IN THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE BIBLE LESSON February 15, 2010 Issue

ONE INTELLIGENT RESOURCE

BRIAN HALL

THE RESPONSIVE READING of this week's Christian Science Bible Lesson, titled "Mind," begins, "My God will enlighten my darkness" (Ps. 18:28). As a student I prayed many times to understand God better as divine Mind—as my source of intelligence. However, while studying this Lesson, I found that it expands this concept of God even further. In Section I, Science and Health explains how spiritual understanding reveals to us that "all is Mind, and that Mind is God, omnipotence, omnipresence, omniscience,—that is, all power, all presence, all Science" (p. 275, citation 1).

One aspect of understanding God as Mind is the healing it brings in people's lives. Jesus perfectly demonstrated this. In citation 11 of the Bible, we find Mark's account of Jesus healing a woman of hemorrhaging. She had spent all of her money on physicians, and yet still never got better. The woman worked her way through a crowd just to touch Jesus' clothing. He sensed this was more than physical contact and asked who touched him. When the woman came forward and told what had happened, and that she was healed, Jesus told her it was her faith that healed her. Some scholars, such as Pheme Perkins in the New Interpreter's Bible Commentary, regard this story as one that separates Jesus from other "miracle" workers because of the immediacy of the healing. Science and Health provides this key insight: "When man is governed by God, the ever-present Mind who understands all things, man knows that with God all things are possible" (p. 180, cit. 21). This explains that it was not so much a power Jesus possessed of his own that allowed him to perform that healing, but rather what he understood—that he was governed by Mind and as such expressed the power of this one infinite intelligence.