Article November 29, 1919 Issue

A Few Teachings from the Bible

CLARENCE A. BUSKIRK

How terse and crisp and noble and true are a vast number of utterances in the Bible! In Proverbs we read concerning "him that hath an evil eye" that "as he thinketh in his heart, so is he." In Psalms we may read that "the fool hath said in his heart, There is no God." These words of the fool are contemptuous; but that God is, stands forever a self-evidemt verity to every wise man, to every one who really thinks. Men may differ among themselves about who or what God is, but that is tha extent of their differences; for we all feel and know the eternal existence of that Supreme Being revealed to Moses as "I am that I am."

The Bible tells us that God is Spirit, and that He is omnipresence. What is termed matter cannot be all-present, in any shape. The so-called physical senses cannot discern God; for He can be discerned only spiritually. Man is conscious of God because man is spiritual. His apparent vestment of matter constitutes no part of his real being; for it is merely temporal and phenomenal. Spirit is self-existent and eternal. Self-existence has no beginning and no ending. That which is a reflection of Spirit is likewise eternal. It is axiomatic that two bodies cannot occupy the same place at the same time. If God is omnipresent, then what are sin, sickness, and death? Is God all-present where sin, sickness, and death appear to be? Yes: because evil in all its aspects is a seeming and not reality,—the same stuff of which the dreams of the night are made.

God is Life; and in Revelation we find the promise, "I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life freely." No one can find any other source of life. Life includes health and harmony; for both are good, as well as essential. Life does not include sickness or death, just as harmony does not include discords. To think of existence as eternal implies a Being who is eternally alive. God is good. He is not relatively good—partly good and partly bad. He is absolutely good. What is called evil is self-destructive. Everything which is of God, therefore, is likewise absolutely good; or, to employ the words of the Bible, "God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good,"—very good, not partly good and partly bad. God never made any form of sin, sickness, death—because they are not good.

Send a comment to the editors

NEXT IN THIS ISSUE

Article

"All these things shall be added"