The nuclear challenge

Where is the world headed? Can we somehow stop the forces that would impel worldwide destruction? Powerful issues trouble people in this nuclear age. And because such questions carry huge implications, they can't be brushed aside with simplistic answers. But there arem answers, authoritative answers based on eternal truth, and we can discern them.

We can't come to the most meaningful conclusions, however, by endless wrestling with appearances, by dwelling on fluctuating outward conditions and labeling them ''truth.'' Truth, in its deepest sense, is unchanging, spiritual; it transcends and overrules the threats of these times - the unenlightened, even sinister ideologies, the destructive weapons, the selfishness and sensualism. Through innate spiritual sense each of us can see beyond the temporal manifestations of evil to the supremacy of divine power, of Almighty God, Truth itself.

Isn't what we're witnessing today - particularly in relation to the threat of nuclear destruction - the ultimate, wholly evil supposition that matter has the power to destroy Spirit, to destroy God and His good creation, including man? This claim might be likened to the ''great red dragon'' we read of in the book of Revelation. The fate of the dragon? It ''was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world.'' n1

n1 Revelation 12:9.

The great deceptive claim of evil is, in effect, that matter and evil are power rather than Spirit, the one supreme God. This lie inflates itself to dragon-like proportions, arguing that all of life is at the mercy of matter. But is it? Is matter conscious power? Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, writes, ''The great red dragon symbolizes a lie, - the belief that substance, life, and intelligence can be material.'' n2

n2 Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 563

If God is Spirit, the only authentic creator and power, as the Bible reveals, then substance, life, and intelligence must truly be spiritual, indestructible. Man's actual being, even though unapparent to the physical senses, must be spiritual, unending. The issues of life must rest with God alone, not with supposed material forces or unenlightened mentalities.

Just the opposite may seem to be the case to fearful human thought, which assumes that evil really is power. But if there is just one infinite God - a theme that runs throughout the Scriptures - then what appears as potency in matter or in misguided materialistic thinking must be a false claim, a lie, which can be exposed and progressively destroyed.

The threats in today's world are not evidence of evil's superiority, but of its dragon-like resistance to inevitable self-destruction. Can it wipe out civilization in the process of destroying itself? Not if we understand its powerlessness in the face of Spirit. Not if we pray with a deep conviction of the efficacy of prayer to dissolve the foundations of wicked, aggressive, mortal thought. Not if we daily strive to purify and spiritualize our own thought and refuse to be mesmerized into thinking there's little we can do as individuals. There's much we can do. In our lives and prayers we can reflect the power of God , the power that destroys evil.

It's materiality, the impersonal evil, in human thought - animality, sensuality, hatred, envy, and so on - that faces destruction; not good, not man. Christ Jesus proved that the power of Spirit is supreme, that man is not the slave of material conditions. But he prophesied that there would be tumult with the inevitable overturning of materiality - ''wars and rumours of wars.''

It's unlikely that the self-destruction of evil will take place without conflicts and upheavals. Jesus said, ''See that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass.'' n3 ''All these things'' point, not to the end of creation but to the end of everything unlike God, good. They point to Spirit's infinitude, uncovering and annihilating materiality through divine law. The message of Jesus' life and of the Bible as a whole is the allness of good, of Spirit, not the demise of good. It's that God is Love, and that He preserves His creation.

The nuclear challenge is great. But we can deal with it with dominion, confident that Spirit, boundless Love, is supreme.

n3 Matthew 24:6.

DAILY BIBLE VERSE There is no power but of God. Romans 13:1