Q: I have never understood prophecy. In my younger years, I thought of it as spiritualism and have held that view ever since. Recently, one member of the Board of Directors wrote that as the Board visited churches and members around the world, the question was often asked, “What is going to happen with the Christian Science church?” The reply included the phrase “It is in prophecy.”
—A reader in Maine
A1: To understand prophecy, I’ve found it helpful to think of real existence as an eternal symphony with infinite movements. When we attend a concert, for example, we know the symphony is complete, that it has already been composed. But we also know we aren’t going to hear the whole symphony at once!
Genesis relates that “God saw every thing that he had made,” that it was good, and that creation was “finished” (see 1:31–2:1). God’s infinite work, His “symphony,” is finished. Nothing is unknown, nothing has yet to be created. Reality is Life’s perpetual revelation of its own self-completeness. Since the divine Mind is the only real intelligence, on earth as in heaven, an individual who has yielded to this scientific fact, which in practice includes humbly renouncing the belief in a personal mind separate from God, is bringing his or her thinking into accord with Mind and with what Mind knows—with the entire symphony, so to speak. So when Isaiah prophesied that a virgin would bear a son (see Isa., chap. 7), for example, he was seeing an aspect of the complete “symphony” that would be revealed at an appointed time. To divine Spirit, there is only the eternally unfolding here and now, no past or future. Thus, in a sense, a prophet is one for whom the future is the present.
