Disease

A disease is a disorder of the body or mind that impairs its normal functions and causes suffering. The English word comes from Old French desaise, “lack of ease.” Hebrew uses machalah and choli, both meaning sickness, the second from a root meaning to be weak, while the Greek New Testament pairs nosos, “disease,” with malakia, literally “softness,” the weakness that illness leaves behind.

Scripture sometimes links disease to sin, and a common reading treats it as punishment. Israel was promised that God would “put none of these diseases upon thee, which I have brought upon the Egyptians,” if the people obeyed (Exodus 15:26), and Jesus’ disciples asked of a man born blind, “who did sin, this man, or his parents?” Jesus refused the inference: “Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him” (John 9:2-3). The verse in Exodus ends by naming the Lord as the one “that healeth thee,” a promise made manifest in the healing of the blind man.

All Manner of Sickness

Jesus went about Galilee "teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing all manner of sickness and all manner of disease among the people" (Matthew 4:23). It has long been recognized that this summary, repeated almost word for word five chapters later, frames the Sermon on the Mount and the miracles, presenting Jesus first as teacher and then as healer. Matthew reads Isaiah's suffering servant as foretelling these healings: "Himself took our infirmities, and bare our sicknesses" (Matthew 8:17). Isaiah's word, rendered "griefs" in the King James Version, is choli. Going further, Matthew repeats the phrase a third time when Jesus gives the Twelve power over every sickness and disease. Their title, apostolos, means "one sent," and the one sent from the Father sends them in turn.

Herbs and Mild Food

Restoration scripture integrates faith with practical care for the sick, situating modern medicine among God’s appointed means of healing.

An 1831 revelation directs that "whosoever among you are sick, and have not faith to be healed, but believe, shall be nourished with all tenderness, with herbs and mild food, and that not by the hand of an enemy" (D&C 42:43). Herbs and diet, the medicine of the day, are provided for those whose healing does not come by faith. The pattern recalls Marah, where older commentators observed that God harnessed the natural properties of the tree, as far as nature could go, before supplementing them with his own power.

Freely Give

Jesus attached a condition to the power to heal, and that condition makes the distribution of cures part of the work.

When he sent the Twelve out, Jesus told them, “Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils: freely ye have received, freely give” (Matthew 10:8). King Benjamin asked his people to share their substance with the poor, “visiting the sick and administering to their relief, both spiritually and temporally, according to their wants” (Mosiah 4:26). Mormon transhumanists read these passages as a call to become saviors who heal one another, and they count science and technology among the means God has ordained for that work. Smallpox, which killed as many as 300 million people in the twentieth century, was declared eradicated in 1980 after a global campaign that tracked the virus to its last natural case, a hospital cook in Somalia, in 1977. In contrast, the first therapy to use the gene-editing tool CRISPR, approved in 2023, can free patients from the crises of sickle cell disease, but it costs more than two million dollars, requires specialized hospitals, and reached fewer than a hundred patients in 2025. More than three-quarters of the children born with sickle cell disease are born in sub-Saharan Africa, where the therapy is not yet offered.

The Divine Mandate to Heal

One mRNA vaccine against COVID-19 was designed two days after the virus’s genetic sequence was shared and authorized for use within the year. Antibiotics carry a different danger. In his Nobel lecture of 1945, the discoverer of penicillin warned that a careless user might underdose “and by exposing his microbes to non-lethal quantities of the drug make them resistant.” Drug-resistant bacteria now directly cause more than a million deaths a year, and one forecast projects 39 million such deaths between 2025 and 2050. Each careless use of an antibiotic weakens it for everyone, so these drugs are a shared inheritance that calls for the prudence the Word of Wisdom asks in the use of herbs.

Ultimately, Restoration theology frames the struggle against disease not as a passive wait for divine intervention, but as an active, sacred partnership. From herbs and ancient remedies to mRNA vaccines and gene-editing therapies, God works through natural laws and human agency to relieve suffering. Yet technical mastery is only half the mandate. If we are to fulfill the command to “freely give,” the fruits of modern biotechnology cannot remain the privilege of a wealthy few, nor can their power be squandered through imprudence. To manifest the works of God in our time is to wield our expanding medical capacities with wisdom and love, ensuring that the work of healing reaches every corner of the human family.

See also: Affliction, Healing, Health, Senescence, Sickness