It has struck me over the years that there is a great contradiction in what Christians believe and what they say they believe. This contradiction is not intentional, but rather stems from fear. And this fear has gotten a hold of us because of a lack of faith. It is this lack of faith that has in many cases, allowed us to place idols in front of God.

Now, this may sound strong, and you may think that this could not apply to you, but it has been my experience that nearly all Christians have been faltering on their faith in this same way. Although I am far from being the perfect Christian, there is a certain message and a purpose the Lord has given me that I cannot leave silent.

To see this weakness in our faith we first must ask ourselves a few questions. Are we not created in the image of God?  Since God loves us didn’t He make us with everything we need for health, happiness, and a fulfilled life?  Didn’t He also give us a free will that allows us to turn either toward Him or away from Him?

I think we all would agree the answer to all of these questions is “yes!”  This leads us to the inevitable conclusion that God did not make any mistakes when He created us.  And from this we should be able to deduce that all we should have to do to be healthy and fulfilled is follow His direction.

Think for a moment of a tree. God created trees and in their way He made them perfect.  They can process minerals from the ground, sunlight from the sky, and rain from the clouds and put these all together to produce a perfect tree. And yet, every tree is different with its own uniqueness that shows its individuality.

Since man is created in Gods image, there should be no doubt that we are His greatest creation. To think that at conception two tiny cells come together and form one. Then this one cell multiplies and becomes two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, until approximately two hundred eighty days later a child is born with all the features and parts of his parents.  This child will over the years grow and mature into an adult.  During this entire Life the heart will continuously pump blood, the intestines will process food, the lungs will take in air, and the nerves will regulate body function.  All this and thousands of other functions will work perfectly on cue for year after year. Truly a miracle.

It has only been recently, though, that science has been able to see, record, and understand the wonders of the human body. More and more technology has explained the workings of various systems inside our physical self. In years and even centuries past the workings or malfunctioning of the body were only explained on a spiritual basis, because no man-made knowledge of what was happening was available. When a person became sick or diseased, man would see it as a sign of Gods displeasure with a person or group of people. Man would try to repent, pray to the Lord and watch as that person would, in most cases, improve and return to health.  But over all, the people had faith that it was God who controlled their health.

But now, as man has gained a limited knowledge, he has begun to turn away from his faith in God and he has begun to place his faith in something that is replacing God.  He has begun to place his faith in technology. Now, technology in and of itself is not bad, but when you place your faith in technology above your faith in God, then it becomes an idol in front of God.

Let us take the smallest of examples so that you can understand where this idol worship has begun to creep into your lives. Imagine your child as he plays in the street.  Now picture as he plays that he falls and he cuts the end of his finger on a piece of glass.  You would probably wash the cut off thoroughly, put some iodine or other antiseptic on it and place a band-aid over it in an attempt to help it heal.  Now ask yourself why you followed this procedure.  You first washed the cut out so as to remove any glass or other foreign matter from it.

Second, you put the antiseptic on the cut to kill the germs and prevent an infection,  And third, you covered it up with a band-aid to prevent germs from getting in.  All these things seem logical enough. Suppose for a minute you didn’t follow these procedures. Suppose all you did was quickly wash off the dirt and glass and leave the finger alone. Guess what; it would heal anyway.  But a fear would arise in your mind that an infection would set in and spread up your child’s hand and arm.

Another example is a child with a fever. Up until recently, the medical profession, along with the drug companies, have been telling us that fever is bad and that when a child gets a fever we should try to lower it, and these children can only be saved by aspirin or the like.  It would seem as if God made a mistake in allowing children to get fevers.  It has only been in the last few years that science has found out that a fever is a normal defense mechanism that helps the body kill bacteria and speeds up our body’s defense system. Lowering a fever actually prolongs the problem. 

The point I’m trying to make with these small examples is that due to our lack of faith, we rely on the technology of modern medicine “just in case.” Are we really lacking in faith so much to actually believe that God created us with a lack of man-made antiseptics or aspirin?  Could it be true that God made a mistake and forgot that children will fall down and cut themselves or get fevers when they are ill? 

The fact is, science shows us that our body has thousands of defense mechanisms and it can produce all the antiseptic and germ fighting cells we need.  But why should science be used to comfort our belief in God?  Science and technology are only based on man’s limited knowledge.  However, true wisdom is with God.

Let me give you another example of this “lack of faith” that virtually all of us have.  This example may test your very strength of faith in God over your faith in science.  Ask yourself this:  If God created us perfectly to survive on this planet, then how come our children need to be immunized early in life to supposedly keep them from becoming sick or dying?  Did God actually forget to put enough vaccine into us to survive? And if we believe God didn’t forget something when he made us, why do we vaccinate our children?

Here’s a few more questions that I think we should be asking ourselves. Did God make a mistake when he made our hearts so that by age 50 most of us need blood pressure medicine to survive?  Did God give women faulty female organs that, according to medical science, should be removed by age 40 or so?  Did God make a mistake with a woman’s reproductive systems that now require over 30% of all births in this country to need cesareans?  Did God give us faulty eyes so that most of us will need glasses someday in order to see? Was the skin God gave us too frail so that the sun He placed in the heavens would give us cancer? Is mother’s milk such a poor nutritional choice by God that we had to invent formulas to feed our babies? Over all, did God ‘botch’ up the job with us so bad that more than 80% of the population over 60 requires some sort of regular medication?

Now, I have heard the rationale that because of modern technology we are living longer than we were supposed to.  But this would seem to suggest that man’s technology can do the job better than God.  If, however, you look back in the Old Testament, you will see many people living quite a lot longer than we do today.  Also, if you look at Genesis 6:3 you see that the Lord said “My spirit shall not strive with man forever, for he is indeed flesh; yet his days shall be one hundred and twenty years!

So it is apparent that God designed us to live at least 120 years.  Do you believe these years would be sick, helpless, and require medications and surgery?  Can you truly use the excuse of “old age” when you are only 60, 70, or 80?  Would God have made such a terrible mistake as to have given us body parts that fail at such an early age if we were supposed to live to be 120?

Even science has finally discovered through genetics that the human body is supposed to live to be between 120 and 150 years.  And according to science, we should be healthy all those years.  It should not be comforting to know that science has finally agreed with what God told us we should have.  We should be comforted by our faith in God, not our faith in science. Science is only a tool God has given us to help us explain some of His miracles.

Does the discovery of gravity take away from the fact that God gave it to us?  Does the fact that science can now explain how a rainbow occurs make Genesis 9:13 invalid where God says, “I set My rainbow in the cloud, and it shall be for the sign of the covenant between Me and the earth.”

Since God created the heavens and the earth, all the science and physics and everything that goes into making it run would have to have been placed there by God.  If modern science can now explain it, great!  But that shouldn’t take away from the fact that God set it up this way.

You can look at our wonderful human body in the same way.  God set it up the way He did so it would work.  Science can explain some of it, but we should not presume that we know better than the Creator, how we should take care of it, or even how this magnificent creation works.  However, science has been able to explain small parts of how God intended our body to function.

Science has finally shown that the body’s defense mechanisms can fight off any disease process.  Science also has found out that almost every cell in the human body replaces itself in one year or less.  This means that the body you have now is not the same body you will have in a year from now.  Science has also shown that your bones and joints will totally be replaced within seven years.

So, it would seem that all our health problems should correct themselves.  After all, if God intended our body to replace itself, why wouldn’t we replace ourselves with healthier body parts?  It should be comforting to know that God set all these things and much more into our bodies so that we could be healthy.

Science and technology will never fully understand all the wonders that God has placed into the human body.  This is because modern science and technology comes from man’s limited intelligence, while God’s wisdom is limitless.  We can, however, use science and technology as a tool to help partially explain the God-given magnificence of this creation called man.

Let us look for a moment at our early development in the womb.  When the first two cells from our father and mother came together at conception, an amazing process began. These cells multiplied and started to specialize into different parts.  But, the very first part that started to form in us was the brain.  This should tell us that God intended some special purpose for our brain because he wanted it to form first.

The next things to form were our spinal cord and the rest of our nerve system. So it seems evident to me that if God created these first they are important. It is also interesting to know that the brain and the spinal cord are the only parts of your body that do not replace themselves.  You keep most of these cells from conception to death.  It sounds as if God intended something very important for these. And, in fact, He did.

If you check all modern anatomy books today, they will all say that your brain and nerve system control and direct the function of the rest of your body.  Science has only now shown us what we should have known all along.  That is, that God has made our bodies well organized.  And, in fact, God made our brain as the master controller of the rest of our bodies. This means that all the wonderful systems and organs that He placed in our body are supposed to be controlled by our brain.

As if science is finally catching up with how God set up this body, modern medicine has finally decided that death is when the brain stops functioning, not the heart. Man can artificially replace the heart, but not the brain.  This is because it is a person’s brain that controls all the other body parts and functions.

Something we should notice is the difference between a living person and that same person the minute he dies.  The very minute after death all the parts are still there.  The brain is even still there.  But, one thing is missing and that ingredient is life!  Life itself is the one vital ingredient that God gave us that man can never replace.  No matter how advanced our science and technology gets, science can not create new life. Only God does that.

But, I think we can conclude from observations that if when the brain stops and life ends, then life itself must somehow be stored or kept in the brain.  This would explain why God created our brain first in our early development.  Now to transmit this life energy from the brain to all the body parts, it seems obvious that God’s second creation in man, the spinal cord and nerves would fill the job. And in fact, this is exactly how our body works.

Life energy, sometimes called nerve energy, is stored in the brain.  This master computer, the brain, then sends this life energy over the spinal cord and nerves to every body organ, muscle, and tissue.  So, as you can see, man is only beginning to find out how God intended our magnificent body to work. 

In understanding this and having faith in the fact that God created us to be healthy, we can have faith that we will remain healthy. We can actually start to depend on what He gave us, and not on the idol of science and technology that we have created.

At this point we can start to explore the things that God has given us. We can start to see where we may have gone astray and how we may have created our own health problems. Now remember, each time we find something helpful through science that can now be explained, it had to have been available to all people before technology was available. I don’t think God would have given us something we need to be healthy, but withheld it from us until almost 2000 years after Christ was born.

The first and obvious thing God gave us is clean air.  This is something we have had from the beginning of man on the earth.  But, now it seems we are endangering it.  This gift of clean air is something all Christians should be concerned about.  Isn’t it strange that around the same time we are destroying the air, we also are now developing the technology to monitor and purify the air. 

If you notice through man’s history, the same time man creates a problem, the solution is also available.  It would seem that God intended us to have the ability to solve our own problems if we know where to look.  Also, keep in mind the fact that He did things right, it is man who messes up!

Along the same line as clean air is clean water.  And here again the same situation exists. But in this case, we even purposely poison our own water. Do we actually believe that God made a mistake with water by not adding chlorine and fluoride to it so it could keep us healthier?  Here again is an example of how we have faith in science over faith in God. God gave us clean water. Man thinks he makes it better by adding man-made chemicals.

The next concern is food. For centuries God has given us the fresh, good foods of the earth; pure and natural.  But, now we process, refine, purify, pasteurize, and add chemicals to everything we eat.  Take a moment some day and look at the ingredients column of some of the packaged food you buy.  Then ask yourself how much of this stuff did God give you to eat and how much technology created for you to eat. And now, science has determined that we should start radiating our food.  According to science this must be something else God forgot to do.

Our sleeping habits also need to be examined.  God gave us many natural alarm clocks such as the day, the night, the animals of the world, or even our own biological clock.  But, most of us now live according to our man-made clocks which we set according to our man-made work schedule, or how late we watched T.V. the night before.

God also intended for us to be happy and spiritually fulfilled. And to this end, He gave us His Son. If we trust in Him and the things He has given us, we shall not want. It is only when we place the concerns and beliefs of man over what God has given us that we fall from hope and lose the joy that we have been given.

Another concern we should have is in what God has created our bodies to do. For centuries man was, out of necessity, doing physical, manual labor.  Man was supposed to work hard to be able to survive.  Today we lead a more sedentary life, therefore we’ve created exercise to hopefully replace what hard work used to do.  Once again, it seems we have found something that helps correct a problem just as we have created it.  This need for exercise was created due to our life-style and lack of activity.

Around the turn of the last century man’s life-style drastically changed.  Man went from a hard, physical, working farmer or tradesman to a city-dwelling factory or office worker.  Man began to sit more, drive in cars, and work in the same position for hours on end. In general, man’s activities completely changed. And once again, just as one problem was created by man, it seems the solution was discovered.

But, in this case, the solution had been around from the days of the early Greeks and Egyptians.  Unfortunately, this solution was never completely utilized or organized until it was fully needed, just at the time man’s life-style changed.  Some may call it coincidence, I call it a miracle.  To fully understand what I’m speaking of, I must first explain the problem that got worse at the turn of the century and how it relates to almost everything you’ve read here so far.

When man’s life-style and activities changed man placed himself in awkward positions either sitting or stooping for eight to ten hours a day.  Plus, man was not nearly as mobile as he was before.  Women went from being hard-working in all household chores to having more modern conveniences to do the work for them.  Science can now show us that this type of sedentary life-style will structurally cause problems in our skeletal system.  The key to our entire skeletal system being our spine.  And God gave us our spine not only as the main structural support of our body, but also as the major protection of our spinal cord.

If you remember, it seems as if God intended the gift of life energy to be somehow controlled in or by the brain.  This life force, or energy, is then transmitted through the spinal cord and then through all the nerves to every part of your body. So, as you can see, and as science has only recently found out, this system God gave us is vital to our life and health. Just as it is obvious that if we interfere with this system we will adversely affect our health.

Now, continuing with the idea that God doesn’t make mistakes, and keeping in mind that God made our brain so important,  He would have certainly given us protection for it, wouldn’t He?  I mean, if our brain were not protected then every time we bumped our heads we would cause brain damage. This would be terrible. But, thankfully, God gave us the perfect protection for our brain… - the skull.  This perfect bone covering for the brain is our God-given helmet to protect this vital part.

Following God’s miraculous plan would lead us next to see that He also gave us protection for the major cable that comes out of the brain, the spinal cord.  The protection He gave us for the spinal cord we call the spinal column.  These rings of bone allow movement for the spinal cord and its many nerves.

Now, remember I said that at the turn of the century man’s life-style drastically changed, and that this man-made change had a big effect on the structure of the spine and skeletal system.  And remember how I showed you that God seemed to reveal the solution of a problem to us at almost the same time as we either created it or made it worse?  Well, once again this happened.

Just prior to the turn of the century, in 1895, a man named D. D. Palmer made a small discovery of a principle that had been practiced sporadically since the beginning of man. For thousands of years, from the old Europeans to the Chinese, even back to the Egyptians and Greeks, the art of spinal manipulation was used.  However, if was never organized into a healing art until D. D. Palmer put it all together on September 18, 1895.

Some may call it an accident or fate, but I believe that when the Lord shows us a solution to a problem, it is no accident!  On this day in 1895, Dr. D. D. Palmer manipulated, or as he called it, “adjusted” a bone in a janitor’s neck which then caused this janitor, Harvey Lillard, to regain his hearing which he had lost more than 17 years earlier. It was from this incident, and subsequently from hundreds and thousands of other so-called “miracles,” that the science, art, and philosophy of Chiropractic was born.

What Dr. Palmer had discovered, and his son Dr. B. J. Palmer later developed, is a health profession based on the fact that man can create pressure on the nerves of the body by getting bones of the spine, called vertebrae, out of their normal position.  This pressure on these nerves interferes or cuts off the God-given “Life Force” that is supposed to travel from the brain to all the body parts.  This then interferes with the normal systems of healing that God has placed in our body to keep us well.

Therefore, the reason we are not always as healthy as we should be is we are interfering with one of the most vital systems God gave us!  Even science has now shown that a slight amount of pressure placed on spinal nerves for as little as three minutes can alter the nerve impulses and energy by 60 %.

This revelation in health care can take us from trusting in science to once again having faith in this body and the healing systems that God has given us.  Now, we no longer have to throw our blind faith into medical technology. We can now begin to trust in God! After all, if we can remove interference from the main system in our body that controls and coordinates all other healing systems, then the natural God-given process of health and healing will work as He intended it to.

I don’t doubt that God allowed us to discover the technology of modern medicine to help in crisis or accident situations.  But, I do doubt that we were supposed to abuse this technology by thinking that we know better than God what is right for us.  The epitome of the “technology over God” thinking can be easily seen in the cases where the doctors do everything their technology can to help a sick and dying patient.  Then when it seems helpless the doctor says, “It’s in Gods hands now.”  When wasn’t it in God‘s hands?  Our entire life and health is always in His hands!  It is only when we try to take it into our own hands that we mess up?

It is time we start to practice our faith believing that God gave us everything we need to be healthy!  All too often I will see a person praying for health, but ignoring what God has given them to achieve health.  I believe God answers all prayers.  I also believe that many people don’t know how to understand or interpret the answers God gives us.

There’s an old saying I’ve heard that says, ‘When I’m hungry and I pray to God to give me a chicken, I almost never get one.  But, when I pray to God to give me the strength to catch me a chicken,  I almost always get one!”

This is the same way we should look at our health.  God has given us all the tools we need to be healthy.  All we need to do is to learn how to use these tools properly and we will be healthy.  Science has now finally begun to understand enough to start to show us that God has given us everything we need.

Science now agrees that we need clean air and water.  We need exercise and activity as well as rest. We also need a good mental attitude and a spiritual base in life, which I believe comes through Christ.  And we also need no interference to the nerve system that God has given us, and this comes through chiropractic.

Now I have not placed these in the order of importance, because above all I believe we most need Christ.  But, it is through my belief in God the Father, Christ the Son, and

the Holy Spirit, that my faith and understanding in chiropractic is based and strengthened.

All the science in the world can support what I have written here, but it means nothing if not backed up by my faith in God. 

In closing, there is a short saying we use that spearheads the chiropractic philosophy, and it goes…

“The Power That Made the Body,

Heals the Body!”