spiritual

According to research, there are 33 species of aromatic plants given in the Bible from which essential oils were produced. Depending on the way you count them, there are as many as 1,035 references to essential oils and/or the plants that produced them in the Old and New Testaments.

and God said, "Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit..." and it was so. God's intent for us to use plants for our medicines (see Ezekiel 47:12 and Revelation 22:2) is more than just their oil. God's intent is for us to take responsibility for our own health care and use the intelligence He gave us, guided by Him through prayer. This is the way we can personally discover the medicines He created for us and how to use them. This is how we can alter our lifestyles to live free of disease, which is God's desire for us.

Healing is a holistic spiritual term, not a medical one. God, being the first aroma therapist, filled the earth with life sustaining plants, inspiring us to realize the infinite care and detail to which our Creator has gone to provide for us the medicines we need to heal and maintain our health, spiritual purification, moral repentance, and healing. Among these divine gifts are the oils of plants. God made them and gave us the intelligence to discover and learn how to use them. They are called 'essential' because they are necessary for the life of the plant and contain the 'essence' of the plant, and are a gift from God to us, His children.

Aromas come from essential oils, broadcast by plants as their means of communication between themselves, the animal kingdom, and people. Scientifically, we now know that these natural aromas are more than just pleasant. They are emotionally, spiritually, mentally, and physically healing. Just by breathing them, even in minute quantities, even when the fragrances of the flowers and trees are too faint to be detected by our sense of smell, the molecules of oils are still in the air, administering therapy to us. God gave us the natural herbs and essential oils to be our medicines, for inhalation, topical application, and ingestion for healing and wellness.

In Biblical times, a great assortment of essential oils were used for healing, medicines, ointments, anointing, sweet savors, odors, spices, incense, perfumes, oils of joy and gladness, given as gifts, embalming, and offered as sacrifices. The people of the time knew what each oil was for and how to use them, which isn't always depicted in the Bible. It would be like writing a story about modern Christianity today and including the uses of aspirin, which are common place and wouldn't need to be explained. The same holds true with the oils of the Bible, they were so much a part of the lives of everyone that no explanations were necessary.

Essential oils perform many duties in plant functions. They regulate plant growth, help in plant metabolism, and provide the basis for the plant's immune system, warding off undesirable viruses, bacteria, microbes, fungi, parasites, and insects. When a plant is cut, it bleeds the oleo gum resin into the wound which initiates healing. Because God created the plants for us, their oils can serve many of the same purposes for us. They support and balance our endocrine, circulatory, digestive, nervous, and reproductive systems. They clear our sinuses and lungs to help us breathe better. They help us metabolize our nutrients, minerals, and vitamins. They also boost the natural defenses of our immune systems so we can fight off disease by our own abilities. And while they are friendly to us, they can be hostile to bacteria, viruses, parasites, and fungi. As if the foregoing were not enough to demonstrate the amazing abundance of healing properties of essential oils, they are also the world's most powerful antioxidants that gobble up free radicals in our bodies.

While eating foods high in antioxidants is a desirable and very healthy thing to do, learning to use essential oils in your daily life can potentially be even more desirable and health producing. God's intelligence in oils and the beauty of oils as medicines is that they don't have negative side effects like the synthetic drugs and chemicals of modern pharmacology. For example, the tinctures of iodine, merthiolate, mercurochrome, and other antiseptics may be effective in killing organisms that could invade an open lesion, but they are toxic, destructive to human tissue, and retard healing. Essential oils are not only just as effective in their antiseptic powers, they are non-toxic, harmless to human tissue, and promote healing. Because they are direct creations of God's word (see Genesis 1:11-12), when properly applied in a prayerful way they possess the divine intelligence to know how to do what is beneficial and to avoid doing that which may bring harm.