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Clearly we have now arrived at a climax in the book
and a new section opens consisting of four chapters forming the KEY TO THE
SCRIPTURES. The next two chapters have the titles of the first and last books
of the Bible.
Chapter fifteen, GENESIS, begins with the story of the
seven days of creation showing that the nature of God as sevenfold has in fact
always been presented to mankind through the Scriptures. The seven days are the
Bible's symbolization of what we call the seven synonymous terms. These days
illustrate how the seven terms which are God generate within us the
understanding of what those synonyms are. It is like a teacher in a classroom
telling the children what the numbers are and then saying that next he will
show them what they represent, how to use them, and what to do with them. So
the "Genesis" chapter shows us how the divine sevenfold nature of God unfolds
itself in human life, regenerating our conception of ourselves, so that we are
no longer born of Adam and Eve, or of Darwin's theory of evolution, but we are
really consciously born of God right where material evolution seems to be. The
sevenfold generative nature of God exposes the unreality of the Adam story in
which mortals seem to have originated.
Chapter sixteen, THE APOCALYPSE, now transforms our
sense of the ultimate, "Genesis" having transformed our sense of
origin. From the book of Revelation in the Bible the textbook extracts
just a handful of verses. They introduce the angel with the little book, the
God-crowned woman symbolizing man generically, and show how the problem of
evil, or the great red dragon, is finally resolved when we let the holy city
come down from God into consciousness. This chapter comes to its climax in this
four-sided holy city, called in the textbook language, the Word, Christ,
Christianity, and Science. The Bible begins with "In the beginning God created
the heaven and the earth." It ends with the Revelator saying "I saw a new
heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed
away and I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of
heaven" (Rev 21:1,2). This sixteenth chapter ends with the twenty-third Psalm,
which is the state of divine consciousness that John finally depicts. Mrs Eddy
substitutes the word LOVE for the Bible words, The Lord, "substituting for the
corporeal sense, the incorporeal or spiritual sense of Deity" (578:2).
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Published by
Elmdon
Publications
Elmdon, Saffron Walden, Essex, England
1989
In
association with Christian Science Foundation, England |
