TRUE WORSHIP DISPELS IDOLATRY

Which shall it be for me, true worship or idolatry? Each individual makes his own choice. No one can decide for another. There is just one true God. True worship is the adoration of the one true God and the serving of Him alone. Any departure from this, even in the slightest degree, is idolatry.

Moses was an inspired revelator of God's law to mankind. He lifted the children of Israel out of the prevailing idolatry into a beginning of the worship of the one true God, Spirit. Mary Baker Eddy says in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p.200), "Moses advanced a nation to the worship of God in Spirit instead of matter, and illustrated the grand human capacities of being bestowed by immortal Mind." Whoever takes this progressive step out of faith in matter into faith in Spirit finds harmonious, satisfying answers to many hitherto baffling human problems. Through the true worship of God as infinite divine Principle he comes to demonstrate spiritual understanding in his daily experiences. In Christian Science divine Principle is one of the synonyms for God, and Truth is another. Any deviation from divine Principle and Truth is a failure to worship God truly.

Mankind should be exceedingly grateful to the pioneers of true worship. They opened the way for the putting off of the old man of flesh and the putting on of the new man in the image and likeness of Spirit. Through centuries of testing perseverance and progress they clung to the spiritual truth of being revealed through precept and practice by Moses and other prophets. Years of faithful worship of the one true God Almighty were marvelously consummated in Mary's pure conception of Christ Jesus and his subsequent inspired ministry.

Through his spiritual origin, understanding, and demonstration of God-derived intelligence, power, and love Jesus of Nazareth taught a higher sense of worship than had been known before. He did not come "to destroy the law, or the prophets," he said (Matt.5:17), "but to fulfil." The Ten Commandments, revealed by God, divine Mind, to Moses, and clarified by Christ Jesus, are the basic propositions of being upon which enlightened peoples build their moral and civil laws. They underlie all true worship.

Christian Science explains that the first of the Ten Commandments presents the great spiritual fact that to worship God, the one and only self-existent, all-inclusive, everywhere present, immortal cause or creator is to worship Spirit, divine Mind. The second of the Ten Commandments is also of great spiritual importance to mankind. It demands spiritualization of worship. Understood in its highest meaning through Science, it brings to light the spiritual, divinely mental nature of God's creation, as well as the falsely mental nature of the material so-called creation, appreciable only to the mortal, material senses. The second commandment presents the inescapable errors to be experienced by those who accept a mistaken sense of cause and effect, as well as the certain joyous peace, satisfaction, and dominion to be enjoyed by those who glimpse the true spiritual sense of being and yield obedience thereto.

The second of the Ten Commandments reads (Ex.20:4-6):

"Graven," in the first of these verses, comes from the verb "to grave." It means, among other things, "to impress deeply (on the mind); to fix indelibly." Christian Science reveals that one's graven images are merely one's human misconceptions of God's immortal, divinely mental universe. One's need is to behold and to understand the spiritual ideas of God as they are in Truth, but never to pervert them into finite human approximations, or graven images.

The second verse deals specifically with those who "hate me [God, Spirit]." Evidently these are they who entertain the erring belief that God, Spirit, divine Mind, is not All, and that His opposite, sentient matter, is just as real, true, and powerful as God, if not more so. The offspring of Spirit's opposite, the children of the flesh, fail to comprehend the spiritual revelations of Moses regarding the one God and His infinite spiritual manifestation. Instead, they bow down to and serve the material senses' graven image, its misconception of divine Mind's spiritual ideas and their identities.

Through Christian Science we find that "the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me [God]" has reference to the offspring of false material sense and not to human beings quickened by the practical application of the Ten Commandments and by spiritual awareness.

Of a surety God is a "jealous God," if by the adjective "jealous" is meant "exacting exclusive devotion," as a dictionary defines the word. Justice is a quality of God. Paul stated the perfect law of justice, of which no one can rightfully complain, when he wrote (Gal. 6:7), "Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." Justice requires that all the heirs of Adam, of whatsoever generation—third, fourth, or three hundred thousandth, according to human sense testimony—shall reap with Adam, because as acknowledged members of the Adamic race they have sown and are still sowing with Adam a material or mistaken sense of God and man. And they will continue to reap the iniquities of their own sowing until they individually realize that Adam and the Adamic race are counterfeits of God's immortal, perfect children.

Mistaken beliefs about man, the same as mistaken beliefs about other things, are illusions, which hold despotic sway in mortal thought until Truth exposes them for the errors they are and fully dispels them with immortal Science. In fact, delusions have no reality, past, present, or future. To believe that they do is either to have faith in more gods than one or to believe that the one true God, good, is a union of opposite, good and evil, Truth and error. Awakening even partially from the Adamdream, individuals begin to apprehend spiritually the Ten Commandments and to put them into practical use in their daily lives. This is to worship truly.

As the truth regarding real consciousness is glimpsed and demonstrated through the rules of scientific practice, mortal consciousness becomes less and less evident, until it disappears, and immortal divine consciousness, with all its harmony and perfection, is found to be the one and only consciousness.

Mrs. Eddy explains the seeming origin and existence of the human mind's graven images and how through divinely mental means to exchange them for the eternal verities of being. She says in "Miscellaneous Writings" (p.60): "Evil in the beginning claimed the power, wisdom, and utility of good; and every creation or idea of Spirit has its counterfeit in some matter belief. Every material belief hints the existence of spiritual reality; and if mortals are instructed in spiritual things, it will be seen that material belief, in all its manifestations, reversed, will be found the type and representative of verities priceless, eternal, and just at hand."

The third verse of the second commandment deals specifically with those who "love me [Spirit, God]." It reveals the innumerable blessings bestowed by God on those who understand man as made in His image and likeness, who know and love the one true God, Spirit. Those who love what God loves are they who bring to light His children, His ideas, who through the divine law of reflection express what their Father-Mother God knows and does. This verse not only shows the possibility but the absolute necessity of all men having the "mind [the one divine Mind]" in them "which was also in Christ Jesus" (Phil.2:5). This would mean the salvation of all human beings from entertaining the material senses' graven images and from paying the dire consequences thereof. It must be clear to thinkers that the one who does actually comprehend and obey this second commandment of Moses loves, yea, worships, the one true God and so avails himself of Spirit's innumerable benefactions.