The Single Remedy

For over two hundred years, the Royal Navy watched its sailors die of scurvy. Captains tried everything — sulfuric acid elixirs, vinegar rinses, seawater purges, mustard plasters. Ship after ship carried barrels of supposed cures. And voyage after voyage, men kept dying. The repeated treatments offered temporary hope but never addressed the root deficiency.

In May 1747, aboard the HMS Salisbury, Scottish physician James Lind tried something different. He selected twelve sailors ravaged by scurvy and divided them into pairs, giving each pair a different remedy. Two received oranges and lemons. Within six days, those two men were back on their feet, while the others continued to deteriorate.

One simple provision accomplished what two centuries of repeated remedies never could.

The writer of Hebrews understood this kind of futility. Year after year, the priests offered the same sacrifices — bulls and goats on an endless rotation — yet those offerings could never finally remove sin. They were reminders of the problem, not the solution. But when Christ came, He said, "A body You have prepared for Me... I have come to do Your will, O God." His single, willing offering of Himself did what the entire sacrificial system, repeated across generations, was powerless to achieve.