PERSPECTIVE ON THE NEWS November 26, 1979 Issue

The good news of the Bible

Amid headlines of rising oil prices, famine, and aggressive political confrontation, an occasion such as National Bible Week can remind us of some very basic good news. News all the more heartening because it will never be swept away by a freshet of negative developments. Thanks to the Bible, we can feel today the profound gladness voiced in these words from Isaiah: "How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace; that bringeth good tidings of good, that publisheth salvation; that saith unto Zion, Thy God reigneth!"^{Isa. 52:7;}

"God reigneth!" Isn't this message at the Bible's core? Contained in its pages are countless case histories of God's supreme control—first vividly recognized by spiritually-minded men and women and then evidenced outwardly: a nation rescued from famine, a city delivered from besieging armies, prisoners of conscience suddenly freed, congenital defects healed, even death itself subjugared. Occurrences such as these richly document Mary Baker Eddy's statement in Science and Health, "The central fact of theBible is the superiority of spiritual over physical power."^{Science and Health, p. 131;}

Such events also buoy one's confidence that the good tidings of the Bible are more than a refuge from the bad tidings of the morning headlines. The spiritual and scientific facts that underlie its good news can themselves be decisive shapers of world events as men and women implement Bible truths in the staging ground of daily life and then apply them through prayer to problems of a global scale. "The superiority of spiritual over physical power" is a fact mankind simply can't afford to relegate to the status of a myth or confine to the pretechnological past.

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