You Can Know You Have Eternal Life
#28 Gods Standard for Mankind (12)
Medical knowledge in the Bible points to Divine Inspiration (2)
by Jim Mettenbrink
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About 1445 BC, Moses came down
from Mount Sinai with the 10 commandments of the covenant God
made with Israel. The books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers
and Deuteronomy of the Old testament reveal over 600 laws governing
every aspect of Israelite life. Some of the laws governed
sanitation of which Leviticus 17:12-13 commanded the people not
to eat blood, but rather to bury it in the dirt. Why? Modern
medical science tells us that when substances are buried, the
spread of germs is minimized and the decomposition of harmful
substances are hastened by micro-organisms which are in the ground.
The burial of blood eliminates the attraction for disease
carrying insects and eliminates a culture medium for bacteria.
Another command was to bury human
body waste (Deut. 23:12-13). Diseases such as dysentery,
cholera and typhoid are evidence of man failing to follow this
simple law regarding body wastes. Although this might seem
like common sense to us, when this law was written, the practice
was merely casting excrement into the street. Even in this
century, many villages and towns around the world still have
open sewers running curbside from their houses to local rivers.
Through time, millions died prematurely and hundreds of
thousands die unnecessarily today from the failure to apply this
simple principle of sanitation.
For over 1000 years Egypt was recognized
as the worlds foremost medical authority. About 1100
BC Homer, writer of the Odyssey, wrote In Egypt, the men
are more skilled in medicine than in any other art or skill.
The Persian kings employed Egyptian physicians as late
as 500BC. The fortunate discovery of a 25 foot long scroll
of Egyptian medical practices from the period of Moses, reveals
that Egyptian medical practices used animal dung, urine and blood
in over half of the remedies for disease and ailments. Animal
dung, the remedy of the ancients, is known to harbor disease.
These are exactly the opposite of what Moses, who was reared
in the household of Pharaoh (1500BC), had written. Luke
records that Moses was educated in all the wisdom of Egypt (Acts
7:22, New Testament). Surely the educated Moses would have
known better than to oppose the worlds medical authority!
Scholars are nearly unanimous that
the worlds first laws or precepts of sanitation were laid
down in the first five books of the Bible, all written by Moses.
These Mosaic laws were preventive not corrective. From
where did Moses come up with the idea of preventive medicine
and from where did he get the laws about sanitation, which were
completely contrary to his Egyptian education? Was he a
capricious rebel or was he inspired by God?
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