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  • A Cure for All Diseases—It Can Be Found!
  • The Watchtower Announcing Jehovah’s Kingdom—1985
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  • A Healthy Start
  • What Is Disease?
  • The Search for Health
  • The Cure Is at Hand!
  • Perfect Health for All
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  • Is Perfect Health in a Perfect Environment Possible?
    The Watchtower Announcing Jehovah’s Kingdom—1973
  • Health for All—A Basic Need
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  • Maintain Your Faith and Spiritual Health
    The Watchtower Announcing Jehovah’s Kingdom—1989
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The Watchtower Announcing Jehovah’s Kingdom—1985
w85 4/15 pp. 4-7

A Cure for All Diseases​—It Can Be Found!

THROUGHOUT the ages, there has been no lack of effort at trying to find a cure for all diseases. Yearly, billions of dollars are spent on health services. Some of the world’s greatest talents, using the most advanced technologies, are engaged in medical research. Yet people around the earth still suffer from sickness, and devastating diseases continue with us. Our situation has not changed much since Moses’ day. Over 3,000 years ago he wrote: “In themselves the days of our years are seventy years; and if because of special mightiness they are eighty years, yet their insistence is on trouble and hurtful things.”​—Psalm 90:10.

A Healthy Start

Yet mankind had a perfect start. Adam and Eve lived in a clean, disease-free environment, the beautiful garden of Eden. They were supplied with plenty of healthful, wholesome food. They had stimulating, rewarding work to do. And they were sound in body and mind.​—See Genesis 1:26-30.

God also told them how to maintain their perfect state. First he told them what they should do: “Be fruitful and become many and fill the earth and subdue it.” Then he told them what they should not do: “As for the tree of the knowledge of good and bad you must not eat from it, for in the day you eat from it you will positively die.” (Genesis 1:28; 2:17) If they, and eventually their offspring, would obey these two basic directives, they would be able to maintain their healthy, happy, and perfect state forever.

Many people today feel that the account of Adam and Eve is unscientific, merely a myth. But rather than dismissing these matters lightly, let us take a closer look.

In terms that we are familiar with today, the first command told them that they must take care of their environment. The second told them that they must keep their life-style within certain bounds set by God. Is this unscientific myth or does it underline a basis for healthful living? Note what the book Health and Disease by René Dubos and Maya Pines says on the matter: “One of the least appreciated influences on disease is environment. Where a man lives and how he lives may have a greater effect on his health​—often in unsuspected ways—​than the microbes he encounters or the genes he inherits.”

What Is Disease?

In this context, disease is very much related to how we live and how we deal with our environment. Today we feel that our civilized way of life has done much to improve the general condition of health. But note what Dubos and Pines say: “The Australian aborigines, living in relative isolation in a Stone Age culture, are remarkably free of disease. In fact, it is only in the most advanced societies that civilized man, through the science of modern medicine, begins to approximate the good health the world’s least civilized people enjoy as a birthright.”

Another of these “least civilized people” cited by the authors are the Mabaans of the Sudan. “The Mabaans enjoy longevity that would be remarkable in the most medically pampered society. Furthermore, their declining years are almost free of the usual degenerative diseases of old age. Scientists are still puzzled by the Mabaans’ extraordinary health, but their stable, tranquil environment is almost certainly an important factor.” To emphasize the influence of environment, the authors added: “When a Mabaan moves from home to the city of Khartoum, 650 miles [1,050 km] away, he is beset by a host of ills he has never known before.”

In contrast, our “civilized” way of life has brought pollution of air and water, deforestation, overpopulation, and malnutrition for large segments of the population. Man’s careless treatment of the environment has not only posed serious hazards to his health but also threatened the prospect of his continued existence on earth.​—See Revelation 11:18.

It is not surprising, therefore, that disease has sometimes been defined as “a by-product of a civilized way of life.” We consider ourselves civilized because we no longer live in the wild. Rather, we may live in cities in close contact with, if not literally on top of, one another. In fact, the word “civilized” comes from a Latin root meaning citizen or city dweller. But from where did the idea of city dwelling come?

The first record of it is given at Genesis 11:4: “They now said: ‘Come on! Let us build ourselves a city and also a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a celebrated name for ourselves, for fear we may be scattered over all the surface of the earth.’” That proposal during the days of Nimrod was in contradiction to God’s purpose stated to Adam, namely, for humans to “fill the earth and subdue it.” To do so, they were to spread out as their numbers increased. For refusing to do this, as well as for other reasons, Nimrod came to be known as being “in opposition to Jehovah.” (Genesis 10:9) That defiant course, added to the rebellion in the garden of Eden, accelerated mankind down the road of decadence, disease, and death.

Even today, most of the diseases plaguing those in the affluent nations are the result of their life-style.

The Search for Health

Authorities have come to realize that mankind’s health problems are not solved simply by having more medicine, more doctors, or more hospitals, even though these undoubtedly would provide short-term improvement. Rather, radical changes in the way people live and the way people deal with the environment are called for. For example, Dr. Halfdan Mahler, director-general of WHO (World Health Organization), in an essay on World Health Day, April 7, 1983, wrote:

“What can people do about their health? To give a few examples, they can take individual and community action to ensure that they have sufficient food of the right kind. They can get together to make the most of whatever safe water is available, or can be made available, making sure that it is protected from pollution. They can insist on acceptable standards of hygiene in and around their homes, in market places and shops, in schools, in factories, in canteens and restaurants. They can learn how to space the children they desire in such a way as to give each and everyone of them a good chance of survival, a reasonable education, and a decent quality of life.”

Clearly, these are steps toward good health. But the obvious questions are: How are the poor people in the underdeveloped countries to get sufficient food, safe water, and acceptable hygiene? Where will they get the finances and the skills needed to provide these essential things?

Interestingly, an article in World Health, the official magazine of WHO, declares: “Imagine an ideal world in which all the ingenuity, expense and human and material resources which are at present poured into military weaponry were instead devoted to improving the health of the world!” What would that do? Well, that article estimated that the arms race costs the world about $600 thousand million a year, or one million dollars a minute, to maintain. Yet “the 14-year campaign to wipe out the killer disease of smallpox between 1967 and 1980 cost the world just $300 million.” Thus it concludes: “Clearly, if even a part of the resources at present allocated to military expenditure could be shifted instead to prevention, cure and research in the field of health, the world would be given a prodigious boost towards the goal of Health for all by the year 2000.”

What about people in the developed countries? They may be better off in some respects, but, according to Dr. Mahler, they, too, “must rise to their health responsibilities, eating wisely, drinking moderately, smoking not at all, driving carefully, taking enough exercise, learning to live under the stress of city life, and helping one another to do so.”

Thus we must ask: Will the nations be willing to change their policies and give the pursuit of health high priority? Will they be willing to put aside their political differences and pool their resources and efforts toward conquering disease? And will the people change their life-style to one that is more healthful? Realistically, you will have to admit that this is very unlikely. A cure of all diseases will never be realized if we have to look to the nations for it.

The Cure Is at Hand!

To whom, then, shall we look? Well, recall the vision that the aged apostle John saw. He described it this way:

“He showed me a river of water of life, clear as crystal, flowing out from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of its broad way. And on this side of the river and on that side there were trees of life producing twelve crops of fruit, yielding their fruits each month. And the leaves of the trees were for the curing of the nations.”​—Revelation 22:1, 2.

The symbolic “river of water of life” is seen flowing out from “the throne of God and of the Lamb.” Clearly, then, it is to Jehovah God and the Messianic Kingdom of his Son that we must look for “the curing of the nations.” Is that not logical? God is the Creator of the human body and of the entire earth. He​—more than any doctor or scientist—​knows how matters can best be handled so that diseases can be overcome. Under God’s Kingdom rulership, mankind will be freed from the disease-causing and death-dealing contamination plaguing us now. Sustained and nourished by the pure, crystal-clear “water of life” and the fruits and leaves of the “trees of life”​—Jehovah’s entire provision for gaining everlasting life—​mankind will be cured permanently of all its diseases, spiritual and physical.a Humans will be brought back to the happy, healthy, perfect state enjoyed by their ancestors, Adam and Eve, at the beginning.

The time for God’s Kingdom to take action “to bring to ruin those ruining the earth” is at hand. (Revelation 11:18) Then many features of Bible prophecy will become a reality in a restored paradise. (Isaiah 33:24; 35:5, 6) This is good news for all those who desire good health God’s way. Soon the “new earth” that John saw will be here, in which “death will be no more, neither will mourning nor outcry nor pain be anymore.”​—Revelation 21:1, 4.

Will you be among those who survive the end of this polluted and decaying system of things into that clean “new earth”? By making wise use of the time still available for learning more about God’s Kingdom and doing what he requires, you will live to see the day when a cure of all diseases will be realized.

[Footnotes]

a For a detailed explanation of these verses Re 22:1, 2, please see “Babylon the Great Has Fallen!” God’s Kingdom Rules!, published by the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, Inc.

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