All Is Not What It Seems Series

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In the late 1800s, doctors and scientists believed in something called spontaneous generation. Spontaneous generation . . . the idea behind spontaneous generation was that living organisms could suddenly pop up anywhere from non-living organisms, and this pretty much explained, in the late 1800s, disease. That from out of nowhere, disease could just occur and doctors didn’t assume it was related to anything. Suddenly, a disease could pop up on skin or pop up in a person’s body. In many cases, diseases would sweep through families and communities and parts of cities and kill thousands and thousands of people.

The assumption was that these diseases just popped up and that it was random, it was providential, and in some cases, it was God’s will. And there was no investigation to determine how these diseases were related or how diseases were transmitted, because it was assumed, because of spontaneous generation, that a non-living organism could just suddenly produce some sort of living organism that would turn into a disease.

Then Louis Pasteur came along and he said no, that’s not the case at all, that there are invisible organisms that you cannot see that actually carry these diseases, and they can be carried by the wind. They can be passed on by touching someone’s skin. They can live in food. They can live on different surfaces. And that these diseases are not just cropping up randomly from non-living organisms, but there are invisible organisms, there’s an invisible world that’s impacting the visible world, and this invisible world of germs, as they would eventually be called, these microorganisms, as we would later call them, these invisible microorganisms are everywhere and you can’t see them.

And this unseen world is impacting the seen world and has the potential to destroy lives, families, communities, and create all kinds of pestilence that goes all over the world and kills hundreds and thousands of people, all because of something you just can’t see. And so he put forth what became known as The Germ Theory of Disease, The Germ Theory of Disease, the idea that invisible microorganisms [he didn’t call them that], invisible microorganisms could impact the seen world.

Well, this caught on pretty quick among this little close-knit group of the medical community he was a part of, and they began washing their hands. They began separating people from each other. They began quarantining. They began watching to see if there was a transmission from one person to another of a common disease. But many people in the medical and scientific community, and people outside the medical and scientific community, thought it was crazy. "You’re telling us that there’s something we can’t see that impacts what we can see? You’re telling us that something that’s invisible can float through the air, land on food, and infect food? That something you can’t see can float through the air and land on a person’s skin and impact . . . you’re telling me there’s something that I can’t see that could be on my skin that gets transmitted to somebody else’s skin? That there’s an invisible world, that we’re surrounded by all these invisible, living organisms that impact our visible world?" To which Louis Pasteur said, "Absolutely."

Well, nowadays, that’s not a theory. That’s an assumption, right? In fact, we all believe in germs. Everybody in this room, everybody listening to this message, we believe there’s an invisible world that impacts our visible world. That’s why all of us have a lot of this in our homes, right [hold up disinfectant wipes or spray]? We’re addicted to this. We’re addicted to this because, not only do we believe in germs, not only do we believe there’s something that we can’t see that impacts what we can see, we believe that it’s dangerous. We believe that it could be life threatening. We know now because of medical discoveries and because of what’s happened since the late 1800s that these invisible microorganisms can wipe out entire populations, and you never see it coming because there’s an invisible world of germs.

This past year, I took my family to another country and we were so committed to this. We had little bottles of hand sanitizer hanging off our children’s belts, and we wanted it so readily available that we could just kind of look at them and wink and they’d get a little squirt and keep their hands clean, because we believe in the invisible world of germs. And we know this . . . the invisible world of germs doesn’t stay invisible, because once it’s mixed at the right time with the right things on the right skin and the right environment, what’s invisible becomes very visible. And it can become dangerous. It can be dangerous. It can, in fact, be life threatening. Now, we all know that. None of us dispute that.