Samantha Rinne
Resident Genderfluid Writer/Artist
Matthew 5:48 Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.
1st Peter 1:15 But as he which hath called you is holy, so be ye holy in all manner of conversation;
16 Because it is written, Be ye holy; for I am holy.
So.... If I have free will I wonder why I cannot follow these two verses or rather choose to follow these two verses?
Hahaha. No.
Perfect, doesn't have quite the same meaning to the Jews as the modern people.
You see, Jesus is fond of interesting word tricks (check my post history, earlier today I talked about how Jesus said give to Caesar what is his, but according to Jews everything belongs to God). The thing is, the Greeks believe in perfection. The Jews don't.
An Imperfect God
Is God perfect? You often hear philosophers describe “theism” as the belief in a perfect being — a being whose attributes are said to include being all-powerful, all-knowing, immutable, perfectly good, perfectly simple, and necessarily existent (among others). And today, something like this view is common among lay people as well.
There are two famous problems with this view of God. The first is that it appears to be impossible to make it coherent. For example, it seems unlikely that God can be both perfectly powerful and perfectly good if the world is filled (as it obviously is) with instances of terrible injustice. Similarly, it’s hard to see how God can wield his infinite power to instigate alteration and change in all things if he is flat-out immutable. And there are more such contradictions where these came from.
The second problem is that while this “theist” view of God is supposed to be a description of the God of the Bible, it’s hard to find any evidence that the prophets and scholars who wrote the Hebrew Bible (or “Old Testament”) thought of God in this way at all. The God of Hebrew Scripture is not depicted as immutable, but repeatedly changes his mind about things (for example, he regrets having made man). He is not all-knowing, since he’s repeatedly surprised by things (like the Israelites abandoning him for a statue of a cow). He is not perfectly powerful either, in that he famously cannot control Israel and get its people to do what he wants. And so on.
While Peter correctly uses the word holy (I'll explain why this is fine), the word "perfect" is a trick.
Holy comes from the same root word as holistic, meaning unified. That is, to say something is holy is not to say brilliant of shining like the sun, but more like... well, like a Yin Yang. Something that is united in seemingly opposite elements.
Isaiah 45:7 tells us that God forms light and creates darkness, and causes both good and bad things. I have an object lesson of this. I was walking to church, and the rain (which was intended to water the crops) poured down in sheets. I had an umbrella but it was literally getting my pantyhose wet and the wind was blowing the umbrella almost hard enough to rip it out of my hands. Then a friend from church happened to be late that day, so I got a ride over and managed to dry off.
We aren't intended to be little perfectionists. The Pharisees were like this, and Jesus hated them. We're supposed to be more like Taoists, mellow and able to see the world as both good and bad at the same time.
But yes, you can choose to follow these verses. You can choose to try to be "perfect" and always fall short. Or you can choose to be "holy" and be much more on target.