The Divine Pattern for Seventh-Day Adventist Medical Missionary Work
By David Paulson, M. D.
God could not trust Moses, with all his skill and learning, to build the tabernacle in the wilderness according to his own ideas. Moses was strictly admonished, “See . . . that thou make all things according to the pattern showed to thee in the mount.” Heb. 8:5; Ex. 25:40. Are our natural abilities, even when consecrated to the Lord as Moses’ were, more capable of developing this Seventh-day Adventist sanitarium movement?
Several years ago Dr. Hurd, who was then president of the American Hospital Association, said, at the annual meeting of the association, in explaining the difference between sanitariums and hospitals, “You know the Battle Creek Sanitarium was started by a vision.” And that is the real fact; for before there was a stone laid in the foundation of the Battle Creek Sanitarium, God gave Sister White the ideals that should govern that work, and subsequently, before each new development in this work, a divine plan has always been outlined in advance of human workmen.
I am thoroughly convinced that the most crying need of our sanitarium work today is not more money, nor more patients, nor better workers, nor more abundant facilities, but a determination, born first of all in the hearts of the leaders, to prayerfully and earnestly study the plans and specifications until we become convinced that we know the will of God concerning the work that has been intrusted to our hands.
Before sensible business men construct an important building, they hire an expert architect to make a blue print and furnish the necessary plans and specifications. No contractor would take the contract for such a building without fully acquainting himself with even the smallest details of not only the blue print, but also of the plans and specifications. And after he has accepted the responsibility, no contractor will keep in his employ for a single day a workman who is not willing faithfully to follow these plans and specifications.
It is high time that our sanitarium leaders should become sanitarium experts. A good lawyer prides himself on knowing the law, or at least where to find the necessary information in his law books. By careful study he has faithfully classified all the essential principles so as to have them at his fingers’ ends on a moment’s notice at any time. Is it reasonable to expect that God will accept anything less from our hands?
Those sanitarium managers and heads of departments who do not already possess the entire nine volumes of the Testimonies, should buy them at once, for the same reason that a medical student buys medical books, and the competent lawyer fills one side of his office with a comprehensive law library. The very next thing to do is to go through, carefully and prayerfully, and classify, in a properly indexed loose-leaf binder, the various important subjects that relate to this sanitarium work. Two hours of study daily for a month will speedily enlighten any one as to what is the matter with our sanitarium work; and no amount of resolutions, learned discussions, and brilliant human ideas will accomplish one tenth as much for our sanitarium work. So much for the shepherds.
What about the sheep? Every worker in our sanitariums, be he nurse, domestic helper, call boy, or even fireman in the heating department, should be encouraged to buy immediately, first of all, “Testimonies for the Church,” Vol. VII. It contains more detailed information as to what God expects in this sanitarium work, and of sanitarium workers, than any other one of the nine volumes. Any worker, unless absolutely dead to the call of God, cannot read the following words without being thrilled through and through with a new vision and a new determination: “There are many who recognize no distinction between a common business enterprise, as a workshop, factory, or cornfield, and an institution established especially to advance the interests of the cause of God. But the same distinction exists that in ancient times God placed between the sacred and the common, the holy and the profane. This distinction he desires every worker in our institutions to discern and appreciate.”—Page 101.
If the sanitarium shepherds are themselves classifying the plans and specifications found in the entire nine volumes, they will have no difficulty in stimulating the workers to do the same in their study of Volume VII. I can scarcely conceive that a worker who for three weeks does what I have suggested, could permit himself to shrivel up spiritually by making the common mistake of substituting service for humanity for communion with God, or that he could ever be content to spend his time as many now are doing—merely studying sanitarium methods, instead of acquiring sanitarium principles.
The day is past—more than past—for any one to be content to any longer carry on the kind of sanitarium work19that we have been carrying on for years. God wants to transform our so-called Christian sanitarium work into genuine medical evangelistic work. That is an institution where nurses, helpers, and patients are taught to bring leaves from the tree of life to sin-sick souls; it is an institution where the Bible is not merely sandwiched in between the medical studies, but becomes the groundwork of each, and its principles are blended with them all; it is an institution where nurses are learning how they can naturally connect spiritual truths with the most commonplace incidents that daily occur; where we doctors make as careful and discriminating spiritual diagnosis as we do physical diagnosis; where we learn to prescribe for the soul maladies as well as the physical maladies; and that means that the doctors and nurses will have frequent earnest, prayerful consultations. In a medical evangelistic institution a nurse will report as faithfully on the patient’s spiritual nourishment and spiritual treatment as she will on the physical condition. Such a nurse will watch and pray as eagerly for spiritual healing as she now does for physical healing.
Our sanitariums have not been worldly enough to suit the worldly class, and they have not been spiritual enough so that God could trust them in a special manner with those who have a genuine aching of heart for spiritual help; and that situation will never be any different until the spiritual is made primary, and the physical is made secondary. The principles for just such a sanitarium are in the Bible, and the plan for it is fully outlined in the Testimonies. Prayerful study and more than human effort to develop such a sanitarium work will be required. Every one who would undertake it must have a special spiritual preparation before the Lord will intrust him with such a responsibility.
I believe the hour has come for us to bend ourselves to the task—to co-operate with the Lord to bring about this very result. We have encompassed this mount long enough. I positively believe Christ is walking through our sanitariums these very days to cleanse them as he did the temple of old. If he does not succeed, he will e’enlong say to us, as he did to the Jews, “Your house is left unto you desolate.” He will raise up a humble group of medical missionary evangelists who will go out with their souls on fire with these principles, and he will use them to finish this medical missionary work in the earth—without the help of any of these institutions, just as in the early dispensation of the church he used the disciples without the temple and its elaborate services which he himself had instituted.