Christ-healing: natural evidence of divine law

Most individuals have yearned for healing at some time. It may have been a need for curing a physical difficulty, restoring a shattered relationship, removing an unyielding grief, or allaying the threat of poverty. Too often, though, it’s believed that in such cases comfort is all that can be expected. The possibility of healing as a restoration to health, a return to harmony, a new view of our spiritual identity, seems too great an expectation—such healing is even thought of as a miracle, something that happens when natural law is set aside.

Yet the Scriptures assert that the very presence of God heals our wounds, supplies our needs, restores health and joy. Accepting this fact brings hope to the heart. As we ponder the innumerable evidences of healing in the Bible, we learn that God, the loving creator, does not set aside His laws in order to restore health, harmony, unfailing joy; rather, those very laws, eternally in operation, bring what we call healing—that is, the revealing of man’s spiritual identity now and always.

Christ Jesus’ healing works during his short ministry are unequalled. It’s easy to think of them as miracles. After all, one could argue, that was Jesus. He is unique. How could any of us even begin to follow his example? And yet this is what he told us, his followers: “He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also” (John 14:12). Note his startling command “Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils” (Matthew 10:8).

Multitudes who have chosen to follow Jesus’ teachings have seriously committed to obeying his injunctions. Inevitably, the question arises: Is it possible to obey all of them, including the command to heal? We need to understand his words. He clearly took no personal responsibility or credit for his actions, but explained, “I can of mine own self do nothing” (John 5:30) and “The Father that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works” (John 14:10).

The Scriptures assert that the very presence of God heals our wounds, supplies our needs, restores health and joy. 

Mary Baker Eddy took these words to heart and discovered the universal divine laws that enabled Jesus to heal and save multitudes. In her major work, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, she states: “There is a law of God applicable to healing, and it is a spiritual law instead of material” (p. 463). What is this law of God? An explanation is found in the Preface to this book: “The physical healing of Christian Science results now, as in Jesus’ time, from the operation of divine Principle, before which sin and disease lose their reality in human consciousness and disappear as naturally and as necessarily as darkness gives place to light and sin to reformation. Now, as then, these mighty works are not supernatural, but supremely natural” (p. xi). 

One might ask: How much must I learn before I can begin to understand this divine law? What’s needed is a shift in thought from human ability to the spiritual fact that you and I, as God’s creation, already have innate spiritual sense with which to understand and apply God’s natural law of healing; in other words, we need a deeply rooted trust in the one infinite God, who is good itself.

Here’s an example of how even a dawning faith is blessed by God’s law of healing. Shortly after I married, as I became better acquainted with my mother-in-law, she told me of her early experiences, her first small steps, in studying Christian Science.

As a teenager during the flu pandemic of 1918–1919, she volunteered as a nurse at the local hospital. She had recently read a magazine, the Christian Science Sentinel. It spoke to her yearning for a God she could know. She read it with eagerness but with little understanding. She then searched until she found the book by Mrs. Eddy mentioned earlier, and read it during the long night hours of caring for patients. 

During this time she began having eye problems. The doctors there examined her and gave a gloomy verdict: If she did not have surgery, she would lose her sight. But now her newly discovered view of God—though elementary and very tentative—impelled her to put all her trust in Him for the solution to the eye problem. Her brand new glimpse of the basis of Christian Science healing silenced her fear. While still volunteering at the hospital, she had a complete healing of the eye disease. That was the beginning of her lifelong devotion to the teachings of this Science of the Christ.

Several years later she would deepen her understanding of God’s natural law of good. As a widow with four young children, she wholeheartedly turned to His law, knowing God would continue to provide a home for her growing family. She daily found strength in this promise: “Yea, the sparrow hath found an house, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young” (Psalms 84:3). If God provided a house and a nest for the sparrow and the swallow, He would surely do as much for her and her children. And it was so. From then on she gave all her time to sharing this precious gift of God’s law with others as a Christian Science practitioner. This work helped provide for her family’s needs.

The Bible declares that God created man (each one of us) in His likeness. God is Spirit. His likeness includes spiritual sense, the ability to discern present spiritual reality. Our spiritual sense may seem very elementary to us at times, but it naturally expands from intuition to hope and faith, and then to understanding and reality (see Science and Health, p. 298). My mother-in-law had the spiritual intuition that guided her to put all her trust in God’s divine law of good, even though her understanding of this law was no more than a mustard seed of faith (see Matthew 17:20 and Luke 17:5, 6). And healing resulted, as the natural evidence of this very law.

We sometimes feel this Christ-healing as when we step from a shadow into the gentle warmth of sunshine. The “sunlight of Truth” (Science and Health, p. 162) is always present, waiting to bless and heal each one of us. Look for it; give it a place in your heart and mind. Trust its power to unveil for you your glorious being, entirely spiritual and intact. You are safe within this light, the allness of divine law, the law of infinite good. And your inherent spiritual sense enables you (and me) to accept this with understanding and joy.

And healing is the natural result. 

Margarita Sandelmann Thatcher