Reading the book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy for the first time, this statement caught my attention: “The inaudible voice of Truth is, to the human mind, ‘as when a lion roareth’ ” (p. 559). Whoa! What instantly came to mind was the MGM roaring lion icon. But that’s noisy, and she’d just said the voice of Truth is inaudible.
I stopped to think about this. What it said to me was that even though Truth’s utterances (God’s thoughts speaking to each of us) are silent, they are as commanding, as authoritative, as the lion’s roar. Despite the screams of the material senses, God’s thoughts keep coming until they get through to us, for God’s omnipotence is the “oomph” behind them. We can’t miss them. But we need to be receptively attentive to them.
This reminded me of Elijah when he was so depressed, wanting to die (see I Kings 19). Jezebel had been killing off the prophets, and her message to him was that he was next. He escaped into the wilderness, then lay down and tried to die. But an angel (a God-thought) awakened him with “Arise and eat,” and he saw a cake on the coals. He ate it, then lay back down to die. Again, an angel awakened him—“Arise and eat.” Then the account says he “went in the strength of that meat forty days and forty nights unto Horeb the mount of God.” Now, he’d already eaten the food on the grill. I couldn’t help thinking that second meal was spiritual food, comforting and strengthening him.