WHEN I AM TEACHING my high school (and older) Sunday School students about reliance on God for good in their lives, I mention the first chapter of Genesis, which describes God as good, and as creating man and woman equal and wholly good.
In fact, seeing creation as already perfect is the way Jesus healed, as Mary Baker Eddy explained in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. "Jesus beheld in Science the perfect man," she wrote, "who appeared to him where sinning mortal man appears to mortals. In this perfect man the Saviour saw God's own likeness, and this correct view of man healed the sick" (pp.476-477).
Jesus asked a man with a withered hand, whose story is related in three of the four Gospels, to stretch forth his hand. When was it made whole? If Jesus was beholding "the perfect man, who appeared to him where sinning mortal man appears to mortals," then Jesus' view of the man was that his hand had never been withered, that it was already whole. And this view of the man — in his present state of perfection — was what brought about the healing.
