True and false law
Law concerns us all. Enlightened human laws help preserve order and the well-being of individuals. However, there's a law that claims to cause discord. This so-called law is to be challenged and broken because it produces the world's illnesses and woes. To break it, to lift its influence from ourselves and others, is vital and is at the heart of spiritual healing in Christian Science.
What is this law? We could describe it as the collective beliefs of humanity acting on general and individual thought. For example, one might have flu as the result of accepting the common belief that at certain seasons and under certain conditions flu will rage. Human thought attributes to germs and viruses a power they do not and cannot have. Only through fear and ignorance are thay endowed with seeming power.
Mary Baker Eddy, who discovered and founded Christian Science, recognized the falsity of this so-called law through a perception of the Bible's profound spiritual truths. She proved the law of discord powerless by healing in defiance of it, mentally, spiritually, following christ Jesus' example. "By universal consent," she writes in the Christian Science textbook Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,m "mortal belief has constituted itself a law to bind mortals to sickness, sin, and death. This customary belief is misnamed material law, and the individual who upholds it is mistaken in theory and in practice. The so-called law of mortal mind, conjectural and speculative, is made void by the law of immortal Mind, and false law should be trampled under foot." n1
n1 Science and Health,m p. 229.
When and infectious or contagious disease is going the rounds, there is no mandatory requirement that we catch it or suffer from it. It is not ourm disease. Knowing that it's essentially an imposition of false mortal law, which is impotent to enforce itself when opposed by the Christly understanding of divine law, we can bar our thought against it and eject it. And every such ejection helps free humanity as a whole from the supposed power of disease.
I had an instantaneous healing of a chill when recognizing that I had unguardedly accepted the general belief in a seasonal malady. Realizing the trouble wasn't mine, or anyone's, and that disease has no place in God's, spirit's, perfect spiritual creation, I was immediately free of it.
Lack, unemployment, riots, are also epidemics. Like disease, they stem from belief in and reliance on constructing material laws, which fluctuate and have no divine basis. On the other hand, spiritual law is certain and governs each identity in God's universe in perfect harmony. Our job is to acknowledge its presence and action. Then this divine law corrects whatever needs correcting in our lives. It acts as a law of obliteration to everything unlike spirit, good.
The understanding that Christian Science gives of our spiritual status as sons and daughters of God enables us to defend ourselves from the pretensions of false law. "God is the lawmaker," asserts Mr. Eddy, "but He is not the author of barbarous codes." n2
n2 ibid.,m p. 381.
Jesus healed in direct contravention of the law that would impose disease and infirmity on mortals. He put down the law that bound people to blindness, palsy , dumbness, deafness, sin, even death. He was in conflict with God's law of perfect harmony. And his disciples, through their spiritualized understanding of true being, were also able to heal. In Acts we read, "There came also a multitude out of the cities around about unto Jerusalem, bringing sick folks, and them which were vexed eith unclean spirits: and they were healed every one." n3
n3 Acts 5:16
God's changeless law of good, explained in Christian Science, empowers every one of us in this age to refute the law that would bind us to occasional or chronic ills of the flesh. DAILY BIBLE VERSE Righteous art thou, O Lord. . . Thy righteousness is an everlasting righteousness, and thy law is the truth. . . . Consider mine affliction, and deliver me: for I do not forget thy law. Psalms 119:137, 142, 153
