Be Perfect

Why Eden Was Not Perfect...And Why We Must And Shall Be

When I was a kid, I remember reading the Bible and getting genuinely excited every time I understood something in it. This little bit of understanding felt like a gift straight from God to me. Now that I’m older, I find I get most excited when I come across something that I absolutely do not understand. My heart still races each time I rediscover just how deep the well goes. And I don’t have to go digging through the minor prophets to find these mysterious gems. Here’s one one right in the middle of the most famous sermon ever given:

“Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (Matthew 5:48)

Here we have Jesus Christ, savior of sinners, lover of souls, healer of our bodies and minds, commanding us quite straightforwardly…to be perfect. What could it mean?

In the modern world, “perfectionism” is rightly considered a kind of low-level pathology. Though it may have certain benefits at certain times, it is not a sustainable way to live. Sanity requires a degree of acceptance and forgiveness of life’s imperfections, which constantly reveal themselves in the world, in others, and in us. We know this, and yet many of us struggle for a lifetime with the functional belief that nothing is worth doing unless it is done flawlessly. (I almost didn’t write this post 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? I think the answer is yes, but I don't think he means by “perfection” the same thing we mean. 

Recently, a friend asked me a very interesting theological question. He said, “At the end of the Bible, in the New Jerusalem, when all things are made new, a new heaven and a new earth, assumedly we will still have free will, so isn't it possible—even likely—that there could be another fall? If Eden were perfect and we sinned, then why couldn’t the same thing happen again in the New Jerusalem? How are we not somehow destined for an everlasting cycle of fall, redemption, fall, redemption?” Good question. And it brings us back to what we mean by “perfect.” 

In modern usage, the word “perfect” tends to means “flawless.” For instance, the perfect machine would produce the same outcome in the same way again and again. 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 and every situation, it might not even be desirable if we could.

To make matters worse, this same modern notion of perfection, as mechanistic homogeneity, has seeped into our view of eternity. More than a few times I’ve 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. That kind of heavenly perfection sounds more like a nightmare. Yet, perhaps the problem lies not with heaven itself, but with our notion of “perfection.”  

In the Bible, the word “perfect” doesn't mean what we mean by it today. For the writers of Scripture, perfection has more to do with finished-ness than flawlessness. Something 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 would then have to conclude: Eden was not, in fact, perfect. Rather, 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 only the beginning. The garden was a young place, 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 tilled the soil so that the man and woman’s relationship with him, with one another, and with the rest of creation could bear fruit, could be made stronger and deeper and higher over time. In other words, so that these relationships could be brought to full maturity.

Adam and Eve were given everything they needed, yet still somehow they were destined for more. Though they were sinless, there was still so much that they had not and could not yet experience. There were gifts they were destined to receive but could not yet receive; and this, 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. There are few physical objects I would more joyfully spend money on than a great surfboard for each of my kids. The trouble is that there tends to be 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 magazines and videos. And yet, they are not—at least, not yet!—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 receive.

My oldest daughter, riding a pretty sick board, because she’s ready now, because she trusted me for years.

If Adam and Eve had only 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. Even if it were, it would not be a sustainable salvation, and therefore not a true one. If, by the sudden flip of a switch or wave of a wand, all creation were made magically flawless, that indeed might be a fragile paradise, prone to another fall (and then another and another). But the Bible’s vision of the New Jerusalem isn’t like that. The twenty-four elders do not magically or automatically find themselves in alignment with the king, but rather fall down of their own accord, cast their crowns before the throne and declare:

“You are worthy, our Lord and God,
    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. The saints of the New Jerusalem are not merely “redeemed” in Christ, but also, through Christ, have become ready and able to redeem, fulfill, and complete the work of of their oldest Edenic ancestors.

Thus, the New Jerusalem is not so much magically 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 can only grow 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, despite its so-called “imperfections.” Likewise, to “be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” is a command and a promise 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 a perfect machine, homogeneous and predictable, our story concludes in a garden-city with an infinite diversity of beings, each realizing full maturity, harmony, and unity in their praise of the Creator.

And, of course, this is not merely a vision of the future. The beauty of the Christian understanding of perfection is that it's not just something that will happen, but something that is happening now. 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 strange sense, the past and the future of the gospel 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 most central thing, is to believe that we are being made new this very moment by the power of His Spirit, which works in and through us, his people.

It is easy to believe that trees grow. It is much harder to plant a seed and actually watch it grow into a tree. In fact, the only way to watch a tree grow is to become as rooted as the tree itself, looking day and night in the same direction, until you have stayed long enough to behold that the growth of the tree is just 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. Which 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.