PHYSICAL PREPARATION FOR “THE PLAGUES.”
By David Paulson
As imbibing error and adopting erroneous habits of life results in the bondage of ill health and disease, so it is equally true that accepting truth and adopting right habits will have a tendency to produce the liberty and freedom that accompany health. So it is not simply in a mystical or vague sense that the Word of God declares: “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” God purposes to have His people protected by a covering during the time of trouble, and He is drawing that cover over them now by giving them an opportunity to embrace the living principles relating to physical health. Small instalments of the plagues are already abroad in the land, and the way we are able to cope with them now, is at least a suggestion as to how we should be able to meet the seven last plagues, were they being poured out. “If thou hast run with the footmen, and they have wearied thee, then how canst thou contend with horses? And if in the land of peace, wherein thou trustedst, they wearied thee, then how wilt thou do in the swelling of Jordan?” Jer. 12:5. He who carries out in his daily life physical habits which give him such impure blood that upon the least provocation he secures a crop of boils or ulcers, may settle it beyond a shadow of doubt that he has some truth yet to accept and adopt before he is prepared successfully to meet the first plague. The individual who takes no precaution as to whether he is drinking infected water, or who deliberately contaminates it by adding tea, coffee, or liquor, is laying the surest kind of foundation to become poisoned, and to succumb under the second plague, when the ordinary sources of water supply become as infected as the blood of a dead man. In fact, the man who ignores the danger lurking in drinking ordinary contaminated water now, will probably by that time become so calloused, so indifferent with reference to this matter, that he may not consider even the water under the second plague very dangerous after all. The man who is camping so near the disease line that the slightest indiscretion or unusual exposure produces a fever or a scorching heat in the body, is not at all prepared to survive, when there is a scorching heat from without under the fourth plague. It is true there are many, who, like Naaman of old, expect that when that time comes, the Lord will suddenly strike upon them (2 Kings 5:11), and enable them to resist on a large scale the very things that, because of a lack of interest that would lead them to adopt right habits of life, they have not been able to rise above on a smaller scale. They have neglected the preparation so needful, and at the very time when God was drawing a covering of truth over His people, they have been turning away their ears from hearing life-saving truth. So when the plagues begin to fall, they will find that their prayers even are an abomination (Prov. 28:9) just as truly as the guilty inhabitants of the old world discovered, that there came a time when it was too late to secure admittance into the ark. It is not enough to be simply baptized in truth as it were; the spirit of truth must get inside, and create a disposition on the part of the individual which will lead him enthusiastically to adopt reformatory principles, and to make radical changes in his habits of life. If a man was imprisoned, and was given a key to the door of his cell, it would not set him free until he used it; so it is not the truth that is accepted theoretically, but that which is carried out practically in the life, that sets humanity free from the thraldom of either spiritual or physical disease.