Up until the middle of the nineteenth century, bad air was thought to be a main cause of sickness and infectious disease. With the formulation of the germ theory of disease, bacteria was found to be the chief culprit causing many of our illnesses. During the last 75 years, our modern men of medicine have been telling us that mental stress and emotions are a major cause of disease ranging anywhere from ulcers to fatal heart attacks.
Psychosomatic illness is not just a “buzz word.” It is a hard reality. Many doctors estimate from 50% to 80% of all of our sickness and disease today find their cause in our faulty way of thinking. The intense stress and emotional turmoil we place ourselves under by our modern fast-paced lifestyle are literally deteriorating every organ in our bodies.
How this happens can be seen if we understand that the emotional center of the brain is constantly transmitting impulses through nerve fibers to every organ and area of the body. It is now well known and medically proven that emotional stress can produce almost any illness imaginable. 100 years ago, medicine understood very little about how the mind could affect our health. Today it is a fact that stress is our number-one killer.
In the Book of Proverbs, God has so overwhelmingly shown us how the mind affects our health that it is amazing it took medical science over 2,000 years to acknowledge what the Bible has stated all along.
May the five verses below, from the Book of Proverbs, serve to demonstrate that the God of our Bible is indeed the “Great Physician,” and that His knowledge of our emotions is right in stride with our most up-to-date findings in the field:
“A joyful heart is good medicine, But a broken spirit dries up the bones.” (Proverbs 17:22 NASB).
“Pleasant words are a honeycomb, Sweet to the soul and healing to the bones.” (Proverbs 16:24 NASB).
“Anxiety in a man’s heart weighs it down, But a good word makes it glad.” (Proverbs 12:25 NASB).
“A soothing tongue is a tree of life, But perversion in it crushes the spirit.” (Proverbs 15:4 NASB).
“A tranquil heart is life to the body, But passion is rottenness to the bones.” (Proverbs 14:30 NASB).
One Hundred years ago medical science knew very little about how our emotions could influence our well-being, but 3,000 years ago a man named Solomon knew all about it. Once again the Bible is at the forefront of medical science. I like how the influential German poet of the eighteenth century, Heinrich Heine, called the Bible, “The great medicine chest of humanity.”1
1 Webster’s New World Dictionary of Quotable Definitions, edited by Eugene E. Brussell, (New York: Webster’s New World, 1988), p. 48.