Transcript: Jesus and Vaccines: A Biblical Perspective

The New Testament Many evangelical Christians today are asking questions about faith in God, and how such faith should affect our attitude towards modern science, especially how it should affect our attitude toward use of the various vaccines which have been rushed into production by pharmaceutical companies around the world in an effort to stem the tide of COVID-19 infections, COVID-19 hospitalizations, and COVID-19 deaths. This issue, as expressed by many, has become one of faith in God, opposing faith in science. Faith in science is sometimes described as faith in man, faith in an evil, corrupt system, or even as faith in witchcraft. This debate has raised questions which Christians everywhere should look at, long and hard. Pentecostal believers have been wrestling with them for more than a hundred years, so don't expect easy answers. When it comes to things like health, it is tempting to separate our religious life from our secular life, refusing to allow links between the two. But, in doing so, we can easily lose track of any relevance that our Christian faith might have to the world in which we live at least six days of every week. I once knew a very well-qualified Christian doctor who seriously believed that Jesus was able to speak perfect Hebrew from the day that he was born. After all, he was perfect, the good doctor argued. Yet that same doctor argued that anyone who believed in miracles today was of the devil. Because miracles, according to his very strong fundamentalist theology, ceased after Jesus left the earth. That is the most extreme separation of faith and reality that I have ever experienced, but not by much. I find traces of that kind of thinking in many other places as well. On this channel, I have urged people to look more closely at Scripture in order to question some false assumptions that we have made about what the Bible actually says. In particular, I have encouraged careful study of the teachings of Jesus and I do so in an attempt to get people away from that kind of thinking that doctor had where they exaggerate the miracles in the Bible so much that it has no relevance to the way that we live now in the real world. Now, I do not believe the Bible is a bunch of fairy tales, but I do believe that many of us have made it into fairy tales through false assumptions. I want to address some of those false assumptions in this video. In particular, false assumptions about what Jesus and the rest of the Bible says about health and healing. Go through the various regulations of the law in Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy and you will find hundreds of rules that relate to health. That should give a clearer picture of just how important God, Yahweh, Jehovah, thought health was. We may have been perfect in the Garden of Eden, but sickness and death are everywhere outside the Garden, and God does not want us to ignore that. Now, some may say that Jesus came to destroy all that Old Testament emphasis on health, But you only need to go through the four Gospels and highlight all of the passages that refer to Jesus healing people to see that Jesus was actually fulfilling what Yahweh had started in the Torah. His fulfillment included some important changes, but the overall spirit of good health is still there. He just put it into better perspective. Jesus was clear that what we need most is eternal life. Everyone that Jesus ever healed eventually died. So the gospel message is not about physical healing as such. It is about spiritual healing, that is, our ongoing life, even after death. In the meantime, however, before we all die, Healing is portrayed as an integral part of expressing the love that Jesus taught in practical terms. Jesus said that loving God and loving our neighbors sums up the whole purpose of the Torah. In Matthew 25, Jesus talked about people getting to heaven and not knowing how they got there. He says to them that it was their practical expressions of love which led them to being there He specifically mentions visiting people who are sick without any reference to healing Just visiting them was enough to impress him. In contrast, Jesus talked about people who would boast that they had done miracles, including miracles of healing, and he would say, Depart from me, you workers of inequity, for I never knew you. God wants us to express our Christian faith in ways that address the temporal needs of a godless world, not because temporal needs in themselves are eternally important, but because addressing temporal needs is our opening or link into the lives of relatively unspiritual people. By at least trying to meet their physical needs, we climb over the wall that divides what the Bible calls our carnal or fleshly nature from our spiritual or heavenly nature. Our heavenly-mindedness comes across as earthly goodness when we reach out, as Jesus did, and bring some kind of healing to those around us. It has often been our unwillingness to do this that has hampered our ability to preach the gospel effectively to the rest of the world. As I was growing up, back in the 1950s, my church put a lot of emphasis on sending missionaries to foreign countries, and especially missionary doctors and nurses. Medical missionaries would go to places like Africa and challenge the superstitions of the so-called witch doctors with the wonders of medical science. We saw medical science as a fruit of Christian freedom from the superstitions of the pagan world. But what we see happening today is just the opposite. The witch doctors have infiltrated the churches and are deceiving people everywhere with lying signs and wonders. And what is even worse, the people love it. They want to be deceived, and many of them go to their deaths praising their witch-doctor false prophets. Seventy years ago, scientific knowledge was seen as a natural extension of Christian influence on the West. But all of that has changed today. Now, in answer to the question title of this video, most of us would probably respond that Jesus would not take the vaccine for Himself, or recommend it for others, because He would not need a vaccine in order to be able to heal COVID-19. He would just declare people to be healed, and they would be healed instantly. After all, He is the Son of God. He can do anything. Certainly, that does seem to be what we read in the Gospels. So let's go with that for a moment. Jesus would not use the COVID-19 vaccine because he could heal COVID-19 miraculously. But take note that the real question behind the title is the same for all sides. The real question is this... would I, as a follower of Jesus, take the anti-COVID vaccine? And would I encourage anyone else to take such a thing? We are trying to find areas where we can demonstrate whatever it was that Jesus was demonstrating through his life and ministry, because if we get it right, we may be able to take Jesus to the world through living like him. I can imagine Jesus walking into the ICU wards of hospitals around the country and emptying them out with just a word. But are you doing that? Or more to the point, can you do that? Can you even imagine yourself or your pastor doing that? If you cannot, then you need to ask yourself a few more questions and maybe take a closer look at what Jesus was doing as well in order to get more consistency between what you preach and what you practice. Along the way, you may need to take a more humble look at what thousands of Christian doctors and nurses are doing, without fanfare or exaggeration. See, I think Jesus was doing what HE was able to do, Him being the Son of God and all. Now, theologically, I could argue that I should be able to do anything that Jesus did. And certainly, if I could do the same things that Jesus did, then God would expect me to be doing it. But if I cannot empty the hospitals, then I need to start with what I can do. Consequently I may also need to be a little more careful about what I tell other Christians to do Like I just said I may need to look more closely at why Jesus did these things meaning, why did he do things that I cannot do? John seems to believe that Jesus did a few key miracles as a way of establishing his right to speak as a mouthpiece of God, But the other three Gospel writers focused more on the fact that Jesus loved people. Because of his compassion, he reached out to them, and because he, as the Son of God, was able to he used his miraculous powers to heal them...miraculously. But take note that all four Gospels repeatedly stress that Jesus told the people whom he healed to keep it secret. Tell no man, he would repeatedly say. In other words, his miracles were not being done as a show or as proof of his spiritual superiority. They were, instead, expressions of his deep and abiding love. That is where our focus needs to be. That seems to be the part of Jesus that keeps getting overlooked and left out in so much of our religious bickering. But does that necessarily imply that Jesus would have taken or promoted the COVID-19 vaccines? I don't think we have examined the evidence sufficiently yet to know what the answer should be. The Bible records instances where Jesus used saliva, or where he used some form of mud, to heal people. In one case, with a blind man, the healing came gradually. After one treatment, the blind man reported only that people appeared to be little different to walking trees in terms of how clear his vision was. So Jesus tried again, and the healing became complete. We need to ask ourselves, what are the implications of a healing in two stages? And we need to ask even more pointedly what the use of mud and saliva imply. Why were they mentioned at all? And were there maybe other treatments that Jesus used which are not mentioned? Did Jesus really need such aids to accomplish his healing? Now, no one knows what chemicals may have been in the mud, but we do know that saliva has some healing qualities. So maybe Jesus was using scientific knowledge himself. Maybe he did not break the laws of physics so much as he used other laws that we have yet to discover, and people just saw it as miraculous, because of their limited understanding of God's creation. Another theory is that Jesus may have been hinting to the rest of us that the use of medication in conjunction with prayer and faith is a legitimate approach to health and healing. Jesus' half-brother, James, instructed the leaders of each congregation in the early church to anoint any sick people in their company with the appropriate oil, and to pray for them, after which he said that they would recover. Not necessarily jump straight out of bed, but at least recover. Now, we never hear of Jesus anointing anyone with oil. Yet, when he sent out his disciples, he told them to do that. to anoint sick people with oil, and, in doing so, to heal them. Surprisingly, when the disciples returned from these outreaches, they were more excited about their success in driving out demons than they were with any healings that may have taken place. Demons were understood to be tormenting people who had mental health issues, and it seems that the message of love that Jesus shared with his followers was the one the disciples found to have the most dramatic effects when they set out to imitate his healing ministry. Healings in response to their anointings with oil hardly rate a mention. In one of the most famous stories that Jesus ever told, he commends a man for pouring both oil and alcohol on the wounds of another man, bandaging up those wounds, and then taking the man to the equivalent of a New Testament hospital. Jesus sets this Good Samaritan's behavior up as a model for anyone who wants to enter the eternal kingdom of God. So, the evidence suggests that Jesus was not opposed to any of us using the best medicines available in carrying on his healing ministry today. He went so far as to imply that it was the loving use of medicine that convinced him that the Good Samaritan had the kind of faith and love that God is looking for in people everywhere Now let me look at infectious diseases in particular Fungal infections even today can be the most difficult ones to overcome So, in Bible times, if a house was found to have mold growing on the walls, the Torah taught that the entire house needed to be destroyed, and all the rubble taken outside the city to be burned. That is an example of just how far God was prepared to go in eradicating dangerous infections, and He expected people of faith to comply with such regulations. Leprosy is one of the most ancient and famous infections throughout history, and it received special attention in the Torah. Because there were no vaccines or antibiotics at the time, isolation was the primary treatment for leprosy, creating a very depressing outlook for the lepers themselves. Consequently, the term leper has come to be used for anyone who is isolated from the mainstream of society. I'm sure that many of those people who have chosen to resist COVID vaccines feel that they are being treated like lepers at the moment, and in this present situation, they more or less are lepers. That is, they are a serious risk to the good health of the rest of society. If they refuse to wear masks, and if they refuse to be vaccinated, then they need to be isolated even if laws need to be passed to make that happen. Now, unlike Old Testament lepers, who had no way to escape their isolation and who could not be blamed for having the disease, today's lepers have brazenly chosen to break all the rules in order to make themselves a deliberate threat to the rest of us, at a time of great physical peril to many millions of people. At the same time, they take the high moral ground about anyone having the audacity to suggest that they should be isolated, through quarantine or other restrictions, because of their behavior. Notice that, when Jesus healed lepers, some details were included that do not appear in conjunction with his other healings. I think these details were included in the Bible for just such a situation as what we are all experiencing today. Jesus told a man whom he had healed of leprosy, Go, and show yourself to the priest for a testimony to him. He was basically sending the leper back to the local religious leaders, who were also the local health authorities of the day, to get himself a good health passport. With such a passport, he would be allowed to come out of lockdown. Without it, he would not. Can you see how Jesus cooperated with the health authorities, even though some of them were his worst enemies? He recognized that they served the purpose in terms of maintaining order, and so he mostly cooperated with them. That delicate balance between recognizing the inadequacy of the secular and even the religious systems to fully represent the kingdom of heaven, and yet respecting those same systems in matters of law and order has always been a difficult one for Christians to maintain. So it was for Jesus. He had something better to offer, but it did not require him to attack everything that everyone else was doing. In fact, God is able to see the hearts of each individual, enough to be able to recognize things like love, faith and sincerity wherever they turn up. That comes across over and over again throughout the ministry of Christ. That is why it makes perfect sense to me to get vaccinated against COVID-19. I not only find it is consistent with what Jesus did, but I feel that educating others to get vaccinated is also a part of the healing ministry that Jesus has given to each of his followers. Now, if you can bring such healing without vaccines, then fine, go ahead and do it. But so far, I do not see much healing happening in the anti-vax armies. What I mostly see are anger, fear and heavy doses of self-righteousness. Please, in the name of Jesus our Saviour, Give some thought to what would be the most loving thing to do in the present world situation. In my opinion, the answer is not all that hard to find. It seems perfectly consistent with the way our Lord would expect us to behave. May God bless you and keep you safe as you seek to serve Him. Thank you for listening. you