The world now spends many trillions of dollars on health care every year. With that kind of spending, one might expect there to be a substantial decrease in sickness globally. Yet sickness and disease continue as major challenges.
This is not that different from a situation described in this week’s Christian Science Bible lesson. Ezekiel records God as telling the leaders of Israel, “The diseased have ye not strengthened, neither have ye healed that which was sick, neither have ye bound up that which was broken” (Ezekiel 34:4). It’s a lament that can be found throughout the Bible.
There would be little hope of escaping this endless cycle if it weren’t for another fact that undergirds the Bible – the omnipotence and supremacy of God. From Genesis to Revelation, one finds assurances and proof that, despite what seems like overwhelming evidence to the contrary, God, good, the creator of all, is actually all-powerful and ever present.
It would be impossible for God, who is divine Love, to create anything unlike Himself. This means that sickness and plagues, which would be the antithesis of God’s health-giving nature, were never created by Him and therefore cannot be real or threaten mankind.
This would be great news if it were true. So is it?
Mary Baker Eddy, the Founder of Christian Science, emphasizes that a right concept of God is essential to understanding mankind’s freedom from sickness. Starting from the widely accepted premise of God’s omnipotence, she writes in “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” “Either there is no omnipotence, or omnipotence is the only power” (p. 249).
We can’t claim God to be the only power while at the same time granting power to sickness. Our growing understanding of God as infinite, as the only power, unmasks sickness and its supposed cures and proves both to be powerless. Real power comes from God, the source of all good.
I experienced this years ago when I was quickly healed of an apparent broken arm. I was riding a mountain bike on a technical trail when I found myself flying over the handlebars and landing on a rock. My arm took the brunt of the fall. By the time I pulled myself together, the arm had become extremely painful, swollen, and discolored.
I was eventually able to get myself home, where I could gather my thoughts and pray. I don’t remember how I prayed, but I know I was refuting the evidence before my eyes and claiming the perfection that was always mine as God’s image and likeness, as the Bible declares (see Genesis 1:26). I affirmed this fact for the next two days. On the third day, the arm and all signs of pain and deformation were completely healed. My arm has been normal from that day on.
Healings are proofs of God’s law of harmony. This law was proven many times over by Jesus. As we read in this week’s lesson: “And Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every sickness and every disease among the people” (Matthew 9:35).
Even the best material health care will not completely eliminate sickness, because what’s needed is a change of the basis of our thought to a spiritual viewpoint. We read in the lesson, “Every system of human philosophy, doctrine, and medicine is more or less infected with the pantheistic belief that there is mind in matter; but this belief contradicts alike revelation and right reasoning” (Science and Health, p. 279). Right reasoning starts with God as the sole and universal source of all good, and concludes with His perfect, harmonious creation, including mankind.
Worldly thinking may be convinced that this reasoning is baseless and even contradicts science. But spiritual reasoning actually exposes the futility and powerlessness of matter-based reasoning altogether. Had the children of Israel not been emboldened by Moses to trust in God instead of the evidence before their eyes, they might never have been delivered from the pursuing Egyptian army. Who would have thought that crossing the Red Sea on dry land would even be an option? But it was, and safety was waiting for them, when they were ready to look beyond material reasoning.
We, too, need to have faith to look beyond worldly evidence and see what God sees. In this way we can eradicate the claims of sickness for all mankind through healing.
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