In Christianity’s early days, one of the budding movement’s most spiritually minded men was murdered. Rage motivated the actions of a mob, and for a moment evil seemed to have triumphed over good—presenting the very inverse of Christianity’s message to the world.

Yet, something that underscored that message occurred right where evil appeared to have prevailed. Stephen lived the Christian love he had preached. His final words, infinitely gracious, were a prayer for his persecutors—spoken in a loud voice so that they’d hear—“Lord, lay not this sin to their charge” (Acts 7:60).

The healing love Stephen’s life epitomized wasn’t extinguished in that moment, but magnified. His unbowed goodness in the face of evil had a lasting effect through the impact it had on the life of one of those present at Stephen’s killing. The man, Saul—one of the most ardent persecutors of Jesus’ followers—was later transformed and became the Apostle Paul, who boldly shared Christ’s message far and wide. His words and deeds remain inspiring and fruitful to this day.

While we can’t know precisely what part Stephen’s forgiveness played in that transformation, we know from the Scriptures that Paul’s life echoed and even amplified Stephen’s example of standing for good in the face of evil. Following his dramatic life turnaround, Paul experienced many harsh circumstances (see II Corinthians 11:23–27). He was in a shipwreck, unjustly jailed, and even brutally stoned. Yet through his spiritual understanding, along with the loving prayers of fellow Christians, good prevailed over all those evils. From the perspective of such proofs, Paul said, “I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38, 39).

Even in the midst of our most heart-rending human struggles, we too can be persuaded of this spiritual inseparability from Love, God, and increasingly gain in our conviction of the power of divine goodness over the evils we face. In particular, the teachings of Christian Science encourage us to recognize that God’s goodness is not only more powerful than evil, but infinite in nature, which in turn calls into question the very claim of evil’s apparent reality.

Certainly, evil feels painfully real if we hear of a tragedy that cannot be humanly reversed—like those early Christians learning of Stephen’s stoning. But even then we have a choice. We can yield to the pull to accept the finality of the news, or see it as a material report that is a flash in the pan compared to the substance of the good life it might seem to obscure.

Even in the midst of heart-rending struggle we can be persuaded of our inseparability from God.

Even more profoundly, we can strongly challenge the commonsense, but spiritually invalid, conclusion that evil has truly been able to rob anyone of even a moment of their eternal inseparability from God’s goodness. That’s what came to me following news of a friend tragically killed while engaged in selfless service. At first I felt shocked by what had happened. It seemed that God, good, had been absent when tragedy struck. But in the relative solitude of a seven-hour transatlantic flight, I prayed persistently to challenge the evidence of evil’s victory by striving to attain Paul’s higher perception—the Christ-idea of our spiritual inseparability from Love. From that viewpoint it becomes clear that God isn’t ever absent, not for a moment. That doesn’t mean God is present in the unjust circumstances themselves, or merely standing by. It means that God is truly present instead of whatever circumstances, including sickness, sinfulness, and death, suggest the opposite.

Glimpsing this brought to thought an idea from Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. Like Paul, Mrs. Eddy courageously overcame countless challenges arrayed against her heartfelt labors to “reinstate primitive Christianity and its lost element of healing” (Manual of The Mother Church, p. 17). So it was with the authority of those proofs of God’s ever-present power that the Discoverer of Christian Science wrote: “We lose the high signification of omnipotence, when after admitting that God, or good, is omnipresent and has all-power, we still believe there is another power, named evil” (Science and Health, p. 469).

As I pondered this idea, I saw how details of a tragedy are a matter-based report, a material sense of a moment in time. But we all have recourse to a spiritual sense of what’s going on in any situation—a timeless, divine perspective that perceives only God’s view of creation.

As my thought yielded to that divine sense, I found myself, to use Paul’s word, persuaded that there had never been a moment when my friend wasn’t God’s spiritual offspring, at one with, and panoplied in, God’s infinite love. On seeing that, I felt such a heartwarming sense of the qualities that made up her unique, divine identity and felt clear that they were going on, untouched by the narrative of evil versus good that would claim to disrupt the infinite order of God’s harmonious creation. I also recognized the ever-ongoing good of all the seeds of healing love she had sown in other lives by humanly expressing her God-reflecting goodness. And I felt a firm commitment to witness to the irrepressible nature of goodness indicated in this statement from Mary Baker Eddy’s Miscellaneous Writings 1883–1896: “In the battle of life, good is made more industrious and persistent because of the supposed activity of evil. The elbowing of the crowd plants our feet more firmly” (p. 339). 

Ultimately, evil’s activity is always “supposed,” because if evil acts were true, the ceaseless inseparability from God that Paul discerned would be a myth. But Love never pauses, and God’s creation is forever one with that ever-present Love. Knowing that, we can echo and amplify whatever good that evil would claim to steal away by taking a stand to live even more consistently on the basis of these spiritual ideas. 

Tony Lobl
Associate Editor