IN THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE BIBLE LESSON June 9, 2008 Issue

SAVED BY GOD'S LIBERATING MESSAGES

CHRISTA KREUTZ

PRESERVATION IS A HOT TOPIC wherever you turn. Marketers offer various products, diets, and fitness routines promising to preserve our bodies. Political candidates promote plans for national preservation. And the preservation of the earth itself occupies personal and global agendas. As I studied this week's Christian Science Bible Lesson on "God the Preserver of Man," I found wonderful guidance—for individuals, communities, and our world—in its angel-messages of divine preservation.

As I approached this Lesson, I asked myself, What is God preserving us from? Are there actual destructive forces from which we need to be delivered? Mary Baker Eddy posed the question this way in Science and Health: "What is this supposed power, which opposes itself to God?" (p. 224, citation 2). This Lesson shows that the "supposed power" is nothing more than various mistaken beliefs that we are separate from God and personally responsible for our own lives.

The Exodus story of the Israelites escaping slavery in Egypt helped clarify these points for me, showing that there is no destructive evil force that can hold people in bondage, and that in the presence of divine Love, evil is self-destroyed. At first glance it might look as if God were rescuing the Israelites from evil people, the Egyptians. But it is the evil practices of oppression and slavery that have to give way to God's liberating compassion.