Article February 12, 2018 Issue

Your identity as God’s idea

Mark Swinney

As its Discoverer, Mary Baker Eddy explained the Science of Christianity to mankind through her book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. One line from that book reads: “… infinite space is peopled with God’s ideas, reflecting Him in countless spiritual forms” (p. 503). This certainly is an illuminating perspective on existence, and brings fresh meaning to the word idea. When we’re striving to find a solution, direction, or the inspiration to create something, getting a new idea is always encouraging. Then, acting on the idea—working through a process to bring it to fruition—makes it tangible.

With God’s ideas, though, it works differently. The Bible talks about the Mind that was in Christ Jesus (see Philippians 2:5). God is the divine and ever-present Mind, creator of the one true universe, an entirely spiritual universe that encompasses everyone. God, divine Spirit, is matterless, so it follows that His creation is also.

I remember how happy I was to discover that each individual idea of Mind is free of faults. This spiritual truth has no exceptions. It opened my thought for the first time to the fact that I am a unique, whole, spiritual idea of God—as we all are. Up to that point, I had been going right along with the belief that real identity is based in matter and imperfection. But Mrs. Eddy explains in The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany: “God creates man perfect and eternal in His own image. Hence man is the image, idea, or likeness of perfection—an ideal which cannot fall from its inherent unity with divine Love, from its spotless purity and original perfection” (p. 262).

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