Seven Secrets To Postpone Your Funeral, Pt 1

Doug Batchelor: It's remarkable to look back and to see how the Lord has led through time, and it's through progression in providence His will is made clear. Throughout Scripture, step by step, the Lord has led His people from generation to generation. Even here at "Amazing Facts," I clearly see God's guiding all the way from that very first 15-minute broadcast in 1966, from radio to television, to publishing, to global evangelism, it's evident that God has a divine plan in motion.

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Doug: I'd like to begin with a verse in the Bible, in the Book of Deuteronomy, in chapter 34. This is at the end of the writings of Moses. It says that God told Moses, "You've completed your work. You cannot cross over into the promised land," because he had sinned, he would be saved, but he was able to see the promised land from the top of Mount Nebo. And it says, "Moses was one hundred and twenty years old when he died. His eyes were not dim nor his natural vigor diminished."

Now, this is what we want, we want to be 120 years old when we die, huh? We want to have a positive, maximum life, maximum life expectancy. Now, think about this for a minute, the main reasons that people die, I've got seven of the leading causes of death here, heart disease, cancer, accidents, stroke, chronic lower respiratory diseases, Alzheimer's disease, and diabetes. These are some of the leading causes that people die. But how can you avoid those things?

You know, right now there is a health crisis in North America, and virtually all of the health problems that they're having in North America are connected with these things. Cardiovascular disease-related deaths jump from 874,000 in 2019 to 928,741 in 2020. It was the largest single-year increase since 2015, and that's according to the American Heart Association's disease and stroke statistics. Obesity, the prevalence of obesity in the US, in adults, in 2020, was estimated to be 42.4%, and that's obesity and being overweight. According to the CDC, in 2021, more than 7 in 10 US adults aged 20 and older are either overweight or obese. That's staggering when you think about it. Being overweight or obese is linked with higher risk of getting 13 types of cancer, these cancers make up 40% of all cancers diagnosed in the United States each year.

And then, diabetes, World Health Organization, the number of people with diabetes in the US went from 108 million in 1980 to 422 million in 2014. In 2020, 10.5% of the US population had diabetes, that's 34.2 million people. This cost the United States an estimated $400 billion annually. There's a lot of sparks in the news recently because the US voted $2 billion for Ukraine, and it says that we spend $400 billion on diabetes, it's an epidemic.

Now, I'm here to tell you that the health crisis could be ended in one year. That's right, the reason there's a health crisis is not because of the insurance companies, it's not because of the equipment, it's not because of inadequate access to the medical problems, the reason there's a health crisis is there's a lot of unhealthy people, that's why. If you could cut down the number of unhealthy people by 25%, the health crisis would be over, the lines at the pharmacy and the emergency room, and the shortage of treatment and the shortage of medicine, and all these things that have turned the medical industry into a crisis is because there's so many sick people, and so much of the major cause of death and illness is related to lifestyle. We do it to ourselves.

Now, you know, eventually, if you live long enough, you're going to get old and die, you all know that, but the idea is, we want to die like Moses. Moses was 120 years old, and he climbed a mountain, and his natural force was not abated, and his eye had not dimmed. That's what we want, you want to have a life where you're productive and healthy as long as possible. It used to be people worked real hard, they got old and they died, and you know, there'd be a few weeks of illness. But now people spend 25-30 years dying and incapacitated, and the number of handicapped parking spots in the parking lot keeps going up. Isn't that right? I know, I don't mean to be unkind or insensitive, but it's true that a lot of people are killing themselves, and so I'd like to share with you some secrets on how you can postpone your funeral. So, what would these tips be?

First of all, this is in a church, and I want you to know the principles that we're sharing with you are medically sound, but they are Bible principles. Does the Bible teach that God cares about our physical health? He does, the Bible tells us, Matthew 4:23, one of my favorite verses sort of encompasses the ministry of Jesus, "And Jesus went about all of Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing all kinds," how much? "All kinds of sickness and all kinds of disease among the people." Jesus, yes, He taught, He preached, but He healed all kinds of disease and all kinds of sickness.

Does Jesus care about people being well? He wants us to experience health, the reason God gave us life is because He wants us to live. And when God created Adam and Eve, He put him in a garden, He intended for them to live forever. But because of the rebellion of Lucifer, and Adam and Eve bought into that rebellion, sickness and death and disease have come into our world. This is not God's plan, God wants us to live, the devil was the one who brings death and sickness and disease. And if we follow the rules that God gives in His Word, we can have a longer life. 3 John chapter 1, verse 2, "Beloved, I pray that you might prosper in all things and be in health, just as your soul prospers." God cares about soul prosperity, but He cares about physical prosperity, Jesus proved that, He wants us to be healthy.

Some people think that, "Well, you know, you go to the doctor when you want to find out about health, and you go to church when you want to find out about spiritual things." That's not accurate, the church is also a place where we should be learning about health, because the principles are in the Bible, God cares about both. God promised the children of Israel that if they would serve and obey Him, He would remove all sickness from them. Did He keep His promise? When he led them out of Egypt, He said, "If you obey Me, I'll put none of these diseases upon you that I put upon the Egyptians." And in going through the wilderness and eating the diet that God gave, and getting the sunshine and the exercise and the clean water from the rock, the Bible tells us, this is a really amazing thing because there's about 2 million Israelites, when they cross over into the promised land, it says, "He brought them out...and there was none feeble among His tribes." Can you imagine 2 million people, and the clinic there, the tent that's got the first-aid clinic, it's always empty, they're bored with nothing to do, nobody's sick, that many people? It's because they were all following the plan that God had given them.

So, what was the original diet that God had outlined for people? The Bible tells us that in the very beginning God had an ideal diet. You know, I bought a new Mazda a few years ago, and in the glove box of the Mazda is an owner's manual. And in order to find out how to take care of that car, I went and got the owner's manual from my Makita drill, and I used my Makita drill to figure out how to take care of my Mazda. Is that how it works? No, if Mazda made it, I figure they know how to take care of it, they engineered it, they know every detail of that vehicle. Well, God made you, and in His Word, He gives the idea and the plans about how you can have optimum life and health.

What was the original diet that God designed for all humans? You read in Genesis 1, verse 29, and God said, "See, I have given you every herb that yields seed...and every tree whose fruit yield seed; and to you it shall be for food." What supplemental food did He add to their diet? He said, "You will eat the herb of the field." So the original diet was fruits, grains and nuts, this was the ideal diet. And by the way, you could do pretty well on that diet now. But something must have been missing that was in the tree of life, and so God, when He drove them from the garden, He said, "You shall also eat the herb of the field," that would be vegetables.

Now, do you know how to tell the difference between a fruit and a vegetable? Let me give you a little quiz. I haven't started yet, let me give you the quiz. So, squash, fruit or vegetable? It's a fruit, I know they look like vegetables. Eggplant? It's an egg. No, it is, no, it's a fruit. When you think about tomatoes? Fruit. Bananas? Fruit, okay. Potato? A vegetable. Brussels sprouts? Inedible, I just. So, the key is very simple, that if it comes from, if it is the product of the flower, it's the fruit. You know, peanuts technically are not a nut, they're a bean, a lot of people don't know that. So, from now on tell your kids, "Would you like a bean and jelly sandwich?" And see how they respond to that.

So, but God, you know, there's things, any part of the plant other than the product of the blossom is a vegetable, if it's the stalk, like celery, or if it's the leaves, like spinach, or if it's part of the root, like a carrot or potato, that's all vegetables. And the combination of fruits, grains and nuts, and vegetables, is the ideal diet.

Now, I know we're going to talk a little bit about meat in just a moment, give you a personal testimony. I'm a vegan-vegetarian, I try not to be radical, but I do promote that, because when I finally, I was a vegetarian for years, but when I finally went the extra step over into being a vegan-vegetarian, for the first time in my life, I was able to breathe freely without being congested, and I was over 50. I never knew that I didn't know what it was like to breathe, I would never go back now. Once I gave up the dairy products, I just felt so much better.

Now, I'm not, again, this is not a salvation issue, I'm just telling you, the jury is in and you will do better on a vegan diet. Went to the doctor not too long ago, he did my bloodwork and my blood pressure, and doctor didn't know me, new doctor, he said, "Are you a vegan?" I said, "Yes, why do you ask?" And he said, "Well, your blood pressure is like a teenager." He said, "Your stats are very good." And I said, "Yeah, you know, I've been a vegetarian for years, and I adopted veganism about 8 or 10 years ago."

I didn't grow up that way, I grew up eating everything that moved, I mean, we used to go out and eat escargot, snails, frog's legs, turtle steak, I've eaten rattlesnake, of course, all the meats, I had a company for a little while, it was called "Doug Batchelor's Wholesale Prime Beef Steaks." I'd buy sections of beef, I'd butcher them, and I'd sell them, wrap them up. And I learned things in that business, for the short time I did it, that really helped me become a vegetarian, and I have been now for 45 years, more than that. And I play racquetball with some guys, I see some of them out here, and they said, "Doug, you run around like 'Wiley B. Coyote,' you know, "the Road Runner."" They said, "You're jumping and diving for the ball, how do you do that?" And I said, "Well, I shouldn't do it anymore." And then one of the other guys answered, he said, "He lives clean," and so it does make a difference in how you feel.

A vegetarian diet is the ideal. The Bible says, "I've come that they might have life, and have it more abundantly." I don't know if you know that Venus Williams, she came down with an autoimmune disease several years ago, she was told that a vegan diet would help her, she felt so much better her sister Serena adopted the diet, they're both vegans. We were just in Melbourne, or Australia about a month ago, and Djokovic won the Australian Open, he is a vegan. Mike Tyson, not that he's our role model, he just adopted veganism. And I could just go down the list of people who are discovering how much better either being a vegetarian or being a vegan is, going to the diet God designed for humans.

Are the laws about clean and unclean animals part of Moses's ceremonial law, that's only for Jews? Now, if you're going to eat meat, the Bible is pretty clear, you should eat the meats that are classified as the clean meats, and I'll tell you very quickly that there's three rules that you use to know, if it's a meat, how do you know what's clean and what's unclean. For the animals, if it had a cloven hoof and it chewed the cud, it needed both criteria, it was considered clean, like a cow or a sheep or a deer, they got the cloven hoof and they chew the cud. You know what I mean, you see them sit down when they're resting, they're under the tree with their eyes closed and they're, they got several stomachs to process this grain. And when they get bored, they bring something up from earlier, and they chew it a little more and swallow it again. And I don't recommend you try that. But so they chew the cud and they got a cloven hoof, that's if they have both those things, they're clean.

Now, there are animals that chew the cud like a camel, but it doesn't have a cloven hoof, and they're unclean. That's why Jesus mocked the hypocrisy of the scribes and Pharisees, He said, "You strain your water to get the gnats out, but then you eat camel." And that's become a famous proverb, "Straining the gnat and swallowing a camel." The other animal that has a cloven hoof, but it doesn't chew the cud is a pig, but I'll get to him later.

For the fish, it needed two criteria, it needed to have fins and scales, in the ocean and in the sea, it needed both those things, fins and scales, not just fins, not just scales, needed both criteria for it to be clean. That would mean that sharks are unclean, catfish, that they live around the sewer, they do not have scales, they are unclean. And there are some fish that have scales and no fins, they're unclean.

And the shellfish, crabs, lobsters, I heard somebody say backstage yesterday, they said, Lobsters, "they're like underwater cockroaches." It is, it's sort of like a combination between a scorpion and a cockroach that they eat carrion underwater, they're scavengers. And so, the shellfish, they are on the bottom, they are basically the garbage cans, you don't eat them.

And then when it came to birds, it's a little more ambiguous, but the birds that are clean are what you would call the foraging birds. These are the birds that go around, they peck like the dove and the quail and the turkey and the chicken, and those were clean. The other birds were considered unclean, you're not supposed to eat buzzard, you're not supposed to eat hawks, and the raptors, and these birds.

So, but if you're going to eat the meat, you need to eat the clean ones. And some are going to say, "Pastor Doug, that's just a law for Jews, that's a ceremonial law." Let's find out if the Bible supports that. What did God say to Noah? Genesis 7:1-2, "Come into the ark, you and all of your household... You will take with you seven each of every clean animal, a male and his female." And so you notice he says the clean animals didn't go two by two, they went how? By sevens. And right after the flood, Noah offered sacrifice, what did he offer? Only offer a clean animal to God. If you wanted to offend the God of the Bible, you would offer a pig or an unclean animal, that's what the Greek king Antiochus Epiphanies did to outrage the Jews.

Read on in Genesis 7, verse 2: "Two of each of the animals that are unclean." Now, what does he mean, clean and unclean, does that mean some of these animals bathe more than the others? It's about unclean for food. And so, if you're going to eat meat, you want to stick to the clean meats, and I think everyone knows the jury is in, don't eat a lot of meat because animal products do carry disease, you can't catch a cold from a plant. Do you know that an animal at the zoo can catch a cold from you and you can get sick from animals? The recent virus that just went around the world, almost everyone agrees it originated with an animal and transferred from animal to human.

Now, look what happened after the flood, all the vegetation is destroyed and eating animals became more common. And you could look at the lifespan, like Seth, 912 years, Methuselah, we all know, he lived 969, Noah lived 950 years, and look at how the ages of man just drops precipitously after the flood when meat eating became more common.

Furthermore, in the Bible it says if you're going to eat meat, there was a certain way it should be eaten, it should be butchered in a kosher way, so there's no fat and no blood, Leviticus 3:17. By the way, this is not just Old Testament, you read it in Acts chapter 15 as well, says, "You shall not eat things that are strangled or with blood." "This shall be a perpetual statue throughout your generations," perpetual, "You shall eat neither fat nor blood." Diseases and stuff can be stored in the fat, and disease can be transferred by blood.

An interesting study someone did regarding the Maasai people that live in Africa, they take care of cattle and they get a lot of exercise, a lot of fresh air, a lot of sunshine, but they do eat fat, a lot of meat, and they actually drink blood, and they have extensive heart disease. Even though they're extremely active, the average Maasai man, life expectancy of 42 years, the women, 45 years. So tragic. So, these things do make a difference, God knows what he's talking about.

All right, point number two, we're moving right along, what's another key to postpone your funeral? Routine exercise, be in a good regular exercise program. Kaiser Permanente did a study that shows that exercise is associated with lower rates of hospitalization and death after infection regardless of your race or chronic conditions. That's December 15, 2020, a recent study. Exercise will help postpone heart disease, it strengthens your bones, it helps prevent a number of different kinds of cancers, of course, it prevents the breaking of bones.

And it's a good idea to exercise where you get your heart going, it basically, you know, at the end of summer, in the city, a lot of dust builds up on the road and you get debris. And you say that, "Every now and then you need," what they call, "A gully washer," a storm comes through, it rains real hard, it cleans the streets, it cleans the airs, and it cleans out the gutters. Your body needs a daily gully washer, and what happens is, you run around, you get your heart pumping, and it flushes any of the debris and the toxins and stuff that might be stored there, it helps flush all that out.

And then God's design where you got kidneys and the liver and pancreas and these filters in your body that then clean things out, but what gets the process going is you got to get your heart going, you've got to get your blood pumping, you got to get your lungs breathing, increase your lung capacity. I think we all know, having just come through the pandemic, is that people who regularly exercise, that had good lung capacity, much-much higher rate of survival, routine exercise.

Was activity part of God's original plan for humanity? What does the Bible say? "In the beginning, God made man," even before sin, God didn't make you to be a couch potato. "The Lord took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to tend and to keep it." We are made for activity. If we're not active, we suffer.

For years, Karen and I had a little airplane, and we had a cabin up in the hills, we'd fly the airplane up to the hangar in Round Valley where we kept a pickup truck, and the pickup truck would normally run fine, but sometimes we'd only get up there, you know, four or five times a year, and had all kinds of problems with that truck that were related to it's sitting. We'd get there and there'd be a mouse in the truck, and then you get in the ventilation system, and then the bearings, because they sit, they start rusting on one side, the tires actually get flat on one side when they don't roll. You get water through--what do you call it? Condensation, water develops in the gas tank, and then you have problems and all these things happen. And you know what? Those machines were made to run, and if you just park it and try to start it a year later, the battery is dead, you have all kinds of problems. God made your body for activity, and if you're just sitting all the time, you're going to end up having problems with your radiator and your oil system and all kinds of things. So you got to stay active, God wants us to exercise.

Even after sin, did God want man to exercise? Yeah. Genesis 3:19, God said, "In the sweat of your face you will eat bread till you return to the ground." Not only do you need to exercise, I'm just throwing it in for free, if you're going to exercise, try and get some of it outdoors, I go to a gym and I work out, but it's really nice if you can get outside. "To those of you who fear My name shall The Sun of Righteousness arise with healing in His wings." God wants us to get fresh air and sunshine, there's something about being outdoors. God made Adam and Eve, and He put them in a garden, He did not put them in a condominium, He put them outdoors where they could get the fresh air and the sunshine. And the Bible says, "If you walk in the light as He is in the light...the blood of His Son Jesus Christ cleanses us from all sin." "In the beginning, God said, 'Let there be light.'" There's something healing about light.

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