☠️ They Shall Drink Poison and Not Be Harmed

“And these signs will accompany those who believe: in my name they will drive out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all; they will place their hands on sick people, and they will get well.”

Mark 16:17–18 (NIV)

I used to read that passage and quietly skip over the poison bit. Drive out demons—yes, that’s dramatic and significant. Speak in new tongues—yes, Pentecost, the mission field, the gifts of the Spirit. Pick up snakes—yes, a dramatic sign of divine protection in hostile territory. Place hands on the sick—yes, healing prayer, something we actively pursue.

But drink deadly poison and not be harmed? It always felt like the odd one out. A curiosity. A sign for missionaries in remote jungles who might accidentally drink contaminated water. Relevant to a vanishingly small number of believers, in a vanishingly small number of situations.

I don’t think that anymore.

The Poisoned World

The Make America Healthy Again movement—championed most visibly by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—has brought into mainstream conversation something that toxicologists, holistic health practitioners, and a handful of lonely voices in the wilderness have been saying for decades: we are being slowly poisoned by the modern industrial food system.

This is not a fringe conspiracy theory. The data is in. The regulatory capture is documented. The conflicts of interest between Big Pharma, Big Agriculture, and Big Food are not hidden—they’re just ignored, because the industries involved are too profitable and too powerful to challenge.

Toxicologist Yvonne Burkart, among others, has mapped out in forensic detail the ways we are exposed to toxic substances—not occasionally, not in unusual circumstances, but constantly, from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to sleep. Let me run through them.

Burning candles indoors. That scented candle you bought from a high-street shop? If it’s made with synthetic petroleum-based dyes and fragrances, it is releasing toluene, benzene, and other known carcinogens into the air of your home. The same air your children are breathing.

Non-stick cookware. PFAS—per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances—are a class of over 15,000 synthetic chemicals used to coat non-stick pans. They are sometimes called “forever chemicals” because they do not break down in the human body or the environment. Known effects include infertility, hypertension during pregnancy, and developmental delays in children.

Processed food. Food additives like titanium dioxide (already banned in the EU for its potential to damage DNA) and propyl paraben (found in many store-bought baked goods) are routine ingredients in products marketed as food. They are not food. They are industrial chemicals that happen to be edible.

Tap water. Fluoridated water supplies, agricultural runoff carrying pesticide residues, heavy metals leaching from aging lead pipes, hormone-disrupting compounds from pharmaceutical waste—all flowing out of the taps we use to cook, drink, and bathe. Standard filtration removes some contaminants. It does not remove all of them.

Indoor air quality. Counterintuitively, the air inside your home can be five times more polluted than outdoor air. Cooking—even on a gas hob, even with healthy ingredients—generates particulate matter. Synthetic furnishings off-gas volatile organic compounds. Ventilation is not optional; it’s protective.

Shoes in the house. The soles of your shoes carry in whatever the streets, lawns, and floors outside have accumulated—pesticides, heavy metals, pathogenic bacteria. Taking your shoes off at the door is one of the simplest and most effective things you can do to reduce your family’s toxic load.

Paper cups. That coffee cup from the café around the corner? It is lined with plastic to prevent leakage. At high temperatures, that plastic liner leaches into your drink. You are not just drinking coffee. You are drinking a cocktail of microplastics and their associated endocrine disruptors.

Cosmetics and personal care products. Parabens—used as preservatives in shampoos, lotions, and makeup—are oestrogen mimics. They disrupt the hormonal system. They accumulate in tissue. They have been found in breast tumour biopsies.

And then there are the wider categories that don’t fit neatly into a list: seed oils oxidising under heat and damaging our cells; high-fructose corn syrup driving metabolic dysfunction; wheat saturated with glyphosate right up to harvest; microplastics now found in human blood, lung tissue, and placentas.

This Is Not Normal

We were not designed to live this way. The human body is extraordinarily resilient—God made it that way—but it was not built to detoxify an unrelenting, 24-hour barrage of synthetic chemicals that did not exist a century ago. We are running an experiment on ourselves and our children, and the results are coming in: skyrocketing rates of infertility, childhood developmental disorders, autoimmune disease, metabolic syndrome, and cancer.

You can reduce your exposure. Filter your water. Open your windows. Ditch the non-stick pans. Cook from scratch. Take off your shoes. Read the ingredients list. These are not small things—they matter. But you cannot eliminate exposure entirely. You live in the world. You eat in restaurants. You breathe in office buildings. You shake hands with a world that is marinating in chemical contamination.

Which is why I have come back, with fresh eyes, to Mark 16:18.

The Promise We’ve Been Overlooking

“When they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all.”

I used to think this was a low-priority promise. I now think it may be one of the most practically relevant promises in the entire New Testament for Christians living in the twenty-first century.

We need healing prayer, yes. We need it for cancer, for infertility, for the epidemic of childhood illness. But we also need the preventive dimension of this promise—the daily declaration of God’s protective power over bodies that are, whether we like it or not, being constantly exposed to substances that harm.

I have started praying this over my family differently. Not just as a general blessing, but as a specific declaration rooted in the specific reality of what we are up against. I lay hands on the food we eat. I pray over the water we drink. I declare, on the authority of Jesus’ own words, that even the poison that has entered our bodies—through a hundred invisible vectors, over years we did not know to be worried—does not have the final word.

God’s Word is more powerful than Teflon. His promise reaches into our fat cells, where these chemicals accumulate. His healing is not limited to what we can see or what we know we need healing from.

Pray This Over Your Body

Pray it now. Pray it tonight over your family. Declare it over your children as you tuck them into bed in houses full of things you cannot fully detoxify.

“Lord, Your Word says that those who believe will drink deadly poison and it will not harm them. I declare that promise over my body and the bodies of those I love. I declare that every toxic substance—seen and unseen, known and unknown—that has entered our bodies through food, water, air, and contact is subject to Your power. I declare healing and wholeness over every cell, every organ, every system. Where the enemy has used the corruption of this world to steal our health, I declare restoration. You are the Lᴏʀᴅ who heals. You are good, and Your promises are true.”

We do not live in a clean world. But we serve a God whose Word is cleaner than any filter, more powerful than any chemical, and more lasting than any poison this broken age can produce.

God is good.