Testimony of Healing May 27, 2013 Issue

A Sunday School lesson and healing

Margaret Wylie

When I was 13, I began to attend a Christian Science Sunday School. On my first day, the teacher asked a question and I was so pleased to know the answer. We had just read the account of Jacob’s struggles the night before he was to meet Esau on his return home. Esau had vowed to kill Jacob because Jacob had tricked their father into giving him the blessing instead of Esau (see Genesis 32).

The teacher’s question was “Who was Jacob struggling with?” Of course, I knew the answer because we had just read it in the Bible and it said plainly that Jacob struggled with a man. I was quite surprised (and a bit chagrined) when the teacher said, “No,” and then she told how Jacob’s struggle is further explained by Mary Baker Eddy in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. Mrs. Eddy points out that “Jacob was alone, wrestling with error,—struggling with a mortal sense of life, substance, and intelligence as existent in matter with its false pleasures and pains,—when an angel, a message from Truth and Love, appeared to him and smote the sinew, or strength, of his error, till he saw its unreality; and Truth, being thereby understood, gave him spiritual strength in this Peniel of divine Science” (p. 308).

I’ve always been grateful for this lesson, which showed the need to get the spiritual sense of the Bible instead of just its literal interpretation. Many years later, this particular Bible account brought a much-needed healing.

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