Good is natural

The first chapter of Genesis in the Bible sets forth God’s spiritual creation. The idea that “God saw that it was good” is repeated over and over. Once, when noticing this repeated phrase, I looked up the word “good” in the Glossary of “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures” by Mary Baker Eddy, the discoverer of Christian Science, and found that the first definition is “God” (see p. 587).

So I went back to those verses and read them as “God saw that it was God.” I realized that these statements weren’t describing God seeing something separate from Himself and recognizing its goodness; what God was seeing as His creation was His own self-expression.

That gave me a broader view of the allness, completeness, and oneness of God and His creation, including man. And because man – meaning each one of us, God’s children – is a spiritual being, the image and likeness of God, we naturally have dominion over anything that appears to be the opposite of God, good, despite what the physical senses, or matter-based perceptions, may be reporting as real.

These ideas became practical for me when I became very sick while on a vacation trip, experiencing stomach pain along with difficulty eating and getting around. The Christian Science practitioner I called to pray for me encouraged me to turn my thought away from what I was feeling physically to the spiritual understanding of my oneness with God, Spirit, in whom I “live, and move, and have [my] being” (Acts 17:28).

She said that in doing so, I could have a “vacation” from the belief that matter could have any power over me. As the practitioner and I prayed together for several days, the pain and restriction diminished until I was well. From this experience, I saw more clearly that my peace, health, completeness, and joy depended not on what was going on in my body but on what was happening in my consciousness of God.

Any disturbing picture is no part of God’s entirely good creation. It is a counterfeit of God’s creation, and while it may appear to be very real, Christian Science reverses this appearance of reality by lifting human consciousness into the light of spiritual Truth. In this light we can view and experience the good that’s inherent in us as God’s image and likeness and in life as the expression of the divine Life.

We don’t have to do anything to make good real. The one creative Mind, God, has already done that, and this Mind forever knows that good is the only reality. All good is present for us to recognize and express through spiritual sense, which Science and Health describes as “a conscious, constant capacity to understand God” (p. 209). And utilizing this spiritual sense, this recognition of ever-present good, is prayer that takes form in our lives as redemption, reformation, and healing.

Nearly 2,000 years ago, Christ Jesus’ clear spiritual sense enabled him to take in only the facts of God’s spiritual reality as he reformed sinners, healed the sick, raised the dead, walked on water, fed multitudes, and so much more. Science and Health tells us, “Jesus beheld in Science the perfect man, who appeared to him where sinning mortal man appears to mortals. In this perfect man the Saviour saw God’s own likeness, and this correct view of man healed the sick” (pp. 476-477).

This Science that Mrs. Eddy discovered was demonstrated by Jesus and others in the Bible, and it’s still operating as law in human consciousness to free mankind from material sense and its effects on our experience. Science leads humanity out of the darkness of material sense to the light of divine reality, where we find the power that heals any belief in an authority and presence apart from God, good.

Through our inherent spiritual sense, we all have an unlimited capacity to overcome such false beliefs. In prayer, we can listen for Christ, God’s message of love, which fills our thought with what’s true and leaves no room for false knowledge of man as mortal or governed by matter. We are whole, loved, and satisfied right now.

Forever under God’s perfect government, we dwell in His kingdom, where harmony reigns, and so are free to exercise our spiritual sense and experience divine goodness in our lives in ways that are just right for us and in harmony with others.

Adapted from an article published in the July 22, 2024, issue of the Christian Science Sentinel.