Scripture says when God looked at the newly created world … “He saw that it was good” (Gen 1:31). By contrast when scripture describes God it says … “as your Father in heaven is perfect” (Matt 5:48). When the perfect God of creation looked upon the work of His hands, He saw that it was very good. But Moses did not describe the wondrous beauty of Eden as being perfect, only that it was very good. Perhaps perfection would have required the absence of potential for evil. Perhaps since Adam and Eve had not made a final choice either for obedience or not, perfection was elusive in our first garden home. But then on closer examination, despite all the glorious language describing the beauty of heaven, the city of our God, it too does not often if ever get described as perfect. The term perfect does appear many times in scripture but seems to always be applied as a characteristic for us as people – either striving for perfection in how we live, or being made perfect by our Lord Jesus Christ. It does not seem to be used to describe inanimate objects. Perhaps this is because perfection cannot be found in or around our settings, our possessions, or our environments. It may be that perfection itself is something that cannot be achieved in our surroundings as no matter how wonderful they may be, they could always be improved in some manner.
When God looked at His creation of this world, He spent time (6 days) in the infinite details of plant life, rocks, trees, seas, lakes, and all the living beings that would live in the nature He created including us. But having created them, and having had Adam give names to all the animals, the remainder of His attention in our Genesis turns to the things God values most – namely us. Perhaps this is because even God looks at the universe He has made, and can imagine new ways to see it improved. Perhaps His own ideas of perfection include constant innovation and Genesis-style creation. But regardless of His opinions of the environments He is able to create, where God centers His attention, His time, and His value is in the origination of man He intended to spend eternity with. We were intended to be the perfect creation, His crowning achievement, patterned after His image and set just a little below the angels, it was to be us who would offer the universe an even clearer picture of what love is – and perhaps in so doing, offer a better picture of what perfection is. This model however would stand in stark contrast to the idealization of “things” and would find fulfillment only in the actualization of “love”.
Our constant failures, inherent short comings, and repeated losses have trained us to become comfortable with mediocrity. Compromise is the rule of our day, whether we curb our desires to what we believe to be attainable, or sacrifice our values to attain something we desire just a bit more than we value our ethics, compromise is our mantra. For generations after the fall of mankind this was so, no less in our own day. Therefore when something identified to be perfect comes along; it causes us to see our own imperfections in its reflection. The law of God was such a thing. The Ten Commandments given at Mount Sinai carved by the finger of God Himself in the stones of the cliffs and handed to Moses to take to His people were perfect. “The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul” proclaimed David as He pondered God’s revelation of love in his Psalms (19:7). God’s law was a beginning revelation of the nature of His love. Well beyond merely a list of do’s and don’ts His precepts were summarized by Christ as loving God first, with all our hearts, minds, and souls, and our neighbors as ourselves (Matthew 22:37-40). Christ did not focus on the particular points of the law; instead He focused on the motives behind it, something His contemporaries seemed to have lost sight of.
Perfect love revealed by God in His law, and by Christ in His life, reveals to us our own failures by contrast. We see in the deeds that contradict the prescriptions outlined in His commandments that love of others does not always govern our motives and behaviors. The law points out to us when self-love is responsible for what we do, more than self-less-love that the law proscribes. When we examine the deeds, words, and motives of Christ, we see perfect compliance to not only what the law proscribes but to the motives that were its underpinning. To attempt to discard the law, to state that grace has somehow overcome the law and made it of no effect, is to attempt to remove love as having meaning from the character of God. Since God is love, this is simply impossible. The freedom our God gives us is actually defined in His laws. Consider for a moment what the law forbids; murder, lying, adultery, lust, dishonor to our parents, the pursuit of other gods, devaluing our God in vanity, discrediting His acts of creation, etc.. All of the things God’s law proscribes against limit our own self-interests that would come at the expense of another. God’s law protects the rights of another person from us damaging them by our actions. In essence, God’s law limits evil. It does not however as Christ pointed out in His very words, put a cap on how much one can express love to God, or limit the expression love to someone else. We are “free” to love others as much as we want, free without limits, free without proscriptions. Christ Himself demonstrates just how far love will go as He offers His own life in exchange for ours. Christ shows to love another is the nature of perfection. His law shows to love self, is the nature of evil.
Our “human” limitations and history of failure to achieve perfect compliance to the law of God have caused us to believe it is an impossible standard. We aspire to act as Christ acted, but find our implementation far from what He achieved. So even within our churches and our Christian ideologies we begin to seek for excuses as to why we do what we do. We offer reasoning that since we are unable to “keep” the laws of God, He must not have intended for us to do so. Our ideas of spiritual perfection have been tainted with the reality of our expression. Too often our failures and manifestations of self-love over self-less-love color our very ideas of what perfection should be. As we lose sight of even the possibility of perfection, we lose the desire to be perfect. We begin to think that God will “wink” at our imperfections. We think His forgiveness will cover our actions, no matter how intentional, or repeated they are. This is the thinking that springs from tainted minds, looking through tainted realities, at a future we can no longer imagine. But it is not the reality God offers. His ideas of perfection for us, can no longer originate within us. Adam and Eve lost us this birthright at our origin, and in choosing to embrace evil began a legacy of inability on our part to achieve the high standard of love our God would outline in stone, and live in the flesh of His Son. Instead we would require a Savior to save us from ourselves and our self-love. We would require outside intervention, from a God of creation, who could re-create us from the inside out. We would need not only a rebirth, but a continual reengineering of our daily lives until He returned and would be able to finish the work He started within us.
It would take more than 6 days to recreate a damaged human heart and psyche. Not because God has limitations in His own abilities to create, but because the clay of our hearts and minds He is forced to work with now is so steeped in evil and selfishness it rebels against His work of recreation every time it has a chance. Our greatest hope now lies in our pursuit of total submission, not total conquest. Everything we have been taught in a society of self-reliance, and self-help, stands in stark contrast to the gift of salvation from self our God offers. We are not to seek perfection in the strength of our characters and actions, but rather on our knees in submission to the only savior who is able and eager to remove from us what we cannot remove from ourselves. It is in perfect surrender that we will finally find perfection achieved. It is because we can only be made perfect, through the act of recreation, the discarding of all that is evil, and remaking of all that is love. In this alone to we find hope. In this alone is the grace of His forgiveness coupled with a change we so desperately need in our day to day expression of His ideals. It is through our salvation from self-love that we find natural and perfect obedience to a law that is steeped in love itself. And through the salvation from slavery to self, we finally see the freedom He truly offers us. A life lived beyond the basics proscribed by His law, a life that is free to explore the infinite expressions of what love to another is all about.
Our interactions when fully surrendered to the process of His recreation of love within us, are no longer focused on what we cannot do to another person – but on what we might do to bring someone else joy, peace, life, and fulfillment. Merely not killing, not coveting, not lying, and not defiling are way too small concerns for a life that is remade in the image God intended. Instead, the quest becomes one of how to make the life of another wonderful, fantastic, and so much better, despite the circumstances we find ourselves in. The life of Christ was set in difficult times where hard physical work was required to survive, when political turmoil threatened your very existence, where taxation was unjust and crippling, where the poor had great need and little help, where the spiritual leaders of the day had perverted a religion of love to one of aggrandizement at the expense of illiterate. But Christ did not use the hardships of His day and circumstances as an excuse to love less, to do less, to show us less what He only “intended” to do. Instead His actions were not bound by His environment. Indeed no-one and nothing could prevent Him from showing us the love He came to show. He was always tender, merciful, and redemptive to everyone He met. He sought out the poor and downtrodden, He went to them not requiring them to find Him. Where He met with the religious leaders of His day, He tried to teach them how far they had strayed from the God of love behind their laws and more importantly their traditions (which had no actual divine origins).
The Pharisees and Sadducees of His day could not even agree on all points of religious doctrine, arguing over the resurrection. They had taken the laws of Moses given beyond the Ten Commandments, which were given in a time in Israel just out of slavery, and extended their limitations even farther. Instead of recognizing the progress that living a self-less kind of love will do to a person, they focused only the “justice” aspects of punishment that unrepentant evil would deserve. They ignored all the proscriptions for mercy found within these same laws for anyone willing to seek forgiveness, and instead only focused on the penalties that would come to those who did not value forgiveness. The religious leaders in the days of Christ made the laws of Moses seem the same as the laws of the Ten Commandments, even though the entire sanctuary services would find their fulfillment in the coming of the Messiah. They equated all laws as being everlasting, all punishments as mandatory regardless of the pursuit of forgiveness, and thus all responsibility for achieving perfection would be left to the strength of the penitent. This is what Christ would strive to correct, from the three days He spent in the temple when we was lost to Mary and Joseph on His twelfth birthday, to His endorsement of the ministry of John the Baptist, to His counsels on His travels throughout the countryside. Christ outlined to Nicodemus, one of these leaders, the true nature of salvation – a rebirth to spiritual perfection that ONLY the Messiah could bring. Perfection would not be found in the leadership of His religion, but in submission to the God of His religion. Christ did reach a few of the religious leaders of His day, but too many were more comfortable with ideas of self-reliance that had led to such vast personal gain.
Is it any different for us today? Our society values self-reliance, a good personal work ethic, and has little sympathy for the downtrodden and unfortunate we come across. These values invade our Christian ideologies until we begin to believe that our salvation is our own responsibility, and that those who suffer in life do so for transgressing the will of God. Like the Pharisees of old, we see those who are poor as being “responsible” for their own conditions either through being lazy and unmotivated, or from committing various acts of evil. It even goes so far as to see diseases like Aids and STDs as punishments from God, instead of the natural consequences of sexual promiscuity. Earthquakes and natural disasters get tagged as “acts of God” instead of merely natural phenomenon influenced by how we treat our planet. In short even those of Christian ideology of today choose to focus on the punishment of unrepentant evil, rather than on the true transformation, and rebirth Christ would offer to all who will seek Him. Salvation is not only for the rich, or for the poor, but for any who would wish to have a better life here and now. Salvation from self-love was not supposed to be something that waited to only find fulfillment in heaven, but rather as a process that begins here and now, and reaches its maturity in the heaven we seek. Christ said … “the Kingdom of God is come”. Obviously He was not referring to streets of Gold, and pearly gates of His city. He was referring to the establishment of His kingdom in the hearts and minds of mankind. He was referring to wonderful gift of recreation He would offer us. A beginning to the achievement of perfection was to be His gift. We could not earn it. We would not deserve it. But we could finally attain it, by merely accepting it.
The religious leaders of His day rejected Christ because they did not want to remove the quest for perfection from their own hands and place it humbly in the hands of our God. They wanted rather to believe they were good, and worthy to be saved, from the great deeds they did; not be forced to admit their hearts had not been truly changed. They were still slaves to self-love. They were still addicts to self-serving, even if it came at the expense of another. Today, we cling to a similar ideology that states we find our salvation in the strength of our characters, or we negate its need clinging to the idea that forgiveness is offered even before we need it for the deeds we are about to commit. It robs us of the power of our religion, and makes Christianity a joke to those who witness us committing the same acts, at the same frequency, as those who do not claim Christ as their savior. If Christianity can only offer forgiveness for wrong doing it is indeed a poor religion. Muslims share this ability, as do our Jewish brothers. All three religions share the ideology of the great forgiveness of our God. Christianity distinguishes itself in that Christ, being the son of God, offers us more than mere forgiveness, He offers us reform. A true change in not only what we do, but in how we think; this is the gift of Christ to us. He re-creates us anew, and re-establishes perfection within us as we surrender to Him. It is NOT our own perfection that is created in us, but His perfection that reflected through us. We become vessels of perfection, not fountains of it. And when we finally reach our heavenly home, it is this work of creating perfection within us that is finally and fully completed – not started, and then ended. It starts today.
In this sense, we need not run from the standards of Gods law as being unachievable. Instead we can recognize our inability, and rest knowing that He will remake us until we find harmony with His laws our natural state of being. We need not seek to delay our freedom from slavery to self, in order to continue committing acts of evil that hurt us and everyone around us. Instead we can seek His salvation from evil and the pain it causes immediately, and begin a life of reformation today, powered by Him, and founded in our submission to Him. As we surrender, our ideas of perfection are restored to what He intended. The taints of our evil, and our genetics, are undone by the power of a regenerative God, who is able to create in us a clean heart, and a clean mind. As the influences of evil are removed, our ideas of perfection become greater and more noble. We begin to see what is truly possible, unbound by mediocrity we have come to accept. We realize that we wish no more a compromise with evil, but its complete and utter destruction within us. Perfection is so much more than we had hoped. Perfection is so much better than anything we could have experienced. And it is indeed plausible, possible, and part of our reality as we embrace our surrender to our Messiah of Love. Christ offers what no other deity has ever purported to do, to reach within us (His enemies) while we are yet His enemies, and change the very nature of who we are, freeing us from evil, as His gift to us, if we but accept it. It is the acceptance that we could not achieve this ourselves that is required of us. It is the recognition of our dependence that is the beginning of the road to perfection. And it is the embrace of His gift that can then transform our lives from the mediocrity of evil, to the infinite that perfection has to offer.
To begin to see perfection, to understand it, we must move past our “human” limitations. To delve into what is by nature infinite; we must allow our creator, to remove what binds us and taints us. We must let Him change the very nature of “how” we think. Unbound by our past and our perspectives, we can begin to see perfection for what it truly is. We can begin to appreciate it. And through our submission to Christ, we can begin to see its potential within us. Perfection then becomes more than an aspiration we can barely hope to achieve, but a daily reality that can be reflected in how we love another. Our relationships will dramatically improve as we have something of His to bring to the table. Our perspectives and priorities of what is truly important will alter as we forsake the pursuit of Madison Avenue suggestions of acquisition, and begin the pursuit of character transformation Christ alone can bring. We can finally and fully embrace the Kingdom of God in the here and now, restoring the power of Christianity which is based in the power of love to others. We can show to the world a reason to see this ideology as being superior to others. Not because we are superior, but because we reflect a superior love through us. In our weakness, in our surrender, we come to find that which is infinite, that which is perfect, the God of love within us.
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