible, worship is filled with God’s Word read, sung, confessed, prayed, preached, pictured in sacraments and responded to with tithes and offerings. We dare not come to God in corporate worship on any terms but his own.
For 13 summers, Timothy Treadwell lived alone and unarmed among the bears of the Alaskan wilderness. He got closer to the creatures than anybody ever dared. He petted them, sang to them, wrestled with cubs, and even swam with them in salmon choked rivers. His bravery, or foolishness, earned him national celebrity. During one interview he declared, “I will not die at their claws and paws. I will fight. I will be strong. I will be master.” But Treadwell was wrong and in the fall of 2003, his life came to a grizzly end when he was devoured by one of the bears he thought he knew so well. Treadwell’s fatal error was that he forgot. He forgot that grizzlies aren’t teddy bears. He forgot to respect them. He forgot to fear them. And because he forgot, he lost his life.
Nadab and Abihu, the men at the center of an alarming account in Leviticus 10:1-3, made a similar mistake. They forgot that the God they worshiped is a roaring lion (Hosea 11:10) and an all-consuming fire (Hebrews 12:29). They forgot that the Lord’s way is in the whirlwind and the storm and that the mountains quake and hills melt before him (Nahum 1:3,5). They forgot that while God is good, he is far from safe. They forgot that the God of the Bible is holy and heavy. We are prone to make the same mistake. The world, the flesh, and the devil conspire to make us lose sight of who God is and how he deserves, no demands, to be worshipped. Passages like Leviticus 10:1-3 disabuse us of any carnal notion that we may approach God on any terms but his own.
Taking a closer look, we see that this short, sordid tale is wrapped in the yellow tape of a crime scene. There, at the foot of the altar of incense in the holy place of the tabernacle lay two charred, smoking bodies. What happened here and why? To answer these questions, we’ll need to exegetically analyze the crime scene.
The Culprits
Nadab and Abihu were the eldest of the four sons of Aaron, the high priest of Israel and brother of Moses. Nadab and Abihu were unspeakably privileged men. In Exodus 24, they were invited by God himself to accompany Moses, Aaron and the 70 elders of Israel up to Sinai’s summit where they beheld the glory of God. The saw the sapphire pavement beneath Jehovah’s feet! What’s more, they had just been ordained to serve as priests beside their father. While good Presbyterian ordination services can sometimes stretch two hours, they can’t hold a candle to the ordination service of a Levitical priest which lasted 7 days. On the 8th day, the entire congregation of Israel, well over one million strong, gathered around the tabernacle to witness the dramatic birth of the Levitical priesthood: “And Moses and Aaron went into the tent of meeting, and when they came out they blessed the people, and the glory of the LORD appeared to all the people. And fire came out from before the LORD and consumed the burnt offering and the pieces of fat on the altar, and when all the people saw it, they shouted and fell on their faces” (Leviticus 9:23–24).
By understanding who these two men were, their proximity to the Lord, and their privileged position in Israel, we can begin to grasp the gravity of their crime. And what was that?
The Crime
In the preceding chapters, we find Moses preparing the tabernacle for opening day, careful to follow the Lord’s instructions to the letter. We find a precious refrain echoing throughout this section: “as the Lord commanded.”
“And Moses did as the LORD commanded him, and the congregation was assembled at the entrance of the tent of meeting” (Leviticus 8:4).
“And he set the turban on his head, and on the turban, in front, he set the golden plate, the holy crown, as the LORD commanded Moses” (Leviticus (8:9).
“And Moses brought Aaron’s sons and clothed them with coats and tied sashes around their waists and bound caps on them, as the LORD commanded Moses” (Leviticus 8:13).
“But the bull and its skin and its flesh and its dung he burned up with fire outside the camp, as the LORD commanded Moses (Leviticus 8:17).
“He washed the entrails and the legs with water, and Moses burned the whole ram on the altar. It was a burnt offering with a pleasing aroma, a food offering for the LORD, as the LORD commanded Moses” (Leviticus 8:21).
“And Moses took the breast and waved it for a wave offering before the LORD. It was Moses’ portion of the ram of ordination, as the LORD commanded Moses” (Leviticus 8:29).
“But the fat and the kidneys and the long lobe of the liver from the sin offering he burned on the altar, as the LORD commanded Moses” (Leviticus 9:10).
But in Leviticus 10:1, something goes horribly wrong: “Now Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, each took his censer and put fire in it and laid incense on it and offered unauthorized fire before the LORD, which he had not commanded them.”
What do you picture when you hear the words “strange fire”? Maybe you think of green or blue flames? Or perhaps you see something like what Moses saw in Exodus 3: a fire burning without consuming fuel? What made Nadab and Abihu’s fire strange is that it was unauthorized. God never commanded them to bring it.
In Exodus 30 we read that the altar of incense stood in the Holy Place, before the curtain into the Holy of Holies. Priests were commanded to burn fragrant incense upon this altar, morning and evening, as a picture of the prayers of God’s people ascending to heaven. Not just any incense would do. God gave Moses a specific recipe: “Take sweet spices, stacte, and onycha, and galbanum, sweet spices with pure frankincense (of each shall there be an equal part), and make an incense blended as by the perfumer, seasoned with salt, pure and holy” (Exodus 30:34-35). What’s more, he demanded that this holy incense be used exclusively in worship and threatened bootleggers with exile. Perhaps God’s recipe bored Nadab and Abihu? Maybe they wanted to spice things up in the Tabernacle and try something new? Whatever the reason, they brought God incense that He had not commanded. They brought him strange fire.
To many of us, that doesn’t sound like a big deal. But imagine: you call your favorite pizza place and place your order: “I’d like a pizza with ham, bacon, pineapple, and extra cheese.” Then you wait 30 minutes, your mouth watering, your stomach growling. This is your favorite pizza. The flavors blend together perfectly! You can’t wait to devour it. But when the pizza guy shows up and you open the box, you see something very different than what you ordered: black olives, slimy tomatoes, broccoli, blue cheese, spinach, and celery. Yuck! You look to the pizza guy and say, “Hey buster, this isn’t what I ordered. Didn’t you hear what I said?” The pizza guy shrugs and replies, “You never said you didn’t want these toppings. I thought you’d like them.” Now, is that a pizza you’d pay for? Wouldn’t you be offended by the hubris of the delivery guy? How much more then, does God, who is infinitely high and holy and separate from sinners, have the right to determine precisely how he wants to be worshipped by those he created and redeemed for his own glory?
We find this regulative principle of worship beautifully articulated in the Westminster Standards: “The acceptable way of worshipping the true God is instituted by Himself, and so limited by His own revealed will, that He may not be worshipped according to the imaginations & devices of men, or the suggestions of Satan, under any visible representation, or any other way not prescribed in the holy Scripture” (WCF 21:1).
Nadab and Abihu teach us not to worship God on our terms but on His. He is not our guest on Sunday, we are His. All too often, discussion and debate about worship swirls around the question: “What do I like?” But one question ought to dominate all liturgical conversations: “What does God like?” “Does the God that made us and saved us by the blood of his Son, not have the right to regulate His own worship? Does our loving heavenly Father not have the authority to instruct His children in heavenly worship?”
God saved us to make worshippers of us. Thus, the obsession of a regenerated heart should be to bring God a pleasing offering in view of his mercy. But how do we know what will please him? We search the Scriptures. When we do, we find that the Lord loves His own Word. Throughout the Bible, worship is filled with God’s Word read, sung, confessed, prayed, preached, pictured in sacraments and responded to with tithes and offerings. We dare not come to God in corporate worship on any terms but his own. Because the consequences are real.
The Consequence
“And fire came out from before the LORD and consumed them, and they died before the LORD” (Leviticus 10:2). Bishop Hall said, “It is a dangerous thing, in the service of God, to decline from his own institutions; we have to do with a God who is wise to prescribe his own worship, just to require what he has prescribed, and powerful to revenge what he has not prescribed.” Dangerous indeed. As Nadab and Abihu sinned by fire, so they died by fire. So terrible was their sin in the sight of God that he demanded Aaron’s family members to drag their burnt bodies outside the camp and forbid them from mourning their deaths (Leviticus 10:4-7). In Numbers 3:4 and 1 Chronicles 24:2, we are reminded that Nadab and Abihu died childless. God blotted out their names from Israel.
It is a dangerous thing to draw near to God on any terms but his own. It was dangerous for Uzzah who was stricken down dead by the Lord for putting his hands on the ark to keep if from falling onto the ground (2 Samuel 6:1-7), because, as Jonathan Edwards said, Uzzah’s believed “his hands were cleaner than the dirt under his feet.” It was dangerous for King Uzziah who, in his pride, played the priest and offered incense himself. For this, the Lord struck his face with leprosy and he lived out the rest of his days alone (II Chronicle 26:16-21).
“Yes,” you might be thinking “that’s just the wrathful God of the OT. The God of the New Testament isn’t like that!” Really? What happened to Ananias and Sapphira when they lied to the Holy Spirit? (Acts 5:3). What happened to Herod when he refused to glorify God? (Acts 12:2-23). They were slain. Why did Paul urge the Corinthians to approach the table of the Lord in a worthy manner? “For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself. That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died” (1 Corinthians 11:29-30). If that sounds harsh to us, may I suggest it is because, like Nadab and Abihu, we take God too lightly. We forget his character.
The Character of God
It’s hard to imagine the searing pain Aaron must felt on this dreadful day. God took not one, but two of his boys. In the midst of that unspeakable heartache Moses came to his brother, with a word from God: “Among those who draw near to me I will be sanctified” (Leviticus 10:3). This word “holy” is taken from the Hebrew word cadosh which means “to separate.” God isn’t ordinary. He is sacred. He isn’t our fellow creature. He is our Creator. We are weak but he is mighty. We are a vapor but he is eternal. We are ignorant but his wisdom is unsearchable. We are finite but he is infinite. We are always changing but God is immutable. We are vile and corrupt but God is sinless and dwells in unapproachable light (1 Timothy 6:16). His eyes are too pure to even look upon evil (Habakkuk 1:13). God is not like a man that he should lie (Numbers 23:19). God is so holy, he made Moses remove his sandals and the seraphim veil their faces in his presence. Berkhof said, “God’s holiness ought to awaken in man a sense of absolute nothingness, a creature-consciousness… leading to absolute self-abasement.” But Nadab and Abihu forgot that God is to be consecrated and instead treated him as something common. They forgot that God is holy. And they forgot that God is heavy.
“Before all the people I will be glorified” (Leviticus 10:3). This word glorified means “to be regarded as heavy, substantial.” In other words, God will not be taken lightly by his people. He’s not just a bumper sticker, keychain, Facebook status, or an item on your to-do-list. He is immeasurably weighty and infinitely significant. He is the Ancient of Days robed in light. He is the Son of Man whom the wind and the waves obey. At his word kingdoms rise and fall. The earth is his footstool. He holds the swirling galaxies of endless space in the palm of his hand. He hung, numbered, and named the stars. In him all things live and move and have their being. He holds the keys of death and hell and one day, every soul will stand before and face the judgement. But Nadab and Abihu forgot that God is heavy and instead treated him like something light. They forgot that He’s glorious.
We would spend less time debating about the hows of our worship if we spent more time discussing the Who of our worship. Jesus was consumed in the flames of God’s hatred for our sins on the cross so that we might be made acceptable to a holy a heavy God. Jesus suffered alone, outside the camp, so that we might have bold access to the throne of grace and the Father’s everlasting embrace. Even now, he who made us by the word of his powerful word and saved us by his powerful grace intercedes for us that we might worship God on earth as he is worshipped in heaven. Even now, the Father is seeking those who would worship him in Spirit and in truth. May he find such joyful, obedient worship in our hearts.
Jim McCarthy is a Minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and is Pastor-elect of Trinity PCA in Statesboro, GA.
Related Posts: -
The Ghastly Truth about “Gender Transitioning” Is Coming Out, and Liberal Elites Can’t Stop It
Children who have been ruined by transgender ideology are coming forward and speaking “their truth” on every platform available to them, and their stories are heartbreaking. And photos of children who have undergone transition surgery…are horrifying to people even when those posting them are doing so positively.
(LifeSiteNews)—It is no surprise that progressives are amping up efforts to cancel Matt Walsh, the Daily Wire podcast host and activist taking on the gender ideologues. His investigation into the Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s practice of “transitioning” children—which included video of one doctor noting that the surgeries are “huge money makers”—triggered Tennessee lawmakers to call for an investigation. This has resulted in an announcement by Vanderbilt that it will be halting all “sex change” surgeries for underage patients while reviewing their processes.
When the U.K.’s Tavistock clinic did this, the independent investigation found that children were being “transitioned” hastily—and a class-action lawsuit with up to 1,000 families participating was close behind.
There were plenty of commentators—even on the conservative side—who scoffed at the idea that a bare-knuckle brawler like Matt Walsh (and the Daily Wire) could produce reportage that could create change. But there is a direct line between Walsh’s reporting and activism and a major hospital putting a hold on mutilating children. This is undeniably huge. Walsh, like the rest of us, isn’t perfect. But his activism against the gender ideologues has been undeniably effective, and he gets results where others have failed.
Meanwhile, the Daily Wire is also showcasing how to relentlessly expose a movement that has been operating with impunity—and the consent of institutional elites—and to the permanent detriment of tens of thousands of children. I suspect that coverage from non-mainstream outlets has assisted in driving these stories to the surface. Consider this recent story from Reuters, for example, that exposes the fact that the manufacturers of puberty-blocking drugs such as Endo International plc and AbbVie Inc have refused to conduct safety trials despite their products being prescribed to children:
Left-wing news outlet Reuters published data on Thursday about the rising number of children and adolescents adopting a transgender identity and seeking medical interventions. Among the shocking revelations is that between 2017 to 2021, 17,683 of the 121,882 children ages 6 to 17 diagnosed with gender dysphoria received puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones. Despite such widespread adoption for the drug’s off-label use, the drug’s manufacturers refuse to conduct safety trials for their use in treating gender dysphoria in adolescents.
Read More
Related Posts: -
How to Respond to “Trans” and Gender Ideology? Simple: Live Not by Lies
The truly free and faithful person cannot live by lies. Everyone who chooses to do so, for whatever reason, is not truly free…nor morally strong. As Solzhenitsyn said many decades ago, such a person must admit, “I am part of the herd and a coward.”
At the precise moment of his arrest and exile from Soviet Russia in 1974, the celebrated literary dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn released a document that was as powerful as it was brief: Live Not By Lies.
At the precise moment when so many are speaking plain truth today—saying 2+2=4—and getting kicked off popular social media platforms for doing so, Solzhenitsyn’s words are deeply relevant and essential.
It was the great novelist’s simple and profound answer for how his people could resist the soul-crushing tyranny under which they lived. It is our answer today as well.
Communist ideology re-fashioned basic reality in a way the masses knew to be false; giving established words new meaning for political and ideological purposes. Dissent from the new order was not tolerated. Citizens were required, through excruciating political, economic, and ideological pressure, to speak and give assent to a carefully constructed, but wholly false reality. The people wrongly believed they controlled no real levers of power.
Does this sound like anything you recognize in culture today?
But Solzhenitsyn told his fellow citizens, and us today, they possessed the greatest power of all: the individual choice to refuse to live by lies. This is what this short, regime-toppling document explains, and it is worth us reading again today and taking to heart.
Solzhenitsyn explained the simple fact that the ideological system they were suffering under “demands from us only obedience to lies and daily participation in lies.” Thus, he told his countrymen,
The simple and most accessible key to our self-neglected liberation is this: personal non-participation in lies.
Read that statement again for emphasis and reflect upon it. This truth is equally simple and profound. Resolving to refuse to speak or assent to what you know to be false is one of the greatest revolutionary acts a human can perform. Solzhenitsyn explained,
It is the easiest thing for us to do and the most destructive for the lies.
Why?
Because when people renounce lies, it cuts short their existence. Like parasites, they can only survive when carried by a person…Our way must be: Never knowingly support lies…and we will be amazed how swiftly the lies fall away, for that which should be naked will be exposed as such to the whole world.
Lies have no life if we all refuse to let them live in our own words. Simply stop serving as their host. This remarkable insight served to give a humble and seemingly powerless people the moral courage necessary to bring down one of the most dehumanizing systems in modern times. Their example is instructive to us in our age.
Read More