“Popular theology makes God tributary to man, coming at human call; whereas the reverse is true in Science. Men must approach God reverently, doing their own work in obedience to divine law, if they would fulfil the intended harmony of being.”
Those words from Unity of Good (p. 13) by the Discoverer of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, caused me to ask myself if I too was calling on God to know about my problems and help me fix them. Christian Science teaches that we must first approach God reverently. This points our thought in the right direction, to an understanding of the true nature of God and man, which is what enabled Christ Jesus to heal. We must reach out to God with the desire to understand and honor Him, not to get Him to be aware of false mortal beliefs of life in matter.
We tend to assume that if God doesn’t know about our problems, He can’t solve them. But consider the principle of mathematics. It doesn’t know anything of the problems we solve with math. The principle or law, when correctly understood and applied, brings about the intended results. Mathematics does not work more effectively if it first knows the nature of the mistakes being made. It is never influenced by outside forces, opinions, or circumstances. Principle is eternal, immutable, and unerring.
To demonstrate Jesus’ promise of our healing ability, we must first be willing, as he was, to claim our oneness with God and abandon the material sense of things.
Just so, we learn in Christian Science that God, as divine Principle, can be aware of only His perfection. He is “the great I am; the all-knowing, all-seeing, all-acting, all-wise, all-loving, and eternal; Principle; Mind; Soul; Spirit; Life; Truth; Love; all substance; intelligence” (Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 587). So the only creation that exists is God’s creation, whose highest ideas are His sons and daughters, made in His image and likeness, as stated in the first chapter of Genesis.
God is All-in-all, and God is Spirit. Since He is wholly good, and all that He creates reflects His goodness, one must conclude that God did not create evil and knows nothing of it. And since He is Spirit, all that He creates is spiritual. He did not create matter. This means evil and matter must be errors—false beliefs in something besides God, good.
So what is the work we are to do in obedience to God’s law, to which Mrs. Eddy refers? Is it not that we are to rise up and out of the belief of life in matter, of so-called human existence, to the consciousness of God, the one Mind, rather than asking Him to come down to the level of a false, mortal consciousness?
The statement quoted earlier says we are to “approach God reverently.” To me, this means we must recognize God as Spirit, the only Mind, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, as well as the eternal fact that we are His perfect ideas. If God, Spirit, knows nothing of evil or of a material creation, then neither can we.
We look to the Master, Christ Jesus, as our healing Exemplar. After three years of demonstrating his oneness with God and healing every manner of sickness and sin, he didn’t say, “The show’s over!” and leave us to marvel at his works that would be no more. Quite the opposite. He promised us that we could and would do the same works: “He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do” (John 14:12).
To demonstrate Jesus’ promise of our healing ability, we must first be willing, as he was, to claim our oneness with God and exchange the material sense of things for the spiritual. Jesus said, “The Lord our God is one Lord: and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment” (Mark 12:29, 30). That is our part in our covenant with God. God’s part is already fulfilled. He has made us in His image and likeness and has given man dominion over all things. For that dominion to be realized, we have to fulfill our part of the covenant by obeying His laws.
Christian Science teaches that man must be reconciled to God, not God to man. Unity of Good explains: “Christ cannot come to mortal and material sense, which sees not God. This false sense of substance must yield to His eternal presence, and so dissolve. Rising above the false, to the true evidence of Life, is the resurrection that takes hold of eternal Truth” (Mary Baker Eddy, pp. 60–61).
We spend much time focusing on challenges with our bodies, our relationships, our supply, etc. We analyze, agonize over, and keep track of how long they’ve been around. We tell others about them and let others tell us what they think about them, and then we try to apply Christian Science to heal them. That is trying to reconcile God to a material sense of man, asking God to come into the dream of life in matter and fix the dream. A dream doesn’t need fixing—it’s not real. Rather, we want to let the voice of God, Truth, awaken us to the fact that we are already well and have all we need, because God made everything, and He made it wholly good, like Himself.
To lift our head above the mist of material sense, to awaken from the dream, is to see the solution—the truth of being—rather than the problem. Many times I unsuccessfully asked God to come into my dream of life in matter and solve my problems, until I learned that I must lift my consciousness out of the belief in a matter-based existence, and up to the spiritual reality that God, Spirit, is All-in-all.
Years ago, I had to demonstrate this important concept of reconciling my thoughts to God when my husband didn’t show up the night before we were to move back to the United States from Hong Kong. He was devastated that a job he loved had ended, and from his point of view, nothing could compare to what he had just lost. We had no jobs and no home. So, to use an Australian term, it seemed he had gone “walkabout.” Feeling overwhelmed, he went out for a walk and said he’d be home by 10:00 p.m. But at 3:00 a.m. he had not returned, and we were supposed to catch a plane in a matter of hours.
I wanted God to fix my husband, who seemed to be abandoning me, and to fix me and all the anxieties and fears I felt. That didn’t work! So instead of starting my prayer from the standpoint of a missing husband and a frightened wife, I decided to start with God and His perfection. I remember gaining an immediate sense of peace with the realization that one of those scenarios was false, material evidence, and the other was the eternal truth of being—God’s omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence.
Instead of starting my prayer from the standpoint of a missing husband and a frightened wife, I decided to start with God and His perfection.
I reasoned that if God is all-knowing, then my husband couldn’t be hiding or escaping from God’s perfect knowledge of him. If God is ever present, then my husband could feel God’s presence, comfort, and love right where he was. And if God is all-power, then no fear, anxiety, or uncertainty could overwhelm either of us.
In half an hour he arrived home with a smile on his face. He had indeed heard God and was now assured that not only would he be fine, but he had been given explicit instructions on something very special that he was to do. He looked like a new man. And he obeyed God’s guidance, which led us both to whole new careers, working together for the next 15 years.
I had learned that “Christ cannot come to mortal and material sense, which sees not God.” Rather, it was my duty to rise up and out of the belief of any life in matter, separate from God. When I did, I was able to prove that the truth of perfect God and perfect man is a present and eternal reality.
