Does God Expect Mankind to be Perfect?

“[I am] your God: ye shall therefore be holy, for I am holy.” Lev. 11:45

Not too long ago I saw a commercial that was encouraging people to come to a local Methodist church. In the commercial the exhortation that “God does not expect you to be perfect” was given. Now, in a general sense this is true. God does not expect us to be perfect in order to come to salvation. But, in a broader view this is becoming one of the hallmarks of what calls itself Christianity today. It is the idea that we can do as we please and still be blessed by God as if His commandments are of no avail. To the lost this is expected, they have no true understanding of God’s laws. Even the Apostle Paul said “I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and an insolent man; but I obtained mercy because I did it ignorantly in unbelief.” (1 Tim. 1:13) So, there isn’t any real chance that the lost will be perfect, either within their own ranks, or, biblically, within the Church. It seems to me that when we say such things we open the door to the lost having a view that their imperfection is ok; then, when they join a church and profess themselves to be Christians the ground work is positively laid that leads to Antinomianism; which has spread like a wild fire into the vast majority of mainstream Evangelicalism today. Through such thinking we are creating a low view of sin in the world and a moral relativism that is sucking the life out of the church. We have become the church of the Laodiceans; we are neither cold nor hot. We are lukewarm and a lukewarm church is especially repugnant to Christ, so much so that He describes His interaction with such a church in saying that He will vomit [them] out of [His] mouth (Rev. 3:15-16).

Let us then take a look at whether or not God expects mankind to be perfect. First, let us consider what imperfection entails. In mankind’s relationship with God imperfection is known as sin. Sin is discussed in many places in the Bible and it is through the Bible that we are able to define what sin is.

“Sin is a moral evil. Most of the names that are used in Scripture to designate sin point to its moral character. Chatta’th… an action that misses the mark… a deviation from the right way. ‘Avel and ‘avon … a want of integrity and rectitude, a departure from the appointed path. Pesha’… a revolt or refusal of subjection to rightful authority, a positive transgression of the law, and a breaking of the covenant. Resha’… a wicked and guilty departure from the law. Furthermore, it is designated as guilt… as unfaithfulness and treason… as vanity…and as perversion or distortion of nature. Fundamentally, it is not something passive, such as a weakness, a fault, or an imperfection, for which we cannot be held responsible, but an active opposition to God, and a positive transgression of His law, which constitutes guilt.” Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology, pg. 231

Any deviation from the law of God is what constitutes sin; the language used in the word of God makes this clear. God as a holy God is without sin and cannot suffer sin in any form. So the basic decree to follow His commandments is the expectation for all of mankind. All of the language the Bible employs to discuss sin puts it as an act that brings with it guilt; an intentional pitting of ourselves against God and His will.

“Sin is the transgression of a law, yea of a good law, yea of God’s law. Sin presupposes that there is a law in being, for where is no law there is no transgression (Rom. 4:15). But where there is sin, there is a law, and a transgression of the law, for sin is a transgression of the law (1 Jn. 3:4). Now the law not only forbids the doing of evil, whether by thought, word or deed, but also commands the doing of good. So to omit the good commanded is sin, as well (or ill) as is the doing of the evil that is forbidden. Against the fruit of the Spirit there is no law, but against the works of the flesh (for the antithesis holds) there is a law, for they are all against the law, as the Apostle tells us (Gal. 5:19-24). Whatever, then, transgresses the law of God – in whole or in part (Jas. 2:10) – is therefore and therein a sin, whether it break an affirmative or negative precept i.e. whether it is the omission of good or the commission of evil.” Ralph Venning, The Sinfulness of Sin, pg. 25

Any violation of the law of God is condemned by God as sin, period.

Some will say that there are times when they do something quite unintentionally and thus such a sin could not possibly be held against them. I mean, it is one thing to intentionally and knowingly sin but it is another to sin without contemplation, right? Even Christians can testify to the reality that there are times when they find themselves in the midst of a sin before they have so much as thought about it. So does God hold these sins against us? Let us look at a few examples from the Bible.

Perhaps the most striking example of unintentional sin is found in 2 Sam. 6:6-7, “And when they came to Nachon’s threshing floor, Uzzah put out his hand to the ark of God and took hold of it, for the oxen stumbled. Then the anger of the Lord was aroused against Uzzah, and God struck him there for his error; and he died there by the ark of God.” Matthew Henry says this concerning the matter,

“Uzzah… laid hold of it, to save it from falling, we have reason to think with very good intention, to preserve the reputation of the ark and to prevent a bad omen. Yet this was his crime. Uzzah was a Levite, but priests only might touch the ark. The law was express concerning the Kohathites, that, though they were to carry the ark by the staves, yet they must not touch any holy thing, lest they die, Num. 4:15. Uzzah’s long familiarity with the ark, and the constant attendance he had given to it, might occasion his presumption, but would not excuse it. God would hereby teach us that a good intention will not justify a bad action; it will not suffice to say of that which is ill done that it was well meant.”

See, to God it didn’t matter ultimately what Uzzah’s intentions were, it only mattered that he had transgressed the law of God. Uzzah had sinned and the stated penalty for sin is death, there Uzzah died that day showing all of mankind that God cares that you sin regardless of what your intentions may have been in committing that sin.

There are still more passages that deal with the sin we haven’t even recognized or intended. In the book of Leviticus God addresses both unintentional sins and the ones we haven’t even recognized, and demands that restitution be made to atone for these sins. Lev. 4:2; 5:4, 17 are undeniably clear here. If you sin, even unintentionally, or, if you sin, even unknowingly, you will bear your iniquity (punishment). A holy God demands that the law He has given to mankind is followed precisely. The expectation is that without any deviation at all we follow the laws He has given to mankind. David had a truly deep recognition of his own sin and even he prayed to God saying, “Who can understand his errors? Cleanse me from secret faults.” When we sin there is a just penalty for that sin, whether or not we meant to sin or whether or not we even know we sinned. Mankind is so sinful that we sin without even recognizing that we have done so. At times the Spirit will bring recognition to such a case in your life and it is quite horrifying to realize how blissfully unaware we were of that sin both when we committed it and thereafter. Any honest reflection on such a matter will prove unequivocally that Total Depravity is a truth and it exists as is evidenced in the heart of every man.

But God also has expectations, not just of mankind in general, but of His children specifically. Solomon very succinctly states this expectation in the life of the redeemed when he says, “Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is man’s all. For God will bring every work into judgment, including every secret thing, whether good or evil.” (Ecc. 12:13-14) Solomon says again, “He who despises the word will be destroyed, but he who fears the commandment will be rewarded.” (Pr. 13:13) The expectation is clear, the life of the saints are to be lived in obedience; perfect obedience. Franz Delitzsch says of the verse in Proverbs,

“The word is thought of as ordering, and thus in the sense of a commandment. That which is here said is always true where the will of man has subordinated itself to the authoritative will of a superior, but principally the proverb has in view the word of God… as the expression of the divine will. Whoever places himself contemptuously against a word which binds him to obedience will nevertheless not be free from that word, but is under pledge until he redeem the pledge by the performance of the obedience refused, or till that higher will enforce payment of the debt withheld by visiting with punishment.”

He further says in discussing Ecc. 12:13-14,

“The sentence, fear God, repeating itself from vs. 6, is the kernel and the star of the whole book, the highest moral demand which mitigates its pessimism and hallows its [call to be happy]. The admonition… and keep His commandments… places the hearing of the divine word, viz. a hearing for the purpose of observing, as the very soul of the worship of God above all opus operatum of ceremonial services.”

God made His expectations abundantly clear to the Israelites of the Old Testament. In Deut. 10:12-13 the expectation for sinless living is spelled out plainly. Keil & Delitzsch again address these verses and say,

“The demand for fear, love, and reverence towards the Lord, is no doubt very hard for the natural man to fulfill, and all the harder the deeper it goes into the heart; but after such manifestations of the love and grace of God, it only follows as a matter of course. ‘Fear, love, and obedience would naturally have taken root of themselves within the heart, if man had not corrupted his own heart [with sin].’ The fear of the Lord, which springs from the knowledge of one’s own unholiness in the presence of the holy God, ought to form the one leading emotion in the heart prompting to walk in all the ways of the Lord, and to maintain morality of conduct in its strictest form.”

John Gill explains the direction Israel is being given here when he says,

“to walk in all His ways; prescribed and directed by Him, every path of duty, whether moral, ceremonial, or judicial.”

So for the world in general it is expected that mankind keeps the commandments of God without wavering otherwise he is guilty of sin and justifiably condemned. For the chosen people of God, the requirement is no different; God has given commands and He expects them followed exactly.

But some will say that I have mired my self in the Old Testament and not given the New Testament a chance to speak on the matter. Well, what does the New Testament say concerning the matter? Is there less of a requirement for us to be holy and to refrain from sinning? One writer says in speaking of Heb. 10:10,

“[…] the writer of Hebrews is telling us to take seriously the necessity of personal, practical holiness. When the Holy Spirit comes into our lives at our salvation, He comes to make us holy in practice. If there is not, then, at least a yearning in our hearts to live a holy life pleasing to God, we need to seriously question whether our faith in Christ is genuine.” Jerry Bridges, The Pursuit of Holiness, pg. 38

This is the expectation throughout the New Testament. Christ says in Jn. 14:15, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” He makes the same point again in Jn. 15:10 when he says, “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in His love.” Notice He doesn’t say, “if you keep some of my commandments” or “as many commandments as you see fit to comply with.” No, He says in plain language that if you call yourself a Christian you will be obedient to the commandments He has left for us. The expectation remains that you will perfectly keep the commandments that God has prescribed for His people to follow. It is given in love for mankind as is clearly evidenced throughout the Scriptures (Deut. 10:13; Rom. 8:28). But even given in love it is an expectation that we are obedient to the commands of God.

Has grace abolished the requirement to be obedient to every command of God? No! Paul says in Rom. 6:1-22 that we cannot think this way. That while we were slaves to sin, serving the desires of our flesh as the heathen does; now we are to slaves to righteousness, slaves to God, and now because of the eternal reward we have in Him it is even more vital that we are obedient; for now we have the ultimate motivation in so doing. We are inseparably connected with God Himself and in that bond with which He has called us to walk we are to present [ourselves] to God as being alive from the dead, and [our] members as instruments of righteousness.

Yet, it is because of grace that we are no longer condemned by our sin, even though we continue to commit sin throughout the entirety of our lives. We have been justified, and in that we have the righteousness of Christ imputed to us. Because Christ perfectly kept the law (2 Cor. 5:21; 1 Pet. 2:21-24) and we are justified by Him, it is as if we have done the same. But this can never stand as a justification to wallow in the depths of sin claiming all the way to hell that you are a redeemed saint. Your nature has been changed and if you still are not offended by a sense of your own sin then you need to ask yourself why that is. If you are a new man then it is awfully hard to lie in bed at night with a clear conscience knowing you are openly and willingly sinning against the Lord. If this is how you are living your life while being a professed Christian you have fallen into the dangerous trap of Antinomianism and should immediately stop the course you are on, repent, and turn to the Lord to convict you of your folly and to show you your sin while giving you an ever deepening hate for the sin you are shown. It must be the aim of the life of every Christian to mortify sin. I love that word “mortify”. It is an old word the Puritans used which literally means to kill, destroy. That is precisely what we are commanded to do; eradicate sin from our lives and to discipline ourselves to live according to the will of God. Anything less is unacceptable to a holy God.

But then there is the corresponding opposite that is known as Legalism. This seems to be gaining ground these days and more and more I hear people boasting about the fact they are living under the confines of Old Testament law. The Moral Law (The Ten Commandments) is a requirement of man throughout all of time. It is at the very heart of the life of each and every man on this earth and especially the saints. The Westminster Confession of Faith says in 19.5,

“The moral law doth forever bind all, as well justified persons as others, to the obedience thereof; and that, not only in regard of the matter contained in it, but also respect of the authority of God the Creator, who gave it. Neither doth Christ, in the Gospel, any way dissolve, but much strengthen this obligation.”

If this was the crux of their position then it would not be legalistic; it would be true and right and biblical. But they are seeking to reinstitute Mosaic Law in its entirety, down to food laws and the like. Yet our Bibles clearly address this matter just as well as it does the Antinomian position.

Paul discusses this at length in his epistle to the Romans. Rom. 7:1-6 and 8:1-11 are the primary passages under consideration here with special emphasis on 7:6 and 8:2, 13. See, in these passages Paul tells us that the requirements of the law have been fulfilled in us through Christ and that we should live our lives in the newness of the Spirit and not in the oldness of the letter and tells us plainly that the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made [us] free from the law of sin and death.  John Calvin says in speaking on 7:6,

“[…] we are freed from the law, when God emancipates us from its rigid exactions and curse, and endues us with His Spirit, through whom we walk in His ways… we are not pressed down with its intolerable burden, and that its inexorable rigor does not overwhelm us with a curse.”

 He goes on to say in Rom. 8:2,

“[…] it is life-giving… it hence follows that they who detain man in the letter of the law, expose him to death. The meaning then is this, that the law of God condemns men, and that this happens, because as long as they remain under the bond of the law, they are oppressed with the bondage of sin, and thus are exposed to death; but that the Spirit of Christ, while it abolishes the law of sin in us by destroying the prevailing desires of the flesh, does at the same time deliver us from the peril of death.”

There can be no justification for running around as Christians while behaving like Old Testament Jews. That does not please God! How can we seek to perform that which only Christ alone has ever perfectly kept and in which only pointed forward to Him in the first place? The law showed us our sin and our utter inability to keep it. The sacrifices of the Old Testament showed us that we needed a Redeemer that could fully pay the necessary penalty for our sin as the true spotless lamb required of God. And we have that! Why would we look back when everything then was looking forward to what we have now? Paul himself says, “I do not count myself to have apprehended; but one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead. I press toward the mark of the upward call of God in Jesus Christ.” (Php. 3:13-14) Yes, there is an element of personal application here and our struggle with the guilt we feel over past sins, but this is also how we are to live our lives as Christians. How can we have our eyes firmly fixed on heaven if we are needlessly trying to fulfill laws that Christ has already fulfilled and miring ourselves in the law that only brought sin and death? Paul drives home this point again in Eph. 2:15 when he says that Christ abolished in His flesh the enmity, that is, the law of commandments contained in ordinances. William Hendriksen says,

“Now ‘in His flesh,’ that is, in His body nailed to the cross where He shed His blood, Christ abolished the law. Of course, this cannot mean that he did away with the law as a moral principle embedded in every man’s conscience (Rom. 1:21; 2:14, 15), formalized in the decalogue (Ex. 20:1-17; Deut. 5:6-21), summarized in the rule of love for God and for one’s neighbor (Matt. 22:34-40; Mark 12:28-34; Luke 10:25-28; Rom. 13:8-10; Gal. 5:14), and climaxed in the new commandment (John 13:34, 35). By God’s grace and through the indwelling Spirit the believer, in principle, obeys the law out of gratitude for salvation received. He delights in it (Rom. 7:22).”

So there is a law we follow but it is not the Mosaic Law. To try and revert back to the requirements thereof abrogates the price that Christ paid on the cross for our sins and the perfect righteousness only He could bear as the payment for our sins. To sum up what we are being taught here let us look to what that giant of the faith John Owen had to say regarding Rom. 8:13. He says,

“The choicest believers, who are assuredly freed from the condemning power of sin (the law), ought yet to make it their business, all their days, to mortify the indwelling power of sin.” John Owen, The Mortification of Sin, pg. 20

That is the appropriate attitude to have for the Christian that has been freed from the curse of the law and who now lives under the Covenant of Grace.

There is in the lives of Christians a biblical view of obedience that is the correct one to have. It neither disregards the demands of God nor does it seek to clutch on to requirements already fulfilled in Christ. When the Church understands this and chokes on the reality of its own sin while basking in the overwhelming grace we have received because of Christ, then we know we have attained a genuinely biblical view of sin and the requirements God has of us, and especially what He has done for us in regards to our inability to keep those requirements. If we have that, perhaps the church will provide a more realistic view of sin to the world when it extends the outward call to men in general. We cannot marginalize their sin and we cannot act like showing up to church will somehow correct their sin. There is an old Puritan saying that says, “You must plough the field before you can sow the seed.” Why have we forgotten that? The church in general is offering forgiveness in a way that makes repentance an afterthought and even worse makes the lost man’s sin o.k. to him. Are we not told plainly that we are to be holy, for [He is] holy? So why would we not tell the lost world the same? Invite them in, seek them out, and evangelize the nations. But let them know the sad state they are in, let them know that they are damned because of their sin against God Himself and that the only way to be forgiven their sins is first to acknowledge that they are living in sin, that they must repent, and that they must place their faith in Jesus Christ alone for the remission of their sins. Stop coddling the damned! Would you tell a man dying on the side of the road from a car accident that he doesn’t need to be made well before taking him to the hospital? Or for the sake of his life would you bring him in and ask that the work to save him be performed immediately? In the same way that the doctor doesn’t tell the patient that the life threatening injury he has sustained is but a scratch that he need not worry about; we cannot tell a dying man that the perilous state of his soul is nothing to be concerned about either. Impress upon the lost the gravity of their situation and through faithful interaction pray the Lord save their miserable souls. Make no mistake about it, when we as a Church are worried about offending their conscience, it is a sure sign that we ourselves have such a skewed view of sin that we are more worried about offending our own sense of well-being, and thus we proceed to the damnation of those around us.

We must live pious lives that glorify God; that is to be our aim. We are not to be Antinomian and we are not to be Legalists. We are to be only what God has prescribed in His word. Through that godly insistence in our own lives we will rightly call the damned to repentance. Does God expect all of mankind to be perfect? Yes, without hesitation, yes! If He did not then Christ died in vain. It is because of that expectation and our inability to live up to that expectation because of the sin that has ruled in our hearts that God in mercy has given His only begotten Son to propitiate His wrath on behalf of the elect. This is the message we must invite the world in with, for this is the reality of what the circumstance is. Perhaps next time the commercial could say, “God does not require you to be perfect in order to be saved; but, He does require perfect obedience and because of your violation of that expectation you must come to salvation or suffer the wrath of God as a just punishment for your sin.” Perhaps through such an exhortation from the Church the world will be shown the terrible wrath of God and their comfortable lives of sin will be questioned. Salvation depends on the Lord; but we must be faithful to present His word as He has given it to us, regardless of how concerned we may be that the lost will think we are being too harsh.