Why knowing God heals

Is it possible that just knowing God can heal you?

A young father, new to Christian Science, severely injured his back and could not move. He asked a Christian Science practitioner for treatment and went to a Christian Science nursing facility for care. Through prayer, he soon gained a whole new understanding of God as Love and felt loved, worthy, and known. In three days, he was home and playing soccer with his two little boys, totally healed.

This healing was based on divine Principle – as demonstrated by Christ Jesus, discovered by Mary Baker Eddy, and evidenced countless times in the many healings documented in the Christian Science periodicals, including this column.

So let’s break this down: What does it mean to know God?

Christian Science, based on the Bible, describes God as omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient. Having all power means there is no opposing power. God being everywhere means there was never and can never be a time when any other power could have legitimate influence. Being omniscient means that God knows His creation definitively, conclusively, precisely, and tenderly.

To know God is to understand and accept God’s supremacy and goodness. This is the essence of the First Commandment, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3).

And as we come to understand God as our creator, we better grasp who we are as God’s spiritual offspring. Like the young father experienced, seeing God in a new light enables us to see ourselves in a new light – spiritual and whole, made in the image and likeness of God.

So knowing God opens our thought and lives to what is spiritually sound and real: life as built on a foundation of spiritual good, infinite, and free from evil, lack, injury, or chance. It also does another thing. Knowing and cherishing God as good removes what is ungodlike from our thoughts and experience. It’s like the nature of light, which doesn’t know darkness, nor care how long it seems to have been there. The light just does what it does – it shines, radiates forth, and the darkness dissolves.

Evil in any form, including disease, fear, or divisiveness, is like that darkness. It would have us believe that it has the intelligence to determine our life prospects, or the power to deteriorate the good we have. But we don’t need to bow down to, or accept, these suggestions, because they aren’t of God’s creating. Whatever has no divine substance is “error” – a mistaken belief about what is spiritually true.

Mrs. Eddy once wrote in a letter, “Error comes to you for life, and you give it all the life it has” (Irving Tomlinson, “Twelve Years with Mary Baker Eddy,” Amplified Edition, p. 98). We have God-given authority to refuse to give error any life. We can let divine Truth animate us, rather than fears and suggestions that say we are isolated from God, Love – or from the good, health, and peace He provides. We can refuse to rehearse what is erroneous and hold to the truth that reverses it: that God, good, is supreme.

Humble prayer to know God, Truth, as the origin and foundation of our lives dissolves the fear that health is established by chance, and that contagion or deterioration are an inevitable part of our lives. And we begin to see that God’s perfect love brings out His exacting care. That we could never be separate from or undeserving of God’s goodness, abundance, and guidance. As the Bible describes, God is “of great power: his understanding is infinite” (Psalms 147:5).

There is great comfort in knowing that we need never despair. God is ever present. It is as if our understanding of God is the canvas on which our life is painted. The purer and clearer our understanding of God is, the more our life experiences reflect that clarity in purity and resilience. The more we get to know God as omnipotent Truth, ever-present Love, and all-knowing Life, the more confident and assured we will feel that we are safe and that “with God all things are possible” (Matthew 19:26). And out of that, comes healing.