What God Knows
IT can sometimes throw a useful light on troubles that we feel enmeshed in to sit down and consider quite seriously whether God is conscious of them.
It's a startling question, when you think about it. The answer has to be, No, God couldn't be conscious of troubles. If He were, He would be conscious, or aware, of a highly imperfect creation, and He would be responsible for evil as well as good.
It doesn't make any sense, for example, to think of God's knowing unemployment. We simply can't conceive of infinite divine intelligence, or Mind, being unable to provide endlessly productive, worthwhile purpose and employment for His man. God is the source of all the good and the right ideas that exist. Man, who is made wholly in God's image and is spiritual--the son, or expression, of God, Spirit--naturally includes those ideas and is impelled and moved by them.
It is possible to see also that hate and bitterness cannot possibly be included in divine consciousness. Christ Jesus, in teaching that we should not hate but should love, made the point that we must be the children of God, our Father. Mary Baker Eddy, who discovered and founded Christian Science, explains, "Divine Love knows no hate; for hate, or the hater, is nothing: God never made it, and He made all that was made (Miscellaneous Writings).
If we can't conceive of God, who is infinitely good, knowing of embittered relations, unemployment, and sickness, does it make sense to think in terms of putting all our effort into informing Him of such difficulties through prayer? Or wouldn't the primary object of our prayer be to come into recognition of more of what God does know?
To get on with opening thought to only what God knows, which is solely and wonderfully good, is to come to know Him better and to feel the effect of divine Love in practical ways here and now. It does not make us wonder if God knows us and knows our need; on the contrary, we feel His care and are more assured that His love answers our need.
As we are aligned with God's true nature, and so feel the closeness of divine Love, we become more conscious of the coincidence of the human and the divine--the fact that divine Love is never absent. It increases our sense that God hears and answers our prayers, cares for us, helps and heals us. But it also opens our eyes to the Science of Christianity, taking us out of the darkness of mortal and material impressions of existence into God's unlimited and total spiritual reality.
It is certainly something other than our physical state or material circumstances that has the capacity to lift us or heal us. Christian Science refers to this power as the Christ, or true idea of God, which is still present with mankind. It was this Christ and Holy Ghost, the revelation of what God knows--not what a human being is all too familiar with--that gave the original impulsion to Christian Science. Speaking of some of the powerful healing experiences she had seen result from her consciousnes s that the infinite God recognizes no disease, Mrs. Eddy writes in Unity of Good: "Certain self-proved propositions pour into my waiting thought in connection with these experiences; and here is one such conviction: that an acknowledgment of the perfection of the infinite Unseen confers a power nothing else can.
To know more of what God knows is to experience much more of life as God actually created it--when, as the Bible says, "God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.
This is a condensed version of an editorial that appeared in the December 16, 1991, issue of the Christian Science Sentinel.