WHEN the problems of human existence—discordant relationships, food shortages, sin, disease, or death—seem difficult of solution, we may profitably consider the success achieved in their solution by those great Bible characters, Joseph and Christ Jesus.
Joseph's ability to provide for a nation in time of famine followed his overcoming of the temptations to sin and to cherish resentment and revenge toward his enemies. No doubt his purity, obedience to God, and willingness to forgive were as important to his demonstration of supply as were his foresight and executive talent. Pharaoh must have recognized this, since in choosing Joseph to be the governor and food administrator over Egypt he spoke of him as "a man in whom the Spirit of God is" (Gen. 41:38).
Christ Jesus amply fed the multitudes in a desert place when the available food supply was utterly inadequate. Thus he proved that the Christ-understanding was the Saviour from lack, as well as from sickness, sin, and discord. Christian Science elucidates this saving understanding as the recognition that infinite Spirit, divine Mind, is the real man's all-harmonious and all-supplying source. The saving Christ, Truth, neither waits on nor employs material methods of production, distribution, mediation, or medication, but meets all of mankind's needs directly and instantaneously through divine power.
Jesus demonstrated the ever-availability of true, spiritual substance, or Mind, always outwardly manifested in what meets the human need. He healed disease, reformed the sinner, showed the way to individual and collective peace, and overcame all limitations, including death, through his understanding that the kingdom of God is within man, Mind's image or idea, and is ever present, intact, and eternal. Never more than now has humanity needed to heed Jesus' command (Matt. 6:33), "Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness ; and all these things shall be added unto you." Food and clothing are specifically named in the preceding verses, and the Master's promise thus clearly shows that abundant supply is to be expected as the result of obedience.
In the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," Mary Baker Eddy affords, in her admirably succinct way, an interesting comparison between the early patriarch and our great Master. On page 589 in the Glossary of her book will be found spiritual definitions or metaphysical interpretations of the names Joseph and Jesus. Of the first, which in the Hebrew means literally "let him add," or "increase," she writes: "Joseph. A corporeal mortal; a higher sense of Truth rebuking mortal belief, or error, and showing the immortality and supremacy of Truth; pure affection blessing its enemies." Of the second, meaning "saviour," she writes: "Jesus. The highest human corporeal concept of the divine idea, rebuking and destroying error and bringing to light man's immortality."
Note that while Joseph represents "a higher sense of Truth," or God, Jesus is "the highest" human concept of Truth's idea, man, and that while Joseph shows the immortality of Truth, Jesus reveals also the immortality of man. Also, the revelation of immortality is, in Joseph, coupled with "rebuking mortal belief, or error," while in Jesus it is associated with the rebuking and also the destroying of error.
Often the most effective rebuke to error is the silent knowing that evil has no power to deprive man of any of his God-given rights and resources, such as freedom, health, abundance, sinlessness. The Bible records no instance of Joseph's brooding or bemoaning his fate when his brothers' envy, jealousy, and hatred induced them to sell him into slavery. He did not make error. real by charging his brothers with evil or condemning them for it, though he was actively concerned about their reformation.
Apparently Joseph trusted that God would provide for him in every circumstance, for it is related that even in captivity "the Lord was with Joseph, and he was a prosperous man" (Gen. 39:2). He was made overseer in the house of Potiphar, captain of the guard for Pharaoh. Later, when Joseph's purity and integrity brought persecution from Potiphar's wife, he did not complain, but set about aiding his fellows, proving his dominion even in prison. When he befriended Pharaoh's butler, and the latter proved ungrateful, Joseph's trust in God must have deepened and strengthened, for in the fullness of time he was able to prove that Truth is man's provider. Finally he prophesied what was to take place four or five hundred years later: that God would lead the children of Israel out of the land of bondage into the promised land. Thus Joseph showed "the immortality and supremacy of Truth."
Joseph rebuked error, but he did not fully destroy it as Jesus did. Joseph evidently had a high sense of God, Truth, as provider, but to him supply was apparently contingent on such matters as time and human economics, and we have no record that he expressed any assurances of man's immortality. Christ Jesus proved by his life and works that man is immortal; that the belief in mortal man is the error which must be both rebuked and destroyed; and that man's eternality must be demonstrated here and now through overcoming sin, disease, and death. Thus Jesus showed that the Saviour of mortal man effects the extermination from consciousness of all evil, of all the limiting beliefs that would obstruct the present realization of man's immortal status.
Christian Scientists must grow beyond the Joseph stage of thought and achievement which, while acknowledging eternal Truth as provider, merely rebukes the error apparent as human discords and fails to accomplish complete salvation from the entire belief of life in matter. They must go on to the Christlikeness which achieves the destruction of every false concept of life as separated from God. They must overcome the temptation to be content with merely solving the problems of human existence— food, clothing, shelter, health, success, and happiness. Human existence, even at its best, falls far short of satisfying one's immortal cravings. Only the consciousness of one's identity as divine Mind's idea, expressing divine individuality in its infinity, freedom, and perfect harmony, can ever satisfy.
Nothing said thus far should be construed as disparaging in the least the Joseph stage of human progress. No doubt all of us need to express more of the qualities Joseph exemplified, such as faith in God's care and provision, purity, foresight, forgiveness, and intelligence. But the revelation of Christian Science enables those who receive and practice it to advance their salvation by reflecting, through increasing spiritual understanding, man's God-given harmony, health, and inexhaustible life.
The importance of understanding Truth as the Saviour from all human conditions, rather than as merely the provider for human needs, is indicated in the fact that Mrs. Eddy, in all her published writings, makes but one direct reference to Joseph, the one quoted in this article, while her books are filled with allusions to and interpretations of Christ Jesus and his works. Joseph was "a corporeal mortal." Christ Jesus represented both the corporeal and the incorporeal Saviour. This fact was the subject of a remarkable Christmas sermon delivered by our Leader (Miscellaneous Writings, pp. 161-168), in which she makes a clear distinction between the human presentation of goodness as seen in the physical man Jesus and the spiritual idea, Truth, or Saviour, that represents incorporeal divine good.
In this sermon she says (p. 165), "The last appearing of Truth will be a wholly spiritual idea of God and of man, without the fetters of the flesh, or corporeality." And she adds: "The daystar of this appearing is the light of Christian Science—the Science which rends the veil of the flesh from top to bottom. The light of this revelation leaves nothing that is material; neither darkness, doubt, disease, nor death. The material corporeality disappears; and individual spirituality, perfect and eternal, appears—never to disappear."
"Individual spirituality"! The Saviour that restores man's primal and eternal perfection is the great truth that individual man—our real being—is the expression of the one infinite Mind. In the perpetual harmony and abundance, the happiness and complete satisfaction, of this wholly spiritual sense of man we find that we are already saved; hence the only human need is to know that man is not human, but in his true being is divine Mind's idea.
Let us then affirm that demand and supply are one in infinite Love and its manifestation, man and the universe; that Mind will "keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on" God (Isa. 26:3); that health and holiness are the present reality, and that death is but a dream of the absence of ever-present Life, God. Let us rejoice, as did Paul, that when the human sense reaches out to the Saviour for relief from suffering, the appeal is met by Truth's assertion of its own self-sufficiency and of man's reflection of its all-satisfying grace and perfect strength (see II Cor. 12:7-10).
Not occultism nor miraculous intervention, but man's direct expression of individual spirituality delivered Daniel from the lions and his friends from the fiery furnace. Not esoteric magic nor special dispensation, but man's direct individual reflection of omnipresent, universal Love enabled Jesus to feed and heal the multitudes and to step forth from the tomb a victor over death, hatred, envy, revenge, and disloyalty. So today, when lack and strife may seem from a material standpoint inescapable, God's saving grace in Christian Science can furnish not only tables of food but spiritual strength in every wilderness of mortal belief and lift men out of the conflicts and hell of physical personality into the peace and heaven of individual spirituality.
That man's perfection, peace, and incorporeality are the scientific fact yesterday, and today, and forever, Jesus revealed in his admonition to the seventy disciples who reported great success in healing sickness and sin. "Rejoice not," he said (Luke 10:20), "that the spirits are subject unto you; but rather rejoice, because your names are written in heaven." Thus he emphasized the joy and glory of the kingdom of God, in which there is no error to rebuke or destroy, no disease or sin to heal, no death, no lack for which to provide, no man in need of a savior, for Truth and its idea are the All-in-all.
