Editorial June 15, 1935 Issue

Divine Deliverance

W. Stuart Booth

How frequently are the experiences of various Bible characters seen to prefigure those of present-day humanity! And what helpful, inspiring, and directive lessons may be learned from the lives of those who, through faith in God and obedience to their highest sense of right, delivered from from evil, provided with human necessities, delivered from disaster! Naturally, he who stands pre-eminent among these and other men of all time is Christ Jesus, for his spiritual teachings, loving life, and complete work verified his Messiahship and marked him as the Exemplar or Way-shower for all mankind. He not only declared and demonstrated the illegitimacy and impotence of all evil, including sickness, sin, and death, but also promised that his followers should fully prove the power of God even as he did. The Master was familiar with the Old Testament characters; he referred to them, and drew helpful lessons from their experiences.

Of Noah we read that in the midst of sin, perversity, and corruption he "was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God." Owing to his clear spiritual vision he must have foreseen that because of evil's self-destroying nature those who clung to evil as if it were a satisfying and powerful reality would be engulfed in and overwhelmed by the waves of retribution and fear. Also, Noah must have discerned the fact that these mental waves would be objectified in a flood of water, for he obediently built him "an ark of gospher wood" into which he and his family went when the destroying flood came upon the earth. Thus, for Noah and those who were with him mentally and physically, the waters served but to lift them higher, and they were delivered from destruction.

Considered in the revealing light of Christian Science, Noah and his experience with the ark point practical and needed lessons for men of today. Because of the idolatrous tendency of the mortal or carnal mind, spiritually unenlightened humanity continues mistakenly to regard matter as both cause and effect, as being substantial and conscious, and hence as the seat of both pleasure and pain—yes, of life itself. These beliefs are blasphemous, because they deny the omnipresence and omnipotence of God, infinite divine Mind; and so they naturally engender other ungodly beliefs, such as fear, animality, hate, jealousy, greed, and resentment; these in turn find expression in limitation and lack, sickness and sorrow, discord and death—a disheartening picture, indeed, for those who are not yet acquainted with God, divine Life, Love, and Truth.

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