The Body's Smallest Martyrs

In 1882, Russian biologist Élie Metchnikoff made a discovery that would earn him the Nobel Prize. Studying starfish larvae under his microscope, he watched as certain cells rushed toward a foreign invader and engulfed it, destroying themselves in the process. He called them phagocytes, from the Greek for "devouring cells."

Every day inside your body, billions of white blood cells called neutrophils perform this same act of sacrifice. When bacteria breach your skin through a cut, neutrophils race to the wound site. They surround the invader, swallow it whole, and release powerful enzymes that destroy the bacteria and the neutrophil along with it. The pus you see forming around an infected wound is largely a battlefield of dead neutrophils, cells that gave their lives so the body could live.

They never survive the encounter. That is their design.

The apostle Paul wrote that we are the body of Christ. And at the heart of that body, at the heart of all creation, stands a Savior whose design was sacrifice. Jesus did not come to observe our infection from a distance. He rushed toward it. He absorbed it. He let it destroy Him so that we might be healed.

"By His wounds," Isaiah tells us, "we are healed."

The next time you see a small wound closing, remember: something had to die so that healing could begin. That is the gospel written into your very flesh.