Shalom or Dis-Ease

"Beloved, I pray that in all respects you may prosper and be in good health, just as your soul prospers." ~3 John 2

"John greets his friend Gaius with a common Jewish blessing: May you be prosperous and healthy (in a wholistic sense, inwardly, bodily, socially, materially). It implies an interrelated understanding of human nature based on the Hebraic worldview of Shalom: Yahweh's wholistic peace and prosperity, health and harmony, experienced through right relationships. Beginning with Adam and Eve, we see throughout the biblical witness how fractured relationship with God, the source relationship, ourselves, each other and creation itself, leads to "the curse" -- the chaos of sin, sickness, demons and death. We also see how restored relationship (reconciliation) through Messiah's life, death and resurrection breaks the curse and leads to forgiveness, healing, freedom and eternal life. Shalom is God's reign of wholistic order and wellbeing, the opposite of disintegrating chaos and destruction, the rule of evil.

"Simply stated, a biblical understanding of disease is dis-ease--a lack of ease in the whole person. Sicknesses are disorders, the opposite of Shalom, a disruption of God's wholistic harmony and relational wellbeing in the human being. . .

". . . Healing is the event and/or process of restoring wholeness to the whole person. Healing is God's Shalom--experiencing and ministering God's wholeness, order and wellbeing. The New Testament word for this Shalom healing is 'salvation', God's work in saving us and creation from sin, sickness, demons and death . . ."      ~excerpt from Doing Healing by Alexander Ventor

This blog is often devoted to nutritional health and healing. I believe God has provided for our health and healing in nature, his creation. However, complete health and wholeness can only come when it comes in every part of the person: body, soul, mind, spirit and relationships being set in right order. That is God's Shalom, to which Ventor refers above, and which only comes through right relationship with Jesus Christ.

So my greeting today is that of John and the early church: 

May you prosper and be in good health, even as your soul prospers.