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"A merry heart doeth good like a medicine…" — Proverbs 17:22a (KJV)

Long ago, Solomon penned the words of Proverbs 17:22. And now, modern medicine has finally caught up with the old Jewish king.

Researchers at the Mayo Clinic report that laughter sets off a small chain reaction in your body: your oxygen intake rises, your heart, lungs, and muscles are stimulated, and your brain releases endorphins — those wonderful, natural chemicals that make you feel good all over.¹ Dr. Edward Creagan of the Mayo Clinic explains that when we laugh, the "evil stress hormone" cortisol drops, while dopamine, oxytocin, and endorphins — what he affectionately calls "the love and chocolate hormones" — flood the system.² A landmark systematic review published through the National Institutes of Health confirmed that spontaneous laughter measurably lowers cortisol levels across multiple controlled studies.³ The American Heart Association has even found that laughter can reduce inflammation in your arteries and raise your "good" cholesterol.⁴ Regular laughter, researchers note, strengthens your immune system, increases your pain tolerance, and has even been linked — in a fifteen-year Norwegian health study — to lower mortality rates from infection-related illness.⁵

Friend, that is not a joke. That is a peer-reviewed, footnoted, medically documented fact: your laughter is doing surgery on your stress hormones right now.

But here is what should stop you in your tracks and drop you to your knees in worship: long before a single scientist ever measured a cortisol level, the Scriptures had already written the prescription.

"A merry heart doeth good like a medicine…" (Proverbs 17:22a).

Let's break that down for a moment.

THE WORDS THEMSELVES

"A merry heart." The Hebrew word here means a gladness that starts on the inside and can't help but show up on the outside.⁶ This isn't a fake smile pasted over a hurting heart. It's a heart that is genuinely glowing from within.

So what happens when that inward gladness bubbles over?

It "doeth good... like a medicine." The Amplified Version renders it this way: "A happy heart is good medicine and a joyful mind causes healing." Profound! And here's something truly remarkable — the Hebrew word translated "medicine" (pronounced gay-HAH) shows up only one single time in the entire Old Testament, right here in this verse.⁷ Bible teacher Chaim Bentorah spent years exploring ancient Hebrew writings that shed light on the richness of God's Word, and in his studies he uncovered something beautiful about this rare word. It means far more than the kind of cure we associate with a pill or a remedy. It paints a picture of God's restoring touch — a healing that reaches beneath the surface, renewing what has grown weak, strengthening what has grown weary, and bringing wholeness where life has left its scars.⁸ Even more, the word carries the picture of stooping over something to shield it — the way a soldier might throw himself over a friend to protect him from harm. A merry heart, then, doesn't just treat your symptoms. It covers you. It stoops over to guard you. It restores and invigorates your weak body.

Now follow this truth a little further, because it only grows richer.

When ancient Jewish scholars translated the Old Testament into Greek — the Septuagint, the very Scriptures Jesus and His apostles so often quoted — they faced a decision. How do you translate "doeth good like a medicine" into Greek? They reached for a word rooted in euexia (yoo-EX-ee-ah), and it wasn't an ordinary word for health. The Greeks actually had two words for it. One, hygieia, simply meant "living well" — the everyday absence of sickness. But the translators reached past that word for something bigger.⁹ Euexia was a champion's word — the very term used to judge an athlete's body in the ancient gymnasium contests, alongside the companion event of euandria, at its finest, most vigorous condition.¹⁰ Under the inspiration of God's Spirit, that word choice tells us something wonderful: the laughter born of a joyful heart is not merely an emotional comfort. It is part of God's gracious design for our well-being — bringing strength, refreshment, and renewed vitality to body and soul alike. Holy laughter CROWNS you, like the oil of gladness! (see Isaiah 61:3)

Beloved, God's medicine cabinet holds more than herbs. Sometimes one of His sweetest prescriptions is the gift of holy humor — a heart so filled with His joy that it simply cannot help but overflow.

Stay with me a moment longer, because there is one more layer, and it may be the sweetest of all.

Cross now into the Aramaic — the language Jesus spoke every day at His mother's table. The ancient Peshitta translation renders our verse with plain, beautiful directness: *"A merry heart makes the body healthy."*¹¹ No poetry to unpack — just a simple medical fact, spoken three thousand years before your doctor would say the very same thing at your next checkup. And tracing that Aramaic word back further still, into the old Canaanite tongue beneath it, Bentorah found something else entirely: this root doesn't only mean healing. It carries the sense of being set free.¹²

So lay the three languages side by side, and watch what happens:

The Hebrew says a merry heart restores, covers, and shields you. Laughter is God's protective guardian! The Greek says a merry heart trains you toward championship strength. It CROWNS you, like the oil of gladness. The Aramaic says a merry heart sets you free. Gives you liberty! Hallelujah!

Restored. Covered. Crowned. Strengthened. Set free. That is not five unrelated ideas — that is the whole of what your soul needs, wrapped inside one small proverb, waiting three thousand years for you to discover it.

Here, then, is the expanded meaning of Solomon's words, true to every language that carries them:

"A heart that is truly, inwardly glowing with gladness — not painted on, not performed, but real — works healing into your body and spirit the way medicine works into a wound. That gladness stoops over you protectively, the way a soldier shields a friend, guarding your whole being from the corrosive effects of despair; it crowns you while training you, like an athlete, toward real strength — and sets you free from whatever has held you bound."

Glory to God!

Beloved, do you hear what Solomon — and more importantly, the Holy Spirit who inspired him — is telling you? Laughter is not frivolous. It is fortification. Every time you genuinely laugh, you are not distracting yourself from your problems — you are treating them, physiologically and spiritually, exactly as Scripture prescribed and predicted. Humor brings healing virtue!

SO HOW DO WE GET SOME OF THIS FLOWING?

Especially in seasons when laughter feels like the last thing within reach, let me leave you with a few godly, tested pathways.

  1. Listen to clean, Christ-honoring comedy. God has raised up gifted believers whose calling is literally to make His people laugh. Christian comedian Chonda Pierce — the best-selling female comedian in recorded history — has walked through the deaths of both her sisters, a painful marriage loss, and a battle with clinical depression. And yet she has said plainly: *"Laughter has been good medicine that has helped me navigate personal pain, tragedy, grief and depression."*¹³ She calls it, in her own words, *"a soothing balm on dry skin."*¹⁴ Others, like Tim Hawkins, Jeff Allen, John Crist, and Michael Jr., will bless you too! There is nothing unholy about turning on a clean comedy special when your soul needs relief. It is not a departure from your faith — it may be an answer to prayer.

  2. Keep a "gladness journal." Pierce recommends writing down a good memory — a wedding day, an answered prayer, a moment of unexpected joy — on a sticky note where you'll see it daily.¹⁵ Write down things that have brought you laughter too. Over time, you'll build a wall of remembered gladness that quietly counteracts every lie despair tries to tell you.

  3. Gather with people who make you laugh. Solomon said elsewhere, "iron sharpeneth iron" (Proverbs 27:17) — and laughter is contagious in exactly the same way. Seek out that friend, that small group, that family gathering where laughter flows freely. Or better still, be that friend to someone who is down and out.

  4. Remember: God made laughter, and He made it for you. 1 Samuel 30:6 states that "David encouraged himself in the Lord his God." Sometimes, you need to encourage yourself to laugh in the face of adversity too!

And now, here is one more fact — not a fable, not a guess, but a genuine word from the Gospels.

The Bible never explicitly records Jesus laughing; that detail simply has not been revealed to us. But it does record something remarkable: in Luke 10:21, we're told that Jesus "rejoiced greatly in the Holy Spirit." The Greek word there is agalliao — a word that literally means to jump for joy, to exult, to overflow with such gladness that the body itself wants to leap.¹⁶ It's the same word used of Mary's soul magnifying the Lord (Luke 1:47), and of the Philippian jailer who, the moment he believed, rejoiced with his whole household (Acts 16:34). Jesus — fully God and fully man, anointed, Hebrews tells us, with "the oil of gladness" above all His companions (Hebrews 1:9) — knew this kind of exuberant, overflowing joy. Whatever that looked like on His face that day, it was real, it was recorded, and it was His.

So hear this, dear reader, as plainly as I can say it: Jesus doesn't want you to be sad. He wants you to be GLAD!

And He says to you: "My beloved child, I inspired Solomon to write those words; I approve of good, clean humor, and I am giving you an invitation to laugh again. Laughter works healing into your body and spirit the way medicine works into a wound. My gladness stoops over you protectively, the way a soldier shields a friend, guarding your whole being from the corrosive effects of despair, while training you, like an athlete, toward real strength — and setting you free from whatever has held you bound."

So… start to laugh… AGAIN… and reap the physical and spiritual blessings I want you to have to live an abundant life.

Footnotes

  1. Mayo Clinic, "Stress relief from laughter? It's no joke," mayoclinic.org

  2. Dr. Edward Creagan, quoted in "The health benefits of humor," Mayo Clinic Press, mcpress.mayoclinic.org (2024)

  3. Systematic review and meta-analysis of interventional studies on spontaneous laughter and cortisol levels, National Institutes of Health / PMC, ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10204943

  4. American Heart Association findings on laughter and arterial inflammation, cited in SSM Health, ssmhealth.com (2018)

  5. Nord-Trøndelag Health Study (15-year study, released 2016), cited by Chonda Pierce in interview with The Christian Post, christianpost.com (2020)

  6. NASB Discovery Bible / HELPS Word-studies, sameach (Strong's H8056)

  7. Strong's Concordance, gehah (H1456) — used only once in the Hebrew Old Testament, in Proverbs 17:22

  8. Bentorah, Chaim, "Word Study – Heal or Cure – גהה רפא," chaimbentorah.com (2015)

  9. "The Hippocratic Oath," National Institutes of Health / PMC, distinguishing the Greek hygieia ("living well") from euexia ("well-habited-ness," a good habit of body), pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9297488

  10. Ancient Greek athletic and beauty contests included a category for euexia, judged alongside euandria (manly beauty), as documented in classical sources on Greek athletic culture (e.g., Crowther, "Male Beauty Contests in Greece: The Euandria and Euexia," L'Antiquité Classique, 1985)

  11. Lamsa, George M., Holy Bible: From the Ancient Eastern Text (translation of the Peshitta), Proverbs 17:22

  12. Bentorah, Chaim, "Word Study – Heal or Cure – גהה רפא," chaimbentorah.com (2015), tracing the Semitic root behind gehah to an old Canaanite sense of "being freed or set free"

  13. Pierce, Chonda, interview with The Christian Post, christianpost.com (2020)

  14. Pierce, Chonda, interview with Today's Christian Living, todayschristianliving.org

  15. Pierce, Chonda, interview with The Christian Post, christianpost.com (2020)

  16. Strong's Greek Concordance, agalliao (G21); Luke 10:21

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