In the Christian Science Bible Lesson October 3, 2011 Issue

God saves and delivers

For the lesson titled "Are Sin, Disease, and Death Real?" from October 3–9, 2011

By Christa Kreutz

This week’s Bible Lesson, titled “Are Sin, Disease, and Death Real?” invites us to wake up to the Science of God’s good creation. The Golden Text calls out: “I invite the whole world to turn to me and be saved. I alone am God! No others are real” (Isa. 45:22, Contemporary English Version). And this call is repeated in Section I, citation 5, along with an explanation that it is the very nature of God that saves, as Jeremiah speaks for God, “I am with thee to save thee and to deliver thee” (Jer. 15:20, cit. 3). 

So, in asking the question “Are sin, disease, and death real?” this Lesson answers firmly in the negative. It explains that accepting that triad as reality, shows a lack of science,
 a kind of illusory reality. According to Genesis 1, God’s creation is wholly good, and Mary Baker Eddy called this the “Science of Genesis” (Science and Health, p. 525, cit. 9). This Science, she said, is not based on material “sense-testimony” (p. 249, cit. 10). Therefore, it is not creationism or intelligent design, but Science based on the spiritual evidence of our oneness with God, in whose image we are made (see Gen. 1:27, cit. 6).

Sin, then, would be the suggestion of a separation from God—that which is not God’s likeness. As we read in Section III, King David needed to be freed from sin. He had taken someone else’s wife and had had her husband killed. He might have felt a little remorse, but Second Samuel says that “the thing that David had done displeased the Lord” (11:27, cit. 9). In other words, it was outside of God’s good creation and had no place there. Nathan, a prophet of God, showed David what he had done wrong through a story, related in Second Samuel 12:1–7. David saw the injustice in the story, but didn’t recognize himself in it until Nathan’s Christ-impelled persistence helped him repent of his sins. As Science and Health says, “Only those, who repent of sin and forsake the unreal, can fully understand the unreality of evil” (p. 339, cit. 11).

About the author

Christa Kreutz holds a master’s degree in theological studies. She lives in Elsah, Illinois, and is a visiting professor of religion at Principia College.

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