When I was a kid, I remember getting excited any time I came across something in the Bible I actually understood. It was like a buried treasure unearthed. Now that I’m older I find I get most excited about the parts I absolutely do not understand. Each mysterious passage reminds me just how deep the well goes. And I don’t have to delve into the minor prophets to find them. Here’s one right in the middle of the most famous sermon of all time:
“Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (Matthew 5:48)
Here is Jesus Christ, savior of sinners, lover of souls, healer of humanity, commanding us quite straightforwardly, it would seem, to be perfect. What could it mean?
In our time, “perfectionism” is rightly treated as a kind of low-level pathology. It comes with certain benefits, of course, but most seem to agree that the perfectionist lifestyle is unsustainable. Sanity requires a degree of acceptance and forgiveness of life’s imperfections–in the world, in others, and in ourselves. We know this, and yet many of us still struggle with the belief that nothing is worth doing unless it is done flawlessly. I almost didn’t write this essay for this exact reason. I hate my perfectionism. And yet Jesus comes along and tells us to be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect. So we should be perfectionists? Perhaps. But I don't think he means by “perfection” the same thing that we mean.
A student of mine recently posed a classic theological question to me. He said, “If Eden were perfect and humanity sinned, why couldn’t such a thing happen again in The New Jerusalem? How are we not somehow destined for an everlasting cycle of fall, redemption, fall, redemption?” The Christian tradition has a number of good ways to deal with this problem, but the one I want to offer here has to do with the word “perfect.”
In modern parlance, “perfect” means something like “flawless,” like a fine-tuned mechanism producing the same outcome in the same way again and again. A perfect machine. And this, in part, is why we have rightly concluded that “perfectionism” in human beings is unhealthy. After all, humans are not machines. Not only is it unrealistic to expect ourselves to produce the same flawless outcome in any given situation, it might not even be desirable if we could.
To make matters worse, this same modern notion of perfection—as flawless, mechanistic homogeneity—has seeped into our view of eternity. More than a few times I have heard the rebuttal, “I’m not sure I would want heaven to be perfect. Wouldn’t that get boring? Everything and everyone acting the same way. No surprises. Nothing new. That doesn’t sound like paradise at all.” Indeed, it sounds more like a nightmare. And yet, maybe the problem lies not with heaven itself, but with our imagination of “perfection.”
In the Bible, the word “perfect” doesn't mean what we tend to mean by it today. For the writers of Scripture, perfection has more to do with finished-ness than flawlessness. A thing is called “perfect” when it is brought to its full maturity, when it becomes everything it is meant to be.
Now, if we apply this definition to the Garden of Eden, we are forced to conclude that Eden was not, in fact, perfect. Eden was good, as Genesis tells us over and over. He created this and that, and it was good. He created human beings, and it was very good. But it doesn't say perfect. In a very important sense, it was not yet perfect, because it was not yet complete. Eden was the beginning. The garden was, among other things, a place of potential. God gave Adam and Eve things to do. He told them to name the animals, to have dominion, to be fruitful and multiply, and, of course, to refrain from eating of a certain tree. These commands set the stage or till the soil so that the man and woman’s relationship with him, with one another, and with the rest of creation can bear fruit, can be brought to full maturity over time.
Adam and Eve were given everything they needed, yet still they were destined for more. Though they were sinless, there was still so much that they had not and could not yet experience, gifts they were destined to receive but could not yet receive, not because God was unwilling to give them, but because they were not yet mature enough to receive and enjoy them.
A common theme in my household of surfers is my kids’ longing to ride surfboards they are not yet ready to ride. As their father, I actually love this desire and want nothing more than to fulfill it. I love my children, I love surfing, and I want to enjoy surfing with them until the day I die. Few physical objects are more tempting for me to purchase for my kids than a great surfboard. The trouble is…there is usually a gap between the best board full stop and the best board for them. The best surfboards are shaped for professional level surfing. And this, of course, is what they want. The kinds of boards they see in surf posters and videos. And yet, they are not professional surfers. To give them the board they desire before their skill, strength and judgment are at least approaching that of highly experienced surfers would simply be cruel. It would not be a blessing; it would be a curse. Again, this does not mean I don’t want to give it to them. I do. But, in the meantime, they have to trust me as I help them to become incrementally more and more ready and able to receive the thing we both want them to have.
If Adam and Eve had listened, obeyed, and continued to walk with God, they would have seen themselves and the world around them bloom into unimaginable glory. Instead they took the thing they were meant to wait for, and that thing became a curse rather than a blessing. This is the tragedy of Eden.
So, Eden was good. Eden was not perfect. Moreover, the New Jerusalem promises something far greater than Eden ever was—not just a return to Eden, but rather Eden redeemed and completed—men, women and all creation brought to their full maturity in Him.
I am aware that this defies modern imagination. Our push-button culture has tricked us into believing in a push-button salvation. But as the story of the Bible (and the story of our lives) slowly and painfully reveals, no such salvation is available to us. If, by the sudden flip of a switch or wave of a wand, all creation were made magically flawless, that might seem wonderful at first. But it would be a fragile salvation, prone to another fall (and then another and another). The Bible’s vision of the New Jerusalem isn’t like that. The twenty-four elders do not automatically find themselves in alignment with the king, but rather fall down of their own accord, casting their crowns before the throne and declaring that He alone is worthy to receive glory and honor and power…
"for you created all things,
and by your will they were created
and have their being!" (Revelation 4:11)
Notice the reference to the original creation of all things. In Christ, the saints of the New Jerusalem are not merely “redeemed” but have become ready and able to redeem, fulfill, and complete the work of their oldest Edenic ancestors.
Thus, the New Jerusalem is not so much flawless as it is perfectly finished. It cannot fall again any more than an adult could suddenly become an infant again. I cannot hate what my heart has learned over time to love, nor love what my heart has learned to hate. There is no going back. Perfection-as-a-flipped-switch is fragile, but perfection-as-maturity cannot be undone. It only grows more and more perfect through all eternity. All susceptibility to sin vanishes. We have grown out of it, not magically, but necessarily, because of what the Spirit of God has done and continues to do in his people. The New Jerusalem, a city in the place of a garden, cannot become what it was before. The latter glory is greater than the former, in part, because it is all the more permanent.
The modern dream of perfection as flawlessness is not only unrealistic; it is undesirable. The perfect tree is not the perfectly symmetrical tree, the tree without knots or bruises or cut-marks from the hands that pruned it. No. The perfect tree is the tree that bears all the fruit it was meant to bear, that bears fruit to overflowing. Likewise, to “be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” is a command, a promise, and a prophecy for those who love him, not of flawlessness but finished-ness, each in his or her own unique way. Rather than the modern nightmare of heaven as a grand machine, homogeneous and predictable, our story leads to a garden-city with an infinite diversity of beings brought to full maturity, harmony, and unity in our praise of Him. There will be many distinct notes and voices in that eternal song, but we will sing as one.
And this is not merely a vision of the future. The beauty of the Christian understanding of perfection is that it isn’t just something that will happen, but something that is happening. We tend to believe that “one day” we will be perfect in Christ, perhaps imagining that one day we will be made flawless. But that is not as good of a promise as the one we have been given. In a sense, the past and the future are much easier to accept than the present. It may be easy enough to believe, as a matter of historical fact, that Christ died for our sins some two thousand years ago, and likewise that one day we will be made new.
The hard thing, and perhaps the central-most thing, is to believe that we are being made new this very moment by the power of His Spirit, which works in and through his people. It is easy to believe that “seeds become trees.” It is much harder to plant a seed in the ground and watch it grow into a tree. In fact, the only way to see a tree grow is to become as rooted as the tree itself, keeping watch day and night in the same direction until you’ve stayed long enough that the growth of the tree is as certain as the sun and the stars. Likewise, we are being made perfect–not flawless, but mature–like a tree which shows no immediate signs of growth, but whose destiny is no less certain for that fact. Every day, as we abide in Him, we grow more and more into the people we were created to be. And this means that each day is of infinite worth, because each day we become more and more citizens of that new creation, where all will be new and all will be well.
So…let us be perfect as our heavenly father is perfect.