OP-ED: THEY SHOULD HAVE READ THE BIBLE

By Van Yandell

In the early 1840’s, a Hungarian doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis made a discovery. A doctor had performed an autopsy. Then he went directly to the delivery room and delivered a baby.

Soon after the delivery, the mother died. Semmelweis determined the doctors hands were covered in a substance that caused the mother’s death and insisted doctors wash their hands often and with a cleansing agent.

He presented evidence their hands were transferring “cadaverous particles,” which we now call bacteria to the mother and baby. As a result of his assertion and subsequent practice of extensive hand washing by physicians, the death rates of maternity clinics dropped significantly from eighteen percent down to one to two percent.

In 1847 Semmelweis demanded doctors wash their hands in a chlorinated lime solution before being in physical contact with patients.

Had they read the Bible, they would have known God knew, and published in Leviticus, the necessity of washing hands under running water. This simple action could have saved many; written over three-thousand years before their actions of ignorance killed the first mother and baby.

Leviticus 15: 13 “And when he that hath an issue is cleansed of his issue; then he shall number to himself seven days for his cleansing, and wash his clothes, and bathe his flesh in running water, and shall be clean.”

Washing hands in running water is now a common practice in operating rooms around the world. Washing in a pot of still water only circulates and redistributes the germs.

Microorganisms were first seen under hand-made microscopes in the 1670’s. Connecting them to diseases did not occur until the 1860’s when numerous experiments proved the connection.

By surgeons knowing to thoroughly wash their hands, many lives were saved that may have otherwise died a horrible death.

The Bible also teaches quarantine which is another disease preventing measure. Leviticus 13: 46 “All the days wherein the plague shall be in him he shall be defiled; he is unclean: he shall dwell alone; without the camp shall his habitation be.”

We saw quarantine practiced extensively during the covid years. By keeping those with infectious diseases away from the healthy, the spread appeared to be restrained.

Perhaps people prior to the discovery of the Western Hemisphere should have also read the scriptures. People mostly believed before 500 years ago the earth was flat and was stationary in space.

Job 26: 7 “He stretcheth out the north over the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing.” Obviously, God knew and the writer of Job realized the earth is constantly spinning and in an orbital path around our star (the sun). Those movements keep us in orbit and keep us from falling into the sun.

Isaiah 40: 22 “It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in.”

Bible scholars mostly agree Isaiah was written between 800 and 600 BC. God, of course, has the advantage of observing our planet from anywhere including outer space.

A circle can be a flat disc but from a few thousand miles above the earth, it can be observed rotating on an axis thus indicating a sphere.

Prior to a few hundred years ago, many believed the earth was flat and stationary in space. In the third century BC however, Aristotle observed the earths curved shadow on the moon and hypothesized the earth was round and moving.

At the time, many saw him as a lunatic for even suggesting such an absurdity. Conventional wisdom is many times not wisdom at all. Generational handed-down information is also, at times, inaccurate. Always read the scriptures to know what God says.

Prior to the placing of the space telescopes by NASA (Hubble 1990 and James Webb 2021), some astronomers claimed that someday, they would chart and name the stars.

Jeremiah 33: 22a “As the host of heaven cannot be numbered, neither the sand of the sea measured.” God and Jeremiah told us 2700 years ago there were so many stars they could not be counted; astronomers are now in agreement, that is correct!

With the space telescopes we are now told there are billions of galaxies, most of those having billions of stars. Counting the stars in the heavens would be like trying to count the grains of sand on all the world’s beaches.

When we come to the understanding that God knows more than we do, then we can come to grip with the truth of the scriptures.

Several have been credited with the statement “If one knows a little about the Bible he is an atheist; if he knows a lot about the Bible he is a believer in God.”

God told us about the currents in the seas (Psalm 8: 8), proper nutrition (Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14), photosynthesis (Genesis 1: 1-3) and many other science related topics.

Whereas we understand God gave us tremendous information thousands of years ago that no man could have known, perhaps we should listen when He tells us about His Christ being the Savior of the world!

The Bible teaches there is only one eternal salvation. That is by a faith based belief (Ephesians 2: 8) that Christ Jesus was crucified (Matthew 27: 35) for the remission of sin (Romans 4: 25), resurrected (Matthew 28: 6) and ascended alive into Heaven (Acts 1: 9).

Van Yandell is a retired Industrial Arts teacher, an ordained gospel evangelist and missionary. His email is vmy3451@gmail.com