He’s not a perfectionist; He’s a very real Person.
It is peculiar to the West to assert absolutes. Other cultures might figure out what we mean by the term “perfect” regardless of language, but ours is the only one that imputes absolutism to God. It’s not that those other cultures have a lower view of God, but their views are more consistent with His revelation. Our view is wickedly perverse in conjuring up this nonsense. Our concept of perfection itself is foreign to Creation; it is the sick imagination of our evil culture.
It has always been deeply personal. When translators render some word or idea “perfect” in English, it doesn’t mean what it does in our world. It typically implies “mature” in the sense of someone who has spent enough time in the Lord’s service to have squelched their own whims in favor of what makes Him smile. They’ve watched carefully and observed how He responds and what brings Him joy, and strive to make that happen in their own delegated responsibilities.
This is not some impersonal bureaucracy. It’s family. All serve, but we have been granted adoption into His royal household. It’s more like blood kin; we favor our divine family over all others in this world. But it’s an Ancient Near Eastern household, not a modern version. We are under a sovereign dominion; we are property as well as kin. The ideal is not a nuclear family household in separate locations, but all in one big happy tent. When God says, “Come, let us reason” (Isaiah 1:18) it’s not two more-or-less equals dickering over specifics of exchange or contracts. It’s an image of God helping you understand what reality is, because He’s the Creator who best knows how you can harmonize with what He put into place before there was dirt.
So when the Bible talks about a perfect servant of God, it could not possibly be farther from the truth to imagine a static condition. Perfection is the tendency to keep coming back to God and making adjustments all the way through. It implies you have figured out how it works. You have an instinct to first go face down at His feet because there is never sufficient purity to overcome your own damnation. All of it is a gift from Him. By the same token, you would have to assertively change so radically that you bear no resemblance at all to Him, before any hint of alienation comes into the picture.
Once inside, it’s as if there is no option to leave the family, but you surely won’t be happy and useful to His plans if you insist on avoiding those long, personal conversations. But you’ll notice this has nothing to do with some mythical objective facts. God revealed Himself in terms of narrative, characterization and indications. That is how God deals with human minds; that’s how the human mind is wired to work.
It’s entirely possible to come at this from outside of any culture. I’ve shown some of that in my writing with quantum this-n-that. However, you still have to honor what God has done. The earliest human existence just outside the entrance to Eden has always been somewhat like the Ancient Near East. It’s not as if God picked that as some cultural background He could tolerate; it’s as close as humans can come to His ideal for us. And the Hebrew culture that so closely echoes it was made by God directly. He didn’t just choose it; He built it as His own design. So we don’t replicate that, but we discern it and learn it well enough to find out what it looks like in our own context — “rightly dividing” the Old Covenant.
God is not surprised when we wander all over the map away from His ideal. He sees us with compassion and knows we suffer because we reject His model for human existence. But He knows how we are wired and what it should take to bring us closer. If we don’t accept that coaxing and nudging for what it is, it’s our problem, not His. He has granted everything necessary, and a very generous helping of extras, to make us see Him clearly. That is, to see Him as clearly as we could at our stage of development. A couple of folks were so personally close to Him that they didn’t have to die. They weren’t “objectively perfect,” just so in tune with His ways that there was no point in dying. It is within human reach.
By the same token, His own Son died about as horribly and painfully as is possible for a human. Go beyond certain thresholds and people quit feeling anything, so Jesus suffered as much as human wiring could process, and in ways that cannot be measured. He did that for you. He did that so you and I could seize that high placement in the household and then study to find the implications with the full spiritual awareness already fired up. It’s never been easier to live without dying, yet we know of no one who went out that way since Christ. Notice that He came back from the dead and then levitated off into the sky without dying again.
Don’t be a fool — the Bible defines folly as moral insensitivity. If you haven’t rejected your Western heritage, you can’t walk very close to Christ. If you don’t endeavor to cast aside the Anglo-Saxon mythology about our world and what is good and right, you can’t claim to follow Jesus. You can’t turn God into a Westernized deity; He won’t go there. You have to come to Him through the gate He made, and that includes a radical change in cultural views.
God is not an exacting taskmaster, but Our Father — an ANE father in a feudal household. He is our Divine Sheikh.
