Article October 16, 1995 Issue

You are unfallen

Gary Wayne Doran

The Bible tells us in various places and through different metaphors that everything God created is good, perfect, eternally upright. Man, as God's image, must express this perfect state of being.

Yet, when we look around at the world through the human senses, we see so many things wrong, a "fallen" world. What happened? Did the good things that God originally created go bad? Did some other power come in and take the goodness away from the spiritual things God created? If either of these hypotheses is true, then God really isn't omnipotent. Yet the Master, Christ Jesus, proved for all time God's omnipotence.

Jesus also warned us, however, of the deceptive nature of the material senses. He called the devil "a liar, and the father of it" (John 8:44). The Christian Science textbook, Science and Health by Mary Baker Eddy, helps us see that this "liar" is material sense. This book includes the following explanation of devil: "Evil; a lie; ... the lust of the flesh, which saith: 'I am life and intelligence in matter. There is more than one mind, for I am mind,—a wicked mind, self-made or created by a tribal god and put into the opposite of mind, termed matter, thence to reproduce a mortal universe, including man, not after the image and likeness of Spirit, but after its own image'" (p. 584).