God’s Justice is About a Covenant of Loveįirst, let’s look at the context. God is warning his people that each generation will be held accountable if they repeat the sins of the previous generation. But if we dig a little deeper, we’ll see that God isn’t saying he’ll bring his wrath upon totally innocent children for their parents’ actions. In this text, we’re confronted with the intimidating concept of generational accountability. But will we really be punished for something our parents did? It is clear that who our parents are, and even the choices they make, affect us greatly. We inherit things like physical features, health issues, mannerisms, and ways of viewing the world from them. And this seems a little harsh, right? It’s one thing to say we are shaped by our parents - we all know that. So does God hold us accountable for the mistakes our parents make? These verses in Exodus seem to say so. does not leave the guilty unpunished he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth. It makes the next words in the passage all the more challenging (and potentially shocking). So in that sense, we could theoretically be perfect, though none of us is.It’s not hard to understand why this passage in Exodus is the most referenced Scripture throughout the Hebrew Bible - who doesn’t want to be reminded of some of the most beautiful aspects of God’s character? It’s wonderful, gracious, and encouraging. But on a given occasion, it is never, ever necessary. So sin in the Christian life, I would say, is inevitable because of our weakness and because of the multitude of opportunities we have to sin. He always gives us enough grace to overcome sin. The New Testament tells us that with every temptation we meet, God gives us a way to escape that temptation.
Not the least of which, of course, was the apostle Paul, who talked about his ongoing struggle with sin.Ĭan a person be perfect? Theoretically, the answer to that is yes.
The mainstream of Christianity, however, has resisted the doctrine of perfectionism chiefly because we see the record of the greatest saints in biblical history and in church history who to a person confessed the fact that they, to their dying day, struggled with ongoing sin in their lives. That view is called perfectionism, and people develop a theology whereby there’s a special work of the Holy Spirit that gives them victory over all sin or all intentional sin that renders them morally perfect in this world. Therefore, there are Christians, many Christians, who believe that, indeed, it is possible for a person to reach a state of moral perfection in this life. If Jesus says to be perfect, the assumption would be that he would not require us to do something that is impossible for us to achieve. Now to the question of whether we can, in fact, achieve moral perfection in this world. The New Testament word for that is saints. Long before the Sermon on the Mount, God required the people of Israel to reflect his character when he said to them, “Be ye holy even as I am holy.” He set them apart to be holy ones. That’s what it means to be created in the image of God. In fact, the basic call to a person in this world is to be a reflection of the character of God.
For example, “Be ye complete as your heavenly Father is complete.” Now remember that your heavenly Father is perfectly complete! So if we are to mirror God in that way, we are to mirror him in his moral excellence as well as in other ways. However, in this statement, it’s certainly legitimate to translate it using the English word perfect. In the first place, the word that is translated “perfect” literally means “be complete.” So often, the New Testament and the Old Testament will describe people as being upright and righteous-not in the sense that they have achieved total moral perfection, but rather that they have reached a singular level of maturity in their growth in terms of spiritual integrity. There are a couple of things we need to understand about this statement.
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