Radium Girls

Not long after Marie Curie and her husband, Pierre, discovered radium, it was found that the element could be used in producing paint that glowed in the dark. Before long, manufacturers were producing glow-in-the-dark watch dials, painted by young women and girls who were encouraged by their employers to lick the paintbrush or twirl it between their lips in order to get a more precise brushstroke.

Told the paint was harmless, many painted their fingernails and teeth with radium paint. The radium dust in the workplace caused many of the women to glow in the dark from head to toe. As time passed, the women who worked with radium paint began to get sick. Many were still only in their twenties when they became seriously ill and died slow, painful deaths. It wasn’t understood at the time that radium was radioactive and extremely hazardous to a person’s health.

Young women ingesting the substance were hastening their own death.* The problem with sin is that its dark side is not always easily discernible.

Paul wrote that “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23), but many people treat sin like a plaything, failing to realize that it is always doing its deadly work.

While radium has proven to be capable of taking a life in this world, sin destroys people for eternity. Those who die connected to sin will ultimately perish in the “second death” (Revelation 21:8). The Radium Girls could all have been saved if someone had warned them about the danger of what they were handling.

In the same way, not one soul needs to be lost because of sin.

Although sin pays the wage of death, God’s gift through Jesus is eternal life. While sin may seem fun, in the long term, it isn’t to be trifled with.

Sin is deadly. But Jesus came into the world to save us from sin.

God is able to remake every person who comes to Jesus in faith. If we remember how harmful sin is, we will be far less likely to treat it casually.

God wants to save us from the poisonous effects of sin.