Many people familiar with essential oils know that they were used to anoint both the Tent of Meeting in the Old Testament Scriptures (1) and Jesus Christ (2). But few people are aware of the implications of those events for the role of essential oils in healing today.
Historically, the Christian Church is known as the Body of Christ (3), and the Christians within His Body as His physical members (4). The Tent of Meeting in the Old Testament Scriptures served as a type, pattern, or shadow of the true Church to come (5).
So when God gave instructions to anoint the Tent of Meeting with essential oil, He was actually giving instructions to anoint the Body of Christ. When Mary anointed Jesus years later, she physically anointed the real thing, what the Old Testament priests could only symbolically anoint… The forerunner of the Body of Christ.
Under Old Testament law, no layman could touch the oil used to anoint the Tent of Meeting, because it was sacred. Yet here is Mary, a laywoman, anointing Jesus with an entire pot of precious oil and wiping her oil-soaked feet with her hair. She was her way of honoring him or blessing him for raising her dead brother from the grave, but God saw her act differently (6).
What Mary did, she did by herself, but God took advantage of the occasion to unite (bless) the flesh of man with the flesh of his own Son: Something that had not happened before. The anointing of Jesus by Mary unites all humanity to the ultimate sacrifice that Jesus Christ paid for our physical and spiritual healing (7).
God provided for healing oils to be used in the Tent of Meeting because He ordained them (8) to be the natural counterpoint to Christ’s healing ministry (9). Israel (Jacob) called them some of the “finest produce of the land” (10). When Jesus Christ, centuries later, accepted Mary’s healing anointing
oil, He confirmed the sacred and healing role that essential oils have for us today.
Whether people accept or reject the above accounts and their meaning is not important for this report. What is important is that people who use essential oils understand why they were recognized in the Holy Scriptures and set apart for use in the Disciples’ ministry of healing the sick (11). God has blessed essential oils and their use for healing because they symbolically and physically unite the corruptible, mortal human flesh with the eternal, divine, incorruptible flesh in Jesus Christ. They serve as a reminder that it is God who is our Healer (12).
Remember this knowledge and share it the next time you anoint a loved one with oils. People need to hear this story for edification and understand why essential oils are blessed by God for healing.
References:
1. Exodus 30:22-ff
2. John 12:1-8
3. Ephesians 5:29-30
4. Corinthians 6:15
5. Hebrews 10:1
6. John 12:7
7. Isaiah 53:4-5
8. Exodus 30:25
9. Acts 10:38
10. Genesis 43:11
11. Mark 6:13; James 5:14
12. Exodus 15:26