Anybody who's followed news at all knows the phenomenon well: some diet or medical theory that's declared to be a boon to health is deemed to be not so healthy after all a couple years later. Why? Why does something that first appears healthy so often turn out, on further investigation, to be unhealthy?
Maybe it's because so often people look in the wrong place for reliable information about health.
Where do researchers and regular folks generally turn for information about health? To investigations into matter—into the body and its assorted processes as well as into things that invade the body. While no one should sneer at any sincere efforts to reduce human suffering, centuries of research into matter, including countless studies in the past 50 years or so, have been riddled with good today, bad tomorrow results.
But the good news is that we can get reliable information about health straight from the source of good health: God.
"Cease ye from man, whose breath is in his nostrils: for wherein is he to be accounted of?" we read in the Isaiah (2:22)—a passage that strongly suggests we're not going to get a straight account from matter or from considering man as matter. But what's the alternative? Here's how Isaiah puts it later, depicting God as saying "Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth: for I am God, and there is none else" (Isa. 45:22).
These two passages indicate exactly what Christ Jesus, the most successful healer of all time, did: he didn't view people as material, and he didn't delve into the workings of matter; instead, he turned to God and understood that each of us is actually spiritual and immortal rather than material and mortal. Instead of trying to understand matter, which wouldn't get him anywhere, he understood God and man's relationship to Him as His spiritual expression—an expression that must be healthy, good, because God is entirely good. And this understanding healed reliably and consistently, routing diseases considered incurable even today.
"Jesus of Nazareth was the most scientific man that ever trod the globe," Mary Baker Eddy writes in the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (p. 313), continuing, "He plunged beneath the material surface of things, and found the spiritual cause." Jesus delved into spirituality, into a divine Science, and realized that there are laws of God, laws of good, that actually govern all existence. We can understand and apply these laws today just as Jesus did 2,000 years ago, and we can get the same results: health and healing.
Why? Because Jesus founded his healing practice on Truth with a capital T—on God—and this Truth doesn't change. No new information undercuts it. About 140 years ago, Mrs. Eddy discovered the Science behind Jesus' works and tried it out for herself. As she writes (Science and Health, p. 146),Late in the nineteenth century I demonstrated the divine rules of Christian Science. They were submitted to the broadest practical test, and everywhere, when honestly applied under circumstances where demonstration was humanly possible, this Science showed that Truth had lost none of its divine and healing efficacy, even though centuries had passed away since Jesus practised these rules on the hills of Judaea and in the valleys of Galilee.
She used this Science to resolve all kinds of health problems people experience. As she writes (Science and Health, p. 162),Working out the rules of Science in practice, the author has restored health in cases of both acute and chronic disease in their severest forms. Secretions have been changed, the structure has been renewed, shortened limbs have been elongated, ankylosed joints have been made supple, and carious bones have been restored to healthy conditions. I have restored what is called the lost substance of lungs, and healthy organizations have been established where disease was organic.
No studies in the centuries between Jesus's time and today have invalidated his work or the spiritual laws it was built on. As a result, people are using it successfully today. They're turning to God and His laws for information about themselves and their health, and they're finding that the information they get is accurate and reliable. It cures whatever ails them.
It doesn't take years in a laboratory to get the understanding of God and man that heals. It takes turning to God, just as Isaiah said. It takes giving up standard human beliefs about matter and health in order to look at things from a spiritual perspective instead. But the results are worth it.
Jesus said, "The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you" (Luke 17:20, 21). We don't have to look here and there in matter or matter-based theories to find goodness and health. Goodness and health are within us—are part of our very nature as God's spiritual expression. This is a basis for ongoing good health—a basis that hasn't changed for centuries and never will. As we accept it and give up reliance on ever-changing human health theories, we'll experience more and more of the health that nothing can take away.
Link
The New York Times Magazine — "Do We Really Know What Makes Us Healthy" (registration required)
