Beholding God's Creation
`I CAN'T believe it, I just can't believe it!" This is something we often hear someone say after learning of some bad news. Although the words are usually followed by reluctant acceptance, don't they indicate people's natural resistance to accepting evil into their lives? There is more, however, to rejecting evil than just an emotional knee-jerk response.
Christ Jesus' response to news of his friend's sickness was to assure the disciples, ``This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God might be glorified thereby." Lazarus was subsequently revived from death because, instead of seeing a mortal, Jesus beheld ``the glory of God"--God's perfect creation, perfect man and universe.
I've found that these spiritual ideas can be as helpful today as they were in the time Jesus healed. One evening my three-year-old daughter and I were playing in the hall, practicing gymnastics. As I was rolling forward I inadvertently hit her in the face with my foot, which then came down on her foot. Filled with concern for her, I immediately gathered her into my arms to comfort her. Her face and upper lip became badly swollen, and even after she stopped crying she wasn't able to walk because her foot hurt. I had promptly begun to pray, reasoning that I had a scientific basis to deny this evil. A quotation from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, helped me see that accidents and injuries are not God-created. She writes: ``God creates all forms of reality. His thoughts are spiritual realities." I reasoned that in order for anything to be real or valid it must be created by God. God's thoughts are realities; if something isn't c reated by God it isn't real. Only the thoughts of God are real. The extremely compelling evidence of evil presented to me by my daughter's injury could not be real because it did not have its source in God, good. Man, I had learned from studying the Bible, is the child of God, of divine Spirit. Since like produces like, God's creation, man, must be as spiritual and perfect as God is. In reality, a spiritual idea is not subject to materiality and its laws of accident. I had a good reason, then--a Bible-based , scientific reason--to deny the accident and injuries. They were not of God. In fact, they were utterly foreign to Him.
Although I had glimpsed just a little of this truth about spiritual reality, it was enough to make me unreservedly drop all mortal beliefs and fears about the incident. I love my daughter very much, and I knew that to follow Jesus' example of spiritual healing was really the most wonderful thing I could do for her.
My daughter usually sleeps through the night but that night she woke up at four in the morning and called me to her room. ``Daddy, my foot is OK," was all she said. Her face was also absolutely normal. Not even a hint of injury or swelling was visible. She then went right back to sleep. In the morning, when I asked her about waking during the night, she said she didn't remember. In fact, she couldn't even recall being hurt the evening before. This confirmed the accuracy of my earlier reasoning that somet hing which was not created by God had no recognizable, legitimate history--no reality at all.
The Bible tells us in II Timothy, ``Be instant in season, out of season." When confronted with illness, sin, or lack, we can immediately deny evil from a scientific basis. A glimpse of God's perfect, spiritual creation gives us this basis, and the process need not take time, just our consent.
