Certainty

When Moses, searching for the definition of God which would give most authority to his message to the children of Israel, turned to Mind, the answer came: "And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you." Since there are almost any number of terms for God used in the Bible, it is interesting to consider why Moses was led to use this particular one. He had to deal with a suppressed and fear-filled people. Their experience had been such that they might well have been agnostic, have doubted whether there is a God who is Love or Truth or Spirit. If Moses had tried to appeal to them in any of these names he might have met with no response. However, no man lives or ever has lived, be he ever so forlorn and benighted, who does not know and use the term "I am." All that he knows about it may seem very dreary to him, yet the fact remains that the one thing he is quite incapable of conceiving is complete vacuum; he is absolutely sure of some kind of being. When, therefore, Moses was impelled to say, "I AM hath sent me unto you," he really said: I speak to you in the name of and with the authority of all that you are sure of at present. He himself was sure of much more, but he had to reach them.

Once they had yielded to this authority, as they could not but do, since they knew it to be real, they began immediately by actual demonstration, by their passage through the Red Sea and by their experiences in the wilderness, to be sure of more, to be sure that God not only is, but that He is Love, omnipotent and omnipresent. Their initial admission continued to expand and to bear fruit and to bless them throughout their history until there came Jesus the Christ, who was sure of God in all His fullness and who spoke with the authority of this certainty. He was so sure of Him as Spirit that he said and proved that "the flesh profiteth nothing;" so sure of Him as Love that he fearlessly forgave those who betrayed him; so sure of Him as infinite Mind that he could tell the Samaritan woman of what had gone before and his disciples of what was to come; so sure of Him as substance that he walked on the water and fed the multitude; and so sure of Him as Life eternal that the crucifixion was but a step in his triumph.

When nineteen centuries later, Mary Baker Eddy had determined to her satisfaction that God is indeed all that Christ Jesus proved Him to be and had boldly accepted for herself all the implications of her discovery, she was confronted, as Moses was, with the problem of how to speak with authority to a world much in need of what she had to give. Like Moses, she turned to Mind, and, discarding all compromise with old theology or natural science, defined Him as "God. The great I AM; the all-knowing, all-seeing, all-acting, all-wise, all-loving, and eternal; Principle; Mind; Soul; Spirit; Life; Truth; Love; all substance; intelligence" (Science and Health, p. 587). Everything that she wrote, the healing and teaching that she did, the avenues which she provided for the protection and dissemination of Christian Science were all based on this definition. The world she found was not the world that Moses knew, for ever since the demonstrations of Jesus the Christ, it had accepted in belief at least his definition of God, and by this acceptance had prepared the way for recognition of the authority with which Mrs. Eddy spoke when she once more enunciated and demonstrated this definition. From the start an ever growing number of people have recognized the reality of her authority and have striven to base their living no longer on a jumble of assumptions but upon what they know about God.