“As soon as we knew it wasn’t real, it was over.” That’s how my friends described nearly being scammed out of a significant amount of money. They had received an upsetting phone call from someone posing as a relative in trouble and in need of money.
Distraught by the call, my friends began getting funds together to send. But they were also praying – as they normally would do for a loved one in trouble – and their prayers led them to do a little more checking. This revealed the falsity of the situation. My friends and their loved one were safe, and they reported the attempted scam to the police.
The idea, “As soon as we knew it wasn’t real, it was over,” resonated with me. And it reminded me of a passage from “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures” by Mary Baker Eddy that is included in this week’s Bible lesson addressing the question, “Are Sin, Disease, and Death Real?” It says, “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” (pp. 243-244).
What seemed like sin, or “moral deformity” – in this case, the attempt to take advantage of innocent people – could not come from God, who is all good. Further, no one’s true nature can be both good and bad (or innocent and sinful), because we all have our source in God, good, “the fount of all being.” Anything that would say otherwise has to be an illusion, a mistaken view of our real being as God’s creation – His entirely spiritual, pure, and loving offspring.
Science and Health also tells us, “To get rid of sin through Science, is to divest sin of any supposed mind or reality, and never to admit that sin can have intelligence or power, pain or pleasure. You conquer error by denying its verity” (p. 339).
As my friends experienced, prayer helps bring to light in our consciousness the spiritual reality of everyone’s inherent goodness, divesting sin, or wrongdoing, of any power to harm. Such prayer also has the potential to bring freedom from finding pleasure in sin.
If one type of error about our real identity as God’s spiritual offspring can be conquered through prayer, can other errors – such as mental health issues – be defeated as well?
There’s a Bible story in this week’s lesson that speaks to that question (see Mark 5:1-15). In the account, Christ Jesus meets a man described as having “an unclean spirit,” who says his “name is Legion: for we are many.”
To me, this symbolizes the many forms – or legions – of error that can seem very aggressive. In a symbolic move, Jesus sends the “unclean spirits” into a herd of swine numbering about 2,000, which illustrates the many errors Jesus is casting out. The entire herd runs off and is choked in the sea, and the man is healed, free from the legion of errors that had tormented him.
What gave Jesus the power to cast out these errors, and what can that mean for us? Science and Health says, “The power of Christian Science and divine Love is omnipotent. It is indeed adequate to unclasp the hold and to destroy disease, sin, and death” (p. 412). Jesus relied on God, divine Love, as the only power in every healing – whether he was freeing someone from a physical or mental affliction, feeding multitudes of people, or calming a storm.
God, being eternal, is as present now as He was in Jesus’ day, and we can rely on divine Love to prove the reality of good and the unreality of error in every aspect of our lives. We all can pray to know that error in any form isn’t real – isn’t created by God, the only real power. And with this conviction, we can confidently trust that any supposed error is “over” – with healing effect.
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