Christ Jesus spoke with authority and healed with authority. He was convinced of the allness of God, of His all-power. He knew God as Love, and he saw the love of Love as the solvent for evil of every kind.
Jesus often addressed evil directly, not as something real or powerful contesting the omnipotence of God but as a mere negation, devoid of reality, substance, power, law, or individuality. He deprived it of a leg to stand on, a place to take place in. Mark tells us that in healing the epileptic boy "he rebuked the foul spirit, saying unto him, Thou dumb and deaf spirit, I charge thee, come out of him, and enter no more into him. And the spirit cried, and rent him sore, and came out of him." Mark 9:25, 26; Jesus was our Way-shower. He showed us how to speak with authority, how to assert our God-given control over evil, how to talk back to it.
"But," someone might ask, "if I talk to the error, am I not making a reality of it?" No, not if you are making nothing of it through your denunciations. When we pray effectively, we pray from an understanding of fixed Principle—the unchanging perfection and love of God, hence the unchanging perfection and loveliness of man, God's likeness. If evil isn't going on in God, in the one Mind, it isn't going on. There's no outside to God's allness.
