SONSHIP WITH GOD

JOSEPH CARL MARKSTEIN

Christian Science has revealed man's true status. On page 470 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" Mary Baker Eddy writes: "Man is the expression of God's being. If there ever was a moment when man did not express the divine perfection, then there was a moment when man did not express God, and consequently a time when Deity was unexpressed—that is, without entity. If man has lost perfection, then he has lost his perfect Principle, the divine Mind. If man ever existed without this perfect Principle or Mind, then man's existence was a myth."

God being Spirit, His likeness, man, is necessarily spiritual, not material. He is never in nor of the flesh. Spiritual man is the true son of God; therefore true selfhood is unfallen and eternal, despite physical evidence to the contrary. That which claims to be a material selfhood is an illusion of mortal mind. In our true being we have never been other than the loved child of our Father-Mother God.

To those without a workable understanding of Christian Science the flesh and blood mortal, subject to the frailties of matter—suffering and unhappiness, sickness, discord, and death—is man. "The things which are seen are temporal," declared Paul (II Cor. 4:18); "but the things which are not seen are eternal." Mortal man, visible to human sense, is but the outward mask, a temporal seeming; while spiritual man, unseen to human sense, is eternal. Evil, calling itself sin, sickness, lack, even death, would argue that it can make us forget our true sonship or cause us to become discouraged over ever attaining our divine heritage as God's sons. Is it whispering to us its falsities, and are we believing its lies? For centuries, people believed the earth to be flat, but that did not have any effect upon its being a sphere. Facts are never other than facts, regardless of individual or collective wrong thinking. Human opinion can never change unreality into reality. Man is ever the son of God now, regardless of material evidence.

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