The Lesson
(I)
Romans 3: 19, 20, 23 Now we know that what things soever the
law saith, it saith to them who are under the law: that
every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become
guilty before God. Therefore by the deeds of the law there
shall no flesh be justified in his sight: for by the law is
the knowledge of sin. For all have sinned, and come short
of the glory of God;
Galatians 3: 10-12, 22 For as many as are of the works of
the law are under the curse: for it is written, Cursed is
every one that continueth not in all things which are
written in the book of the law to do them. But that no man
is justified by the law in the sight of God, it is evident:
for, The just shall live by faith. And the law is not of
faith: but, The man that doeth them shall live in them. But
the scripture hath concluded all under sin, that the promise
by faith of Jesus Christ might be given to them that
believe.
All that is called mortal thought is made up of
error.
Mortal body and mind are one, and that one is
called man; but a mortal is not man, for man is immortal.
Better the suffering which awakens mortal mind
from its fleshly dream, than the false pleasures which tend
to perpetuate this dream. Sin alone brings death, for sin
is the only element of destruction. "Fear him which is able
to destroy both soul and body in hell," said Jesus. A
careful study of this text shows that here the word soul
means a false sense or material consciousness. The command
was a warning to beware, not of Rome, Satan, nor of God, but
of sin. Sickness, sin, and death are not concomitants of
Life or Truth. No law supports them. They have no relation
to God wherewith to establish their power. Sin makes its
own hell, and goodness its own heaven.
A magistrate sometimes remits the penalty, but
this may be no moral benefit to the criminal, and at best,
it only saves the criminal from one form of punishment. The
moral law, which has the right to acquit or condemn, always
demands restitution before mortals can "go up higher."
Broken law brings penalty in order to compel this progress.
Mere legal pardon (and there is no other, for divine
Principle never pardons our sins or mistakes till they are
corrected) leaves the offender free to repeat the offence,
if indeed, he has not already suffered sufficiently from
vice to make him turn from it with loathing. Truth bestows
no pardon upon error, but wipes it out in the most effectual
manner.
(II)
Lamentations 3: 39 Wherefore doth a living man complain, a
man for the punishment of his sins?
Obadiah 1: 15 For the day of the Lord is near upon all the
heathen: as thou hast done, it shall be done unto thee: thy
reward shall return upon thine own head.
Isaiah 3: 9-11 The shew of their countenance doth witness
against them; and they declare their sin as Sodom, they hide
it not. Woe unto their soul! for they have rewarded evil
unto themselves. Say ye to the righteous, that it shall be
well with him: for they shall eat the fruit of their doings.
Woe unto the wicked! it shall be ill with him: for the
reward of his hands shall be given him.
Hosea 10: 12,13 Sow to yourselves in righteousness, reap in
mercy; break up your fallow ground: for it is time to seek
the Lord, till he come and rain righteousness upon you. Ye
have plowed wickedness, ye have reaped iniquity; ye have
eaten the fruit of lies: because thou didst trust in thy
way, in the multitude of thy mighty men.
"Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also
reap." Error excludes itself from harmony. Sin is its own
punishment.
Divine Science reveals the necessity of sufficient
suffering, either before or after death, to quench the love
of sin. To remit the penalty due for sin, would be for
Truth to pardon error. Escape from punishment is not in
accordance with God's government, since justice is the
handmaid of mercy.
The so-called pleasures and pains of matter
perish, and they must go out under the blaze of Truth,
spiritual sense, and the actuality of being. Whether
mortals will learn this sooner or later, and how long they
will suffer the pangs of destruction, depends upon the
tenacity of error.
Remember that mankind must sooner or later,
either by suffering or by Science, be convinced of the error
that is to be overcome. In trying to undo the errors of
sense one must pay fully and fairly the utmost farthing,
until all error is finally brought into subjection to Truth.
The divine method of paying sin's wages involves unwinding
one's snarls, and learning from experience how to divide
between sense and Soul. "Whom the Lord loveth He
chasteneth." He, who knows God's will or the demands of
divine Science and obeys them, incurs the hostility of envy;
and he who refuses obedience to God, is chastened by Love.
(II)
Matthew 25: 31-33, 41, 46 When the Son of man shall come in
his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he
sit upon the throne of his glory: And before him shall be
gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from
another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats:
And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats
on the left. Then shall he say also unto them on the left
hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire,
prepared for the devil and his angels: And these shall go
away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into
life eternal.
Belief produces the results of belief, and the
penalties it affixes last so long as the belief and are
inseparable from it.
Unless an ill is rightly met and fairly overcome
by Truth, the ill is never conquered. If God destroys not
sin, sickness, and death, they are not destroyed in the mind
of mortals, but seem to this so-called mind to be immortal.
If the Principle, rule, and
demonstration of man's being are not in the least understood
before what is termed death overtakes mortals, they will
rise no higher spiritually in the scale of existence on
account of that single experience, but will remain as
material as before the transition, still seeking happiness
through a material, instead of through a spiritual sense of
life, and from selfish and inferior motives. They who are
unrighteous shall be unrighteous still, until in divine
Science Christ, Truth, removes all ignorance and sin. The
sin and error which possess us at the instant of death do
not cease at that moment, but endure until the death of
these errors. The murderer, though slain in the act, does
not thereby forsake sin. He is no more spiritual for
believing that his body died and learning that his cruel
mind died not. His thoughts are no purer until evil is
disarmed by good. His body is as material as his mind, and
vice versa .
Alas for those who break faith with divine
Science and fail to strangle the serpent of sin as well as
of sickness! They are dwellers still in the deep darkness
of belief. They are in the surging sea of error, not
struggling to lift their heads above the drowning wave.
What must the end be? They must eventually expiate their
sin through suffering.
Grafting holiness upon unholiness, supposing that
sin can be forgiven when it is not forsaken, is as foolish
as straining out gnats and swallowing camels. The
scientific unity which exists between God and man must be
wrought out in life-practice, and God's will must be
universally done.
(IV)
Ezekiel 18: 30,31 Therefore I will judge you, O house of
Israel, every one according to his ways, saith the Lord God.
Repent, and turn yourselves from all your transgressions; so
iniquity shall not be your ruin. Cast away from you all
your transgressions, whereby ye have transgressed; and make
you a new heart and a new spirit: for why will ye die, O
house of Israel?
Job 8: 3-6 Doth God pervert judgment? or doth the Almighty
pervert justice? If thy children have sinned against him,
and he have cast them away for their transgression; If thou
wouldest seek unto God betimes, and make thy supplication to
the Almighty; If thou wert pure and upright; surely now he
would awake for thee, and make the habitation of thy
righteousness prosperous.
If sin is not regretted and is not lessening, then
it is hastening on to physical and moral doom. You are
conquered by the moral penalties you incur and the ills they
bring. The pains of sinful sense are less harmful than its
pleasures. Belief in material suffering causes mortals to
retreat from their error, to flee from body to Spirit, and
to appeal to divine sources outside of themselves.
Who will stop the practice of sin so long as he
believes in the pleasures of sin? When mortals once admit
that evil confers no pleasure, they turn from it. Remove
error from thought, and it will not appear in effect.
No law of God hinders this result. It is error
to suffer for aught but your own sins. Christ, or Truth,
will destroy all other supposed suffering, and real
suffering for your own sins will cease in proportion as the
sin ceases. Justice is the moral signification of law.
Injustice declares the absence of law.
Divine Science adjusts the balance as Jesus
adjusted it. Science removes the penalty only by first
removing the sin which incurs the penalty. This is my sense
of divine pardon, which I understand to mean God's method of
destroying sin. If the saying is true, "While there's life
there's hope," its opposite is also true, While there's sin
there's doom. Another's suffering cannot lessen our own
liability.
(V)
Psalm 130: 3-5, 7,8 If thou, Lord, shouldest mark
iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand? But there is
forgiveness with thee, that thou mayest be feared. I wait
for the Lord, my soul doth wait, and in his word do I hope.
Let Israel hope in the Lord: for with the Lord there is
mercy, and with him is plenteous redemption. And he shall
redeem Israel from all his iniquities.
My little children, these things write I unto
you, that ye sin not. And if any man sin, we have an
advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous: And he
is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but
also for the sins of the whole world.
Hebrews 7: 25 Wherefore he is able also to save them to the
uttermost that come unto God by him, seeing he ever liveth
to make intercession for them.
If men would bring to bear upon the study of the
Science of Mind half the faith they bestow upon the so-called pains and pleasures of material sense, they would not
go on from bad to worse, until disciplined by the prison and
the scaffold; but the whole human family would be redeemed
through the merits of Christ, - through the perception and
acceptance of Truth. For this glorious result Christian
Science lights the torch of spiritual understanding.
For victory over a single sin, we give thanks
and magnify the Lord of Hosts. What shall we say of the
mighty conquest over all sin? A louder song, sweeter than
has ever before reached high heaven, now rises clearer and
nearer to the great heart of Christ; for the accuser is not
there, and Love sends forth her primal and everlasting
strain. Self-abnegation, by which we lay down all for
Truth, or Christ, in our warfare against error, is a rule in
Christian Science. This rule clearly interprets God as
divine Principle, - as Life, represented by the Father; as
Truth, represented by the Son; as Love, represented by the
Mother. Every mortal at some period, here or hereafter,
must grapple with and overcome the mortal belief in a power
opposed to God. The Scripture, "Thou hast been faithful
over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many," is
literally fulfilled, when we are conscious of the supremacy
of Truth, by which the nothingness of error is seen; and we
know that the nothingness of error is in proportion to its
wickedness. He that touches the hem of Christ's robe and
masters his mortal beliefs, animality, and hate, rejoices in
the proof of healing, - in a sweet and certain sense that
God is Love.
(VI)
Leviticus 26: 40-42 If they shall confess their iniquity,
and the iniquity of their fathers, with their trespass which
they trespassed against me, and that also they have walked
contrary unto me; And that I also have walked contrary unto
them, and have brought them into the land of their enemies;
if then their uncircumcised hearts be humbled, and they then
accept of the punishment of their iniquity: Then will I
remember my covenant with Jacob, and also my covenant with
Isaac, and also my covenant with Abraham will I remember;
and I will remember the land.
Isaiah 30: 18-21 And therefore will the Lord wait, that he
may be gracious unto you, and therefore will he be exalted,
that h e may have mercy upon you: for the Lord is a God of
judgment: blessed are all they that wait for him. For the
people shall dwell in Zion at Jerusalem: thou shalt weep no
more: he will be very gracious unto thee at the voice of thy
cry; when he shall hear it, he will answer thee. And though
the Lord give you the bread of adversity, and the water of
affliction, yet shall not thy teachers be removed into a
corner any more, but thine eyes shall see thy teachers: And
thine ears shall hear a word behind thee, saying, This is
the way, walk ye in it, when ye turn to the right hand, and
when ye turn to the left.
Romans 8: 1 THERE is therefore now no condemnation to them
which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but
after the Spirit.
"Work out your own salvation," is the demand of
Life and Love, for to this end God worketh with you. "Occupy
till I come!" Wait for your reward, and "be not weary in
well doing." If your endeavors are beset by fearful odds,
and you receive no present reward, go not back to error, nor
become a sluggard in the race. When the smoke of battle
clears away, you will discern the good you have done, and
receive according to your deserving. Love is not hasty to
deliver us from temptation, for Love means that we shall be
tried and purified.
The truth is the centre of all religion. It
commands sure entrance into the realm of Love. St. Paul
wrote, "Let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which
doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the
race that is set before us;" that is, let us put aside
material self and sense, and seek the divine Principle and
Science of all healing.
Paul and John had a clear apprehension that, as
mortal man achieves no worldly honors except by sacrifice,
so he must gain heavenly riches by forsaking all
worldliness. Then he will have nothing in common with the
worldling's affections, motives, and aims. Judge not the
future advancement of Christian Science by the steps already
taken, lest you yourself be condemned for failing to take
the first step.
We must learn how mankind govern the body, -
whether through faith in hygiene, in drugs, or in will-power. We should learn whether they govern the body through
a belief in the necessity of sickness and death, sin and
pardon, or govern it from the higher understanding that the
divine Mind makes perfect, acts upon the so-called human
mind through truth, leads the human mind to relinquish all
error, to find the divine Mind to be the only Mind, and the
healer of sin, disease, death. This process of higher
spiritual understanding improves mankind until error
disappears, and nothing is left which deserves to perish or
to be punished.
HTML copyright � 1996 L. Tisoncik Last updated: 8/21/96 1:01:07 PM EDT.