A Bridge to Light

People often ask why God would allow—or even seem to create—wars in the Old Testament. If God is good, if God is Love, then how do we reconcile that with violence, destruction, and suffering?

What I have come to see is that these Biblical accounts are not really describing God’s actions, but the condition of human consciousness—what appears when thought is aligned with divine Truth, and what appears when it isn’t.

When I read the Biblical wars now, I don’t see them as records of God ordaining conflict, but as illustrations of thought straying from divine Principle. In Christian Science, God is unchanging harmony—divine Love itself—and does not create or permit discord. If God is truly good, then conflict cannot originate in Him. So when the Bible speaks of people or nations “turning away from God,” I understand that as thought departing from the understanding of divine Truth and Love. From that mistaken standpoint, there appears what the Bible describes as wars, plagues, and trials—not because God has sent them, but because thought is entertaining a sense of life apart from Him.

In different language, other traditions have seen something similar—that suffering is not simply imposed from outside, but is connected to perception, belief, or misunderstanding. Stoic philosophy, for example, taught that disturbance arises not just from events, but from the judgments we attach to them, and modern psychology recognises that our experience is shaped in part by patterns of thought rather than circumstances alone. These are not identical to Christian Science, but they point in a similar direction: that what we accept as real has a direct effect on what we experience.

Take Moses leading the Israelites through the Red Sea. This can be understood not as God intervening to fix a desperate situation, but as the triumph of spiritual understanding over material belief—the yielding of fear and limitation to divine law. The deliverance was not God changing reality, but thought realigning with what was already true: harmony, freedom, and order. That changes the whole basis of how we read these events. Harmony is not something that needs to be created or brought in; it is already the reality of being, but it is only experienced as thought aligns with it.

So these accounts begin to show a consistent pattern. Harmony is the reality of being, but it is experienced only as thought aligns with God, good. When thought turns away from that understanding, discord appears—not because God sends it, but because we are accepting a false sense of existence apart from Him. This is not about blame or condemnation, but about cause and effect at the level of thought. It becomes practical, because instead of asking only, “Why is this happening?” we can begin to ask, “What am I accepting as true here?” Not as criticism, but as a way of finding where our power lies.

The story of Jonah makes this even more clear.  Jonah is sent to help the people of Nineveh see what they need to do to change their situation, which already tells us something important: they were not helpless. Yet Jonah resists and flees. That resistance symbolises individual thought turning away from divine Mind, and what follows appears as chaos—the storm, the loss of control, the great fish. Nothing in this suggests that God is sending punishment; rather, it shows what appears when thought is in conflict with Truth. The moment Jonah yields and realigns with God’s direction, harmony is restored.

The people of Nineveh themselves are also not presented as doomed or powerless. Their “repentance” is not about persuading God to change, but about a shift in consciousness. They turn away from what is false, and in doing so, they experience restoration. Again, the pattern holds: God has not changed, reality has not changed, but their experience changes as their thought changes. This idea—that transformation begins with a shift in thought—is something that appears in many different forms across both spiritual traditions and modern thinking, but here it is shown in its most direct spiritual sense: that harmony is revealed as consciousness aligns with what is true.

So the message of these Biblical stories is not really about historical violence, but about spiritual causation. Stay aligned with divine Truth, and harmony is revealed; turn away from it, and discord seems to appear. And most importantly, we are not helpless in this. At any moment, thought can turn, realign, and begin to experience what has always been true.

If I were to bring this down to something usable, it would be this: when something feels chaotic, fearful, or wrong, instead of asking only, “Why is this happening?” we can ask, “What am I accepting as real right now? Is this aligned with divine Truth—Love, order, harmony? What would it look like to see this from that standpoint instead?” Not as a mental exercise, but as a genuine shift in where we are starting from. Because what these stories consistently show is that freedom does not come from changing God or forcing the world to change, but from thought yielding back to what has always been true.