Is life fair?

Many would argue that it's anything butm fair. In a world where large numbers of innocent people are deprived of basic freedoms, where inequality seems rampant and malnutrition all too prevalent, where so many are handicapped, we may wonder if justice can ever be found.

Clearly, mortal existence doesn't seem fair. But that doesn't mean we're without hope. Nor does it mean that God is absent or unwilling to help. ''God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble,'' n1 the Bible assures us. And many are proving that fact today when confronted with the injustice of disease or deprivation. They're finding healing through the perception that true existence transcends what the senses take in; that God is indeed supreme and that divine justice is unfailing, despite the often persuasive evidence of its absence.

n1 Psalm 46:1.

In the face of injustice we often tend to assume either that there's no God or that God has for some reason allowed or caused the injustice. Could it be, though, that the manifestations of evil point, not to God's absence or to His will for man, but to a demand for humanity to better understand His absolute power and love?

The Bible tells us that God is Love. Divine Love couldn't be unjust. A loving creator wouldn't and couldn't afflict His creation or permit suffering. And that's the very truth that Christ Jesus illustrated for mankind. His answer to the injustice of sickness and deformity was healing. The Master didn't accept such conditions as facts of life or as the outcome of God's will; he evidently viewed them as fraudulent contradictions of divine law, which supersedes and overrules the cruel impositions of material existence. And so he could say with divine authority to the man with the withered hand, ''Stretch forth thine hand, '' and effect a complete healing. The Bible tells us the man ''stretched it forth; and it was restored whole, like as the other.'' n2

n2 Matthew 12:13.

On another occasion Jesus healed a man who had been born blind, making it clear to his disciples that the evil had no divine cause: ''Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.'' n3

n3 John 9:3.

Material existence may not seem fair. But life isn't, in its truest sense, material and discordant, because God didn't make it that way. God, Love, couldn't have created the suffering reported by the physical senses. Everything God created is good, as we can read in the very first chapter of the Bible. So whatever isn't good isn't God-created, and therefore has no divine basis. And because evil conditions have no divine basis, they are subject to destruction through the universal authority of God's law.

The message of the eternal, healing Christ, which Jesus so fully exemplified, is that good is the reality, not evil. The message of the Christ is that everyone's actual selfhood at this moment is complete, fulfilled, perfectly formed and governed by the one infinitely loving creator. The message of the Christ is that true existence is spiritual and unending - expressing the nature of God, divine Spirit - not corporeal and destructible.

Clearly, humanity has a long way to go before these truths are fully demonstrated. But they can be progressively demonstrated, both in our individual lives and in the world as a whole. And the reason for this is that God, good, is the only genuine power. ''All reality is in God and His creation, harmonious and eternal,'' writes Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science. ''That which He creates is good, and He makes all that is made. Therefore the only reality of sin, sickness, or death is the awful fact that unrealities seem real to human, erring belief, until God strips off their disguise. They are not true, because they are not of God.'' n4

n4 Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 472.

It takes work to prove this - loyalty to the one God in all that we say and do; heartfelt prayer that acknowledges God's supremacy for the benefit of all mankind as well as ourselves; inspired study and living of Scriptural truths. But because good is the reality, our step-by-step success is assured. We'll prove that life, the only genuine life, is the outcome of God, divine Life, and is therefore universally fair. DAILY BIBLE VERSE There is no God else beside me; a just God and a Savior. Isaiah 45:21 3 John 9:3. 4 Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 472.