Accept God’s testimony

In this week’s Christian Science Bible Lesson on the subject “Unreality,” Mark’s Gospel reports that Jesus began his public ministry with this astonishing and courageous statement: “The time is fulfilled” (1:15, citation 15). In a way, at the time, this statement was the signal that the long-awaited fulfilling of God’s promise had come to pass.

For me, this Lesson brings a wonderful sense of the immediacy of Jesus’ announcement, and of our participation in its fulfillment. It’s interesting that though the word testimonial is generally used to describe physical or material evidence, this common use is reversed in the Responsive Reading. The Psalmist declared, “I have stuck unto thy testimonies” (119:31); here, the idea is to testify to what God is seeing, rather than what our material senses perceive. Sticking with God’s testimonies, or judgments, could imply that we are asking Him to open our eyes, that we may behold “wondrous things” out of His law (119:18). The New English Bible puts it this way: “Take the veil from my eyes, that I may see the marvels that spring from thy law.” As this Lesson continually points out, the most wonderful of those marvels is what God testifies about every one of us.

I found each section in the Lesson directly challenges the testimony of the material senses—whether appetites, debility, or fatigue. But we are not powerless in the face of their assumed dictatorship. For instance, Section II points out that “the kingdom of God is not meat and drink; but . . . joy in the Holy Ghost” (Rom. 14:17, cit. 7). This section specifically deals with the assurance that relief from excessive eating is possible and that the key is to seek the spiritual, resting on the fact that material testimony is powerless. “This new-born understanding,” wrote Mary Baker Eddy, “that neither food nor the stomach, without the consent of mortal mind, can make one suffer, brings with it another lesson,—that gluttony is a sensual illusion, and that this phantasm of mortal mind disappears as we better apprehend our spiritual existence and ascend the ladder of life” (Science and Health, pp. 221–222, cit.7).

I had to look up that word phantasm, and found that it means a product of fantasy or delusion—its opposite being God’s testimony, and what the Psalmist said he “stuck unto.” The idea that excess is a fantasy naturally leads to the spiritual solution offered in Science and Health: “Let the slave of wrong desire learn the lessons of Christian Science, and he will get the better of that desire, and ascend a degree in the scale of health, happiness, and existence” (p. 407, cit. 9). I like the everyday practical Christianity that this statement calls out—a truth that can directly result in defeating the grip of unproductive appetites.

Jesus’ healing of a man with a deformed hand is another example of how practical Christianity is (Mark 3:1–5, cit. 16). Jesus in effect asked the man to reverse the physical testimony—from one of deformity to wholeness. The healing took place despite fierce opposition to Jesus’ public practice. Though Jesus was angry at the crowd that day and “grieved for the hardness of their hearts,” he overrode that resistance. “Hardness of heart,” according to The Anchor Bible, is “obdurate stupidity” and denotes “Jesus’ impatience with those whose dedication to the law (the letter) was coupled with moral obtuseness” (The Gospel of Mark, p. 243). The man who was healed took his first brave step by extending his hand, as Jesus had asked him to do, restoring it “whole as the other.” Science and Health describes the understanding that could produce such a change: “Inasmuch as God is good and the fount of all being, He does not produce moral or physical deformity; therefore such deformity is not real, but is illusion, the mirage of error. Divine Science reveals these grand facts. On their basis Jesus demonstrated Life, never fearing nor obeying error in any form” (pp. 243–244, cit. 16).

Throughout, this Lesson points to the fact that the testimony of spiritual healing has profound promise for everyone.

“Jesus marked out the way,” wrote Mary Baker Eddy. “Citizens of the world, accept the ‘glorious liberty of the children of God,’ and be free! This is your divine right” (Science and Health, p. 227, cit. 17). We can happily sing out this freedom, and have the promise that God, too, “will joy over thee with singing” (Zeph. 3:17, cit. 22).

If this is the reward of sticking with God’s testimony, then the Lesson has outlined a race worth running.

David Robertson is a Christian Science practitioner and teacher in Stanfordville, New York.

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