People often ask, “Why on earth would a loving God punish us?”
I’ve found it helpful to flip that question on its head and ask, “Is there a kind of punishment that could evidence our divine Father-Mother God’s love for us?”
Yes, since Her love liberates us by rebuking ill-advised thinking and behavior in ways that persuade us to drop both. I’ve found that God’s love disciplines traits such as apathy, anger, arrogance, and sensuality, thus leading us away from the self-destructive actions resulting from them. And, more profoundly, God’s love leads us away from an inaccurate sense of ourselves as something less than what the Bible says we are and what Jesus’ healings proved we are: the pure and perfect image of God.
God’s likeness, which is our true, spiritual identity, never sins and is never punished. What’s rebuked is an ignorant or willful acceptance of ourselves as material and self-indulgent. The Apostle Paul clarified this distinction between the sin (which is punished) and the sinner (who is liberated).
He reasoned, “The good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do. Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me” (Romans 7:19, 20). The true “I,” or divine Ego, is sinless Soul, God, of which we are each the individual expression.
Paul himself was radically redeemed from an extreme level of self-righteousness, dogmatism, and violence through Christ, the message of God’s love that brings spiritual truth to light in human consciousness. His turnaround shows how Christ ever impels us to break free from the evil we truly don’t want to do in order to do the good we’re divinely called to do – and inherently wish to do.
Paul’s words and experience help us see sin for what it is, a mistaken sense of ourselves as matter-made and materially oriented. It’s this material sense of self that believes it wants to sin, resigns itself to being a sinner, and suffers the repercussions of sinning. And while this material view is never truly us, to the extent that we sheepishly or doggedly identify with some sin, we find ourselves tied to the limitations and privations accompanying self-centered traits.
That’s never the end of the story, though, no matter how engrossed in a sin we seem to be. There is no eternal punishment of the sinner, only punishment of the belief in sin – and it lasts only “so long as the belief lasts” (Mary Baker Eddy, “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” p. 497).
God’s unwavering love is ever present to redeem us, always welcoming us home to the right recognition of our identity as our divine Parent’s loved offspring. Our need is to awaken to the ways in which sin claims to act on and through us, rise from the belief of being self-conscious matter to the consciousness of life in Soul, and rediscover our Father’s ever-open arms.
That’s a sequence of events we can all experience. When self-knowledge and humility lead us to seek our pure and actual identity in Christ, we feel Love’s forever embrace.
Orientation away from the common assumption that life is in matter to the Life that is divine Spirit and universal Love – God – doesn’t need to come through a cycle of sin and suffering. We can uncover our spiritual identity by conscientiously and proactively pursuing an understanding of divine Science, daily gaining in our apprehension of the Life that is God, and demonstrating God’s ceaseless care for us and for others.
Nevertheless, like many, I have to confess it has taken Science and suffering to lead me to, and keep me on, a higher and holier path. So while nothing punishing seems desirable in itself, over decades of practicing Christian Science my sense of sin’s punishment has evolved. I’ve gone from balking at the idea, to grudging acceptance of its necessity, to great gratitude for the lessons it teaches – steering us away from attachment to sin in the direction of obeying Love’s laws. These laws of God protect us in practice and move us forward spiritually.
In learning God’s statutes, we find how liberating Love’s law is, upholding our joy, health, happiness, and purpose and outlawing whatever would hide these blessings, so that we can know and live our sacred, satisfying life in God, who is solely good.
Adapted from an editorial published in the Nov. 13, 2023, issue of the Christian Science Sentinel.
