Timeless Life

Conspiracies can be as harmless as children hiding from a searching playmate, or as dangerous as a coordinated effort to inflict major damage. But the biggest conspiracy of all is exposed in this Bible Lesson titled “Life,” the fiction that man is trapped in an aging mortal body and helpless to stave off the destructive impact of time. “Time-tables of birth and death are so many conspiracies against manhood and womanhood,” Mary Baker Eddy writes in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (p. 246 , citation 10).

The book of Joshua provides powerful biblical examples of how individuals moved to a different rhythm than “the clanging bells of time” (Christian Science Hymnal, No. 418 ), a phrase from a hymn by Ellen M. H. Gates that captures the relentless march of time . Asked to undertake the important mission of investigating the land where the Israelites were headed, Caleb shared the reason for his success, as well as his vigor, more than four decades later: “I wholeheartedly followed the Lord my God” (Joshua 14:8, New Living Translation, see cit. 11.) [This article quotes Bible passages from a variety of translations. All of the passages in the Bible Lesson itself are taken from the King James Version.]

Centuries later, a woman would demonstrate the timelessness of the same life-giving principle that Caleb had discovered, when she wholeheartedly pursued Jesus and was healed of a debilitating disease. The story in Luke 8 (see cit. 15) explains that although crowds surrounded Jesus, he felt the touch of one individual who had exhausted not only her funds, but also possibly her hope, on physicians who had been unsuccessful in curing her. Because of her disease, the woman was considered ceremonially unclean under Jewish law (see Leviticus 15:25 ), perhaps accounting for her efforts at a secretive touch of the Master’s robe. “She came up behind him and touched the fringe of his clothes, and immediately her hemorrhage stopped” (Luke 8:44, New Revised Standard Version).

That she touched the fringe (or “border” in King James Version) may have something to do with the directive to the Israelites to make fringes on their garments to serve as reminders of the special relationship the people had to God, who had freed them: “You have the fringe so that, when you see it, you will remember all the commandments of the Lord and do them, and not follow the lust of your own heart and your own eyes.... I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, to be your God: I am the Lord your God” (Numbers 15:39, 41, New Revised Standard Version).

This woman had certainly been in her own “Egypt,” enslaved by disease, and Christ Jesus freed her with the understanding of man’s indestructible relationship with God, Life. He also acknowledged that her faith, her spiritual receptivity, had made her whole. Mary Baker Eddy illumines the how of this healing: “Mortal man will be less mortal, when he learns that matter never sustained existence and can never destroy God, who is man’s Life” (Science and Health, p. 425 , cit. 15).

Throughout each section, this Bible Lesson teaches that understanding God as eternal Life transforms our experience here and now, as Christ Jesus proved with the raising of Lazarus from his tomb (see John 11, cit. 17). Now the bells no longer clang, but peal with joy!