What are you grateful for? You may be thankful for many things—for all the evidences of good in your life, from friendships and family, to home, health, and freedom. For those of a religious persuasion, it’s easy to connect the good to God as the source of all goodness—and to feel grateful to God. But are we really grateful for God?
All of this begs the question of knowing God—something that runs counter to the common perception that God is either a mystery, inherently unknowable, or so otherworldly, so outside of everyday life, that we couldn’t understand Him. Yet the Bible, more than any other compilation, has captured not only the search to comprehend God, but what has been learned and demonstrated of humanity’s connection to Him. The Scriptures, in fact, encourage all: “Continue thou in the things which thou hast learned and hast been assured of, knowing of whom thou hast learned them; and that from a child thou hast known the holy scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus” (II Timothy 3:14, 15).
We can trust Christ Jesus because no one knew God better, or loved Him more. In fact, Jesus’ healing works rebuke to this day the assumption of an incomprehensible or distant Deity.
Throughout his ministry, Jesus revealed a radically different picture of the King of kings than a forceful Ruler. To Jesus, He was utterly holy, and was not remote but deeply familiar and treasured. So good and wise, tender and near, just and right was God to Jesus that the Master called him Father. And of himself he said, “The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do: for what things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise” (John 5:19).
God, the all-powerful, endlessly loving, ever-present Spirit, was reflected across the spectrum of thought, word, and deed by this ideal man, Christ Jesus. And during his short ministry, so many healings came to pass that one New Testament author wrote that the world simply couldn’t hold all the books needed to tell about them. But in the end, it wasn’t about Jesus as much as it was about God. Jesus’ unwavering conviction that his God belonged to everyone—and each one a daughter or a son to their heavenly Father—came with the assurance that what he did, others could emulate. “He that believeth on me,” he announced, “the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; . . . that the Father may be glorified in the Son” (John 14:12, 13).
Mary Baker Eddy’s discovery of Christian Science in the 1800s made apparent Jesus’ practical teachings, spelling out the Science of knowing God for the generations that would read and study her textbook. As she wrote in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, “This Science teaches man that God is the only Life, and that this Life is Truth and Love; that God is to be understood, adored, and demonstrated; that divine Truth casts out suppositional error and heals the sick” (pp. 471–472). She proved through her own healings that the idea of God as good itself was not a religious theory to be believed, but a scientifically spiritual understanding to be demonstrated in daily life. How grateful we can be that God’s goodness isn’t something that is meant for some and not others, or that only some can grasp. God’s goodness is the actual substance of our lives, the law of our being.
Comprehending this truth not only blesses us but enables us to become healers ourselves, witnessing the effects of knowing God as good for our neighbors and far beyond. As Mrs. Eddy explained in her sermon The People’s Idea of God: “. . . when we learn God aright, we love Him, because He is found altogether lovely. Thus it is that a more spiritual and true ideal of Deity improves the race physically and spiritually. God is no longer a mystery to the Christian Scientist, but a divine Principle, understood in part, because the grand realities of Life and Truth are found destroying sin, sickness, and death; . . .” (p. 6).
Should our need to know God come as a surprise? In every discipline the key to progress is always greater understanding. In objects of study as diverse as nature and sports, construction and music, new perceptions open vistas, bring deeper comprehension, and allow individuals to overcome limitations and reach new heights.
One of the best examples of the way an understanding of God transforms lives is in the biblical story of Paul, formerly called Saul. He’s credited with telling the Athenians that their pale conception of God needed an upgrade: “Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship,” he said, “him declare I unto you” (Acts 17:23). He could say this with authority, for he himself—in a literal blinding flash of the Divine that sidelined the rituals, rules, and rites he had seemed so wedded to—had begun actually to know God. And not only his life was reformed—from a henchman to a healer—but multitudes of others were restored and redeemed too. (You’ll get a glimpse into the pure affection that took over Paul’s heart as he grew in knowing God if you read First Corinthians 13.)
Paul came to learn what we, too, can know: It is the spiritually scientific understanding of God and our intimate relation to Him, the Father-Mother of us all, that effects good change in everything from our character to our communities.
Members of the branch church I belong to, praying from this basis, saw a turnaround in an entire public library system that had initially declined our request to hold a Christian Science lecture in a neighborhood library because it was wrongly assumed we would be proselytizing. Over the course of a year—and with no intervening communications—the library board changed their long-standing policy to allow not only Christian Science but every faith tradition to hold free informational talks in any of the numerous branch libraries.
Understanding our Father-Mother God takes us from the gratitude that acknowledges the evidences of His, Her, goodness, straight to the heart of that goodness, because we grow to know and love God. And that is the place where we find surer healing, steadier progress, and more certain salvation ourselves and for the human family. In a season of thanksgiving, nothing could be more worthy of our gratitude than the fact that we can know God.
Ethel A. Baker
Editor
