Article July 20, 1981 Issue

Before, and after, the world

FRANCES M. GIBSON

In healing, an understanding acceptance of man's preexistence in God is helpful. Preexistence means that our origin and destiny are one and the same—spiritual being. Before matter and mortal man claimed existence, the spiritual man is. Spiritual man exists always.

Christ Jesus showed his deep understanding of this preexistence when the Jews referred to him as under fifty years old. In reply to their mockery, he said, "Before Abraham was, I am."^{John 8:58.}

We can all have recourse to an understanding of spiritual preexistence in proving harmless the seeming trials imposed by the beliefs of life and intelligence in matter. And so we can resort to the grandeur and glory of our spiritual origin—reality. After speaking of the Christ as being unconscious of matter and conscious only of God, Mrs. Eddy writes: "Hence the human Jesus had a resort to his higher self and relation to the Father, and there could find rest from unreal trials in the conscious reality and royalty of his being,—holding the mortal as unreal, and the divine as real. It was this retreat from material to spiritual selfhood which recuperated him for triumph over sin, sickness, and death." She continues, "Had he been as conscious of these evils as he was of God, wherein there is no consciousness of human error, Jesus could not have resisted them...."^{No and Yes, p. 36.}