Impossible? Not to God!
For the Lesson titled "God" from July 1 - 7, 2013
We’ve all encountered challenges that seem impossible to surmount such as spiraling debt, a debilitating illness, a natural disaster. This week’s Christian Science Bible Lesson, titled “God,” offers compelling spiritual encouragement for anyone grappling with such issues. It reminds us that our Father-Mother God is totally good—the only real power in heaven and on earth. Therefore good is not only possible for each of us; it’s inevitable! The final citation in Section 1 summarizes a recurring point in the Lesson: “Good. God; Spirit; omnipotence; omniscience; omnipresence; omni-action” (Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 587, citation 5).
Jesus’ tender words “with God all things are possible” bookend the Lesson, as both Golden Text and the final Bible citation (Matthew 19:26, cit. 24). The Master has just told a wealthy young man that to earn eternal life, he’ll need to liquidate his assets, give the proceeds to the poor, and follow him. Crestfallen, the young man reneges. Afterward, the disciples ask how anybody can be saved if such a wrenching sacrifice is required. Jesus’ reply speaks of God’s all-forgiving grace: “With men this is impossible; but with God all things are possible.”
The final Bible citation in Section 1 echoes the theme of impossibility overcome. After informing the Virgin Mary that she will bear a son named Jesus, who will be the Savior of his people—a son fathered not by a man, but by “the Highest”—the angel Gabriel tells Mary that her elderly cousin Elisabeth, who had all her life been considered “barren,” is now in her sixth month of pregnancy! “For with God nothing shall be impossible” (Luke 1:37, cit. 5).
Gabriel’s words re-echo the angelic words to Abraham centuries earlier, as he learned that he and his aged wife, Sarah, would conceive: “Is any thing too hard for the Lord?” (Genesis 18:14, cit. 9). This idea later appears in Jeremiah’s prophecy of Israel’s liberation (Responsive Reading and cit. 22), where God says, “I am the Lord, the God of all flesh; is anything impossible for me?” (Jeremiah 32:27, New English Bible).
So how do you and I experience goodness that often seems “impossible” to achieve? The first citation from Science and Health points to the answer: “The prayer that reforms the sinner and heals the sick is an absolute faith that all things are possible to God,—a spiritual understanding of Him, an unselfed love” (p. 1, cit. 1). Sections 2 through 5 give powerful biblical examples of this “absolute faith”—each section illustrating a facet of the description of good as “omnipotence; omniscience; omnipresence; omni-action.”
The example of omni-action (in Section 5) comes from Paul’s ministry. The apostle boldly argues to the Athenian Areopagus that—contrary to the Stoic philosophical belief that God dwells in His creation—the exact opposite is true. Instead, we live in God, depending on Him for all life and breath and movement: “In him we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:28, cit. 18). Then, proving that all action takes place in God, the next citation relates Paul’s instantaneous healing of a man who’d been “a cripple from his mother’s womb” (Acts 14:8, cit. 19).
It was this man’s “faith to be healed” (verse 9) that prepared him for healing. And this kind of faith makes the “impossible” possible for all of us.
