Health
God told the Israelites: “ ‘If you diligently heed the voice of the Lord your God and do what is right in His sight . . . I will put none of the diseases on you which I have brought on the Egyptians’ ” (Exod. 15:26, NKJV). What were some of the counsels on health given to them by God? Lev. 7:22-26, 11:1-8, 13:46.
For centuries, leprosy and the Black Death spread fear and terror among medieval humanity. It was only when church leaders remembered that people afflicted with leprosy in the Bible were segregated and excluded from the community, and they applied this principle to the victims of leprosy and the bubonic plague, that these scourges were stopped.
Most Seventh-day Adventist pioneers were anything but health reformers. At the 1848 Sabbath Conferences, they most likely sat together eating pork chops for lunch. In a vision in 1848, Ellen G. White was shown that tobacco, tea, and coffee are harmful, but it took several years to convince the membership.
On June 6, 1863, Ellen G. White received a vision in which she was shown the need for health reform. “I saw that it was a sacred duty to attend to our health, and arouse others to their duty.”—Selected Messages, book 3, p. 280. Two years later, on December 25, 1865, she was shown that Seventh-day Adventists should establish a health institute. The Western Health Reform Institute in Battle Creek, which opened its doors in 1866, was the first of a network of more than three hundred hospitals, clinics, and dispensaries which the church operates today.
What can we say to those who claim that Ellen G. White copied the health message from other health reformers in her time?
Recent research into Ellen G. White’s health message has revealed that there is a vast difference in quality between Ellen G. White’s principles of health and those advocated by other health reformers in her time. “Modern medical science has verified a high percentage of her health principles . . . while the sources from which she supposedly copied had a low percentage of health principles that have been verified. This difference indicates that Mrs. White had health information that could not have come from any human source available anywhere at the time she lived.”—Leonard Brand and Don S. McMahon, The Prophet and Her Critics (Nampa, Idaho: Pacific Press Publishing Association, 2005), pp. 87, 88.
| The health message is a wonderful gift from God to us. Like all of His gifts, it can be, and indeed, has been abused. How can we avoid turning this gift into a curse? |
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