“Therefore you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect. (Matthew 5:48, NKJV).
The Upward Call
For someone who believes Scripture means what it says and says what it means, this is not usually a verse we run to for comfort or encouragement. Even if you try to mitigate its clarion call to be like God and substitute the concept of "complete" or "finished" for the word "perfect", both legitimate alternative choices, you still have a monumental problem. God is infinite. We are finite. Everything that God is, His attributes, character and purposes are as far beyond us as it is possible to be.
In one vital sense, of course, we who are Christ's meet this standard because we are in Him. His perfection and completeness are imputed to us by faith in a profound cosmic transaction devised by God to redeem us from sin and death. For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. (2 Corinthians 5:21, NKJV). From that perspective Jesus was providing His audience with a preview of what would shortly take place in history: at the precise moment ordained by God before the foundation of the earth, the sinless Son of Man would lay down His life in infinite payment for our sin.
But if we stop there we miss both an encouragement and promise of reward that is as remarkable and loving as Redemption itself. Before I lay that out, however, think for a moment about how those 1st century Jews and proselyte Gentiles listening to Jesus must have felt. If they had been paying attention at all, they would have been astonished at both the authority with which Jesus spoke ("you have heard… but I say to you"), and the radical principles He was espousing. Aside from everything else, two particular statements would have shaken them to the core. The focus verse above, and “For I say to you, that unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven." (Matthew 5:20, NKJV). Recall that the Scribes and Pharisees were two elite classes of religious leaders who were essentially "professional law keepers". The popular view was that these largely disdainful and ruthlessly scrupulous legalists were guaranteed favor with God. They tithed even mint and cumin, made ostentatious offerings and public displays of sanctimonious prayers, and would not allow themselves to be defiled by so much as a speck of dust kicked up by a Gentile or ceremonially unclean person.
Jesus' statements must have been shocking and decidedly unnerving. "You mean I need to do more then these self-important Pharisees!" And then the final devastation, "I need to be as perfect as God Himself! What possible hope of Heaven is there?" I am certain that these were exactly the reactions the Lord was intending. He wanted to bring the people to the absolutely necessary realization that in themselves there was no hope of earning God's favor. None. Nothing they could possibly do would earn them entrance into Heaven. When His disciples heard it, they were greatly astonished, saying, “Who then can be saved?” (Matthew 19:25, NKJV).
This is the crux of the Christian message to the world, literally. Without the Cross of Christ, there can be no salvation. Without faith in Jesus as both God and Man, Lord and Savior ALL are dead in trespasses and sins, and will remain so forever. There is none who meets the standard of perfection or completeness. The Law of Moses, with all it's do's and don'ts, its prescriptions of clean and unclean, was designed to be that mirror, that tutor, that forced men to fall on their knees in helplessness and cry out for a Savior. "O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? I thank God--through Jesus Christ our Lord! …" (Romans 7:24, 25, NKJV).
But Jesus' directive to be perfect, while being the capstone of His argument pointing to Himself as the only way to the Father, is also a promise and encouragement of eternal reward. Why? Because, as one saint wrote long ago "absolute perfection must be forever beyond, not only any human, but any finite, being; it is a divine ideal forever shining before us, calling us upward, and making endless progression possible." The old enervating picture of eternal life in Heaven as a be-winged creature camped on a cloud strumming a harp is the epitome of inaccuracy. Forever there will be enduring, satisfying purpose in increasingly knowing God and becoming like God - eternal pursuit of the Infinite.
Not that I have already attained, or am already perfected; but I press on, that I may lay hold of that for which Christ Jesus has also laid hold of me. Brethren, 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 goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 3:12-14, NKJV).
