9. God’s Perfection vs. our Fallen State of Brokenness
In the year of King Uzziah’s death I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, lofty and exalted, with the train of His robe filling the temple. Seraphim stood above Him, each having six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And one called out to another and said,
“Holy, Holy, Holy, is the LORD of hosts,
the whole earth is full of His glory!”
“And the foundations of the thresholds trembled at the voice of him who called out, while the temple was filling with smoke. Then I said, ‘woe is me, for I am ruined; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts.” (Isaiah 6:1-5)
The awesome perfection of God’s holy nature presents an insurmountable problem for the fallen, Sin-corrupted nature of broken human beings. His perfectly perfect nature is pure Heavenly Light. And our Sin-damaged and corrupted human nature are the product of Sin and its Darkness. The two natures are incompatible. Righteousness and Sin and Light and Darkness cannot occupy the same space at the same time. The Light is another way of expressing God’s Fullness. But the Darkness expresses God’s absence. And since God is the Source of all Life, His Presence or absence is the difference between Life and Death. And Life vs. Death is the main underlying issue in all of Scripture.
Incompatible Natures
This incompatibility between our Creator and our own fallen human flesh is not about some kind of intellectual or emotional state of conflict. So it’s not essentially due to anger or vengeful resentment against us on God’s part. His perfect nature is Love. He has already created us to be His image and likeness. That is His perfect, changeless plan and purpose that is based on His Love-Nature and that never changes. God will always love and favor us because of who He is and because He has given His perfect Blessing and made a perfect, eternal Covenant with the human race through His Word made flesh. This is why God can and must be trusted by us with an airtight faith, trust, hope and love.
So the incompatibility between His nature and the fallen nature we’re all born with is much deeper than a mere rift in relations and the emotional response we would naturally expect to come from it. It’s like the incompatibility between ‘hot’ nuclear material and our bodies. The incompatibility is fatal to us if we approach the presence of that material without suitable protection. And it’s also that way between Sin-corrupted human nature and the infinite, utterly Perfect Holiness and Righteousness of Almighty God. The two cannot be in the same place at the same time because they conflict in every way and on every level. God is perfect eternal Life and perfect Holiness. He is utterly Sin-less and therefore, perfectly Righteous and Just. And we contain in our flesh the Sin that His Presence will not abide. Our original birth nature is innately Sin-full, demonically broken, damaged and mortally wounded. So just as perfect health and cancer are diametrically opposed to each other in nature, so are we while in our Sin-full fallen state, opposed to our holy God. In our present state of Sin-corruption, we are not what God originally created. We can’t be God’s image and likeness as He intended. Now our nature is the result of what the Serpent and his Sin have done to destroy what God originally created. And that is why God has to re-create or regenerate every human that He will be able to save.
A Life and Death Issue
Let’s go back to our analogy of ‘hot’ nuclear material in a reactor, and the nature of a human being. Because the nature of that nuclear material is incompatible with our human nature, if we draw near to it, we will certainly die. And so technicians that work in nuclear energy facilities must be thoroughly trained to know how to protect themselves before they dare to approach that material. They must have the proper covering in order to survive and be able to work with that material effectively and in safety. They must be protected from it at all times. If they dare to approach it improperly, without adequate protection, the nature of the nuclear material will inflict mortal damage on their human nature.
That’s how it is when sinful fallen flesh dares to approach the presence of God in all of His awesome Holiness, Purity, Righteousness, Majesty and Justice. So we must heed His Word when He tells us what we have to know and what we must do and what we must not do after His Word says to us, “Follow Me!” The Word’s disciples must always be perfectly covered and protected by Him, so that they can draw near to God’s Presence in total safety and minister to Him according to His perfect ways and standards. This is why the regulations given to Israel through Moses in Leviticus (Vayikra) for her priests and Levites were so highly detailed and stringent. It was for their protection and well being that God revealed these things to them and required their strict compliance. These were not merely religious rituals for a showy display; they were life and death instructions for how to approach God’s Presence in His appointed place of meeting!
“The LORD also said to Moses, ‘Go to the people and consecrate them today and tomorrow, and let them wash their garments; and let them be ready for the third day, for on the third day the LORD will come down on Mount Sinai in the sight of all the people. You shall set bounds for the people all around, saying, ‘Beware that you do not go up on the mountain or touch the border of it; whoever touches the mountain shall surely be put to death. No hand shall touch him, but he shall surely be stoned or shot through; whether beast or man, he shall not live.’ When the ram’s horn sounds a long blast, they shall come up to the mountain.” So Moses went down from the mountain to the people and consecrated the people, and they washed their garments. He said to the people, ‘Be ready for the third day; do not go near a woman.’” (Exodus 19:10-15)
This isn’t anything personal. It is universal Truth, based on the laws of God’s Creation and it applies to all flesh. Any child of Adam, regardless of race, culture, nationality, color, gender or religion is included in this. No one, Jew and Gentile alike, has any kind of special clearance; there are no exceptions. In this regard, all children of Adam are absolutely equal. As it is with nuclear material that does not discriminate or favor one human over another, so is it between the awesome Holy Nature of our God in relation to all Sin-corrupted humans. This is why all humans must know the revelation and commandments of God’s holy Word. We must know the laws of Creation as revealed in the Torah along with the principles that apply to all and that govern the proper interaction between God’s nature and our nature. God reveals these things so we can take the proper protective measures to insure our safety and well being as we interact with Him.
So if we have to pay such stringent attention to the prescribed instructions for preparing to approach lethal nuclear material, how much more must we pay attention to the condition of our inner motives, desires, thoughts, intentions and imaginations in the presence of such a Holy God? How pure, righteous and in tune with His Holy Spirit should our heart attitudes be as we interact with such perfect holiness and react to and interact with this most holy and flawless living God?
“Moreover the Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your descendants, to love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, so that you may live. The Lord your God will inflict all these curses on your enemies and on those who hate you, who persecuted you.” (Deuteronomy. 30:6-7)
“For thus says the Lord to the men of Judah and to Jerusalem, ‘Break up your fallow ground, and do not sow among thorns. Circumcise yourselves to the Lord and remove the foreskins of your heart, men of Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem, or else My wrath will go forth like fire and burn with none to quench it, because of the evil of your deeds.” (Jeremiah 4:3-4)
God’s Perfect Answer
We cannot save or fix or restore ourselves! Someone else, someone that is perfect, must provide the perfect remedy for our hopeless imperfection. And the Perfect One has already done it! The Solution is already contained in His perfect Original Creation and Original Blessing which He gave us through His perfect living Word. The Word is the Blessing and the Word contains and is, the perfect Solution. So we have no choice but to interact with and depend on Him for everything so that what has already been done to perfection in eternity, can be personally applied to each one of us in space and time. This is why we must follow God’s living Word at all times as His obedient disciples.
Our lives must become aligned with and follow whatever He reveals about Himself. Is that not what an image and likeness in a mirror does in relation to the source of that image? We must know and embody God’s living Word as He really is. We must learn His ways and develop the proper way of understanding how He perfectly insulates and covers us with His perfect righteousness. Why? So that we can remain perfectly aligned with Him and safely approach and interact with the Father who sent Him to us. Our Master, the Word of God is here to be for us everything that God requires of us. He is our Perfect Covering and in Him, we can and will be completely blessed and made acceptable and blameless in the sight of God. Our Covenant Representative is absolutely indispensable to us and to our earthly and eternal well being. He is the Perfection with which we must be eternally covered.
God’s Perfect Standards
Because the Word, our Blessing, is perfect, everything about Him is all-sufficient, including the way He is able to transform us and empower us to meet God’s perfect standards of righteousness. Those perfect standards will never change. God will never lower them. He will never compromise or cheat on them. Whatever He judges will be judged according to those perfect standards. And that is where the problem of fallen humanity lies. In light of our corporate Adamic Sin-contamination, we are, from conception and by our personal pasts, imperfect by nature. Even before our first parents fell into Sin and suffered its terrible damage and contamination, we, as created beings, were imperfect insofar as our created nature is far below and different from the Nature of our Perfect, infinite, eternal Creator.
So when you add our natural imperfection and limitations to our fallen, broken, Sin-corrupted state, it’s obvious that we fall far, far short of the infinite standard set by God’s perfectly perfect requirements. Even on our very best day, we remain naturally incompatible with God’s nature. That’s why we must have the proper respect for God and make sure we have adequate protective covering to insulate us as we approach Him. And since everything we need is contained in God’s living Word who, through His representation of us in God’s Eternal Covenant, is our Original Blessing and Perfect Covering, we know that whatever we’re going to need to be acceptable to God, can only be found and obtained in Him and can only be credited to us, through Him.
God’s Perfect Answer
Because God’s standards are perfect in every way, only a being that is by nature, perfect in every way can satisfy the perfect requirements and standards of God’s Justice and Righteousness in a perfect way and to a perfect degree. And legally speaking, this perfect being must be in a position to represent those of us who are imperfect. That is made possible by the structure God chose to use. We call it a ‘blood covenant’. By this means, imperfect humans can be covered and protected by a perfect, Sin-less substitute representative. This is how God has provided for us even from eternity. From the moment the first humans came into being, God’s intended image and likeness was endowed with His Perfect Blessing (see Genesis 1) which He released from eternity into our time and space through His perfect living creative Word. The perfect original Creation and the perfect Blessing contain the fullness of God’s eternal Blood Covenant which was already in place before God created anything (see Hebrews 13:20-21). God’s living Word is our Creator and our Original Blessing. He is also our Perfect Sacrificial atoning Lamb, and everlasting Shepherd who, in the fullness of time, became flesh to represent us in space and time. This is why His Father named Him Yeshua, which in Hebrew means ‘God is Salvation’.
When Isaiah ‘saw the Lord…high and lifted up’, he saw what the apostle John saw in chapter 1 of the book of Revelation. Both men saw ‘The Lamb of God, the one who had been sacrificed for us, slain and offered up to God as The Perfect Sacrifice. Isaiah described Him in his 53rd. chapter. Both he and John saw the depths to which God’s love for us drove Him to pour Himself out and suffer infinite abasement and desolation in perfect atonement in order to perfectly satisfy His perfect Justice and Standard of Righteousness. He did it through His Word…to perfectly satisfy His own perfect eternal standards. Do you see it? God fulfilled His own Perfect Law, as only He could do, through His Word. His Word did it in the name of the rest of His very imperfect human brothers and sisters! Isaiah and John did not see God in all of His own glorious divine Perfection; they saw His Word in His Perfect, Sin-atoning agonizing suffering, crucifixion and death; they saw Him in His wounded, bloody, ‘poured out’ state. They saw the Lamb, as it had been slain. They saw the depths of the suffering, humiliation, disgrace and disfigurement He freely took away from us and put upon Himself. They saw Him in the sacrificial death that the perfect Word, the Blessing underwent as, the Eternal Passover Lamb of God. They saw all that He had to undergo to make it possible for God to give us the Love we needed and be free to bestow the perfect Fruit of His Justice and Righteous Love upon the human beings who He is eternally committed to love and care for. But God’s Eternal Justice first had to be satisfied.
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ (Yeshua the Messiah), who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him. In love He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, which He freely bestowed on us in the Beloved. In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace which He lavished on us. In all wisdom and insight He made known to us the mystery of His will, according to His kind intention which He purposed in Him with a view to an administration suitable to the fullness of the times, that is, the summing up of all things in Christ, things in the heavens and things on the earth.” (Ephesians 1:3-10 Emphasis added.)
The Gospel in Genesis
So the earliest revelation given in Genesis, the very first book of God’s Torah, contains the seeds of the complete fulfillment that will appear in its full mature blooming season by the time human history reaches the climactic fulfillment revealed in the last book of Scripture – Revelation. Everything that will be necessary for Creation, including every member of the human race, to fulfill its God-given purpose and destiny, was already created, provided and bestowed upon us in the first two chapters of Genesis. And the rest of the Bible unfolds and unpacks and explains the significance of the perfect application of God’s all-sufficient, perfect grace to those who will repent and return to God. God took great pains to reveal this original Perfection so that it could be established in our minds and fully understood before He revealed the Serpent and his rebellion and the Sin and lethal destruction that he inflicted on what God had created. If we understand the glory of the original Perfection and Completeness of what God made and provided through His perfect Word, even before the Fall, we will understand that nothing that Satan or any other created being could do or fail to do is able to abort or destroy or prevent the perfection that God is and the perfection of what He has done. Nothing can prevent God’s Love and Perfection from reaching perfect fulfillment in the end.
God truly is…Enough!
That is how safe we are – if we believe, accept, obey and abide in our God and His perfection, no matter what we may have to encounter in the course of our earthly lives. This is what must be established in our minds and hearts: God is perfectly perfect in every way. And His love for us is perfect. What God is and what He provided for us from the very beginning will always be more than enough to cover and provide for us and to protect us, no matter what happens, no matter how imperfect we are, and no matter how impossible our circumstances may seem to us. God’s perfection will see us through every bit of it.
Whatever we may need, God in His perfect foresight and wisdom has already provided for it, covered it, thought it out and paid for it. He gives the benefit of that to those who will believe, accept and obey His Word and submit to His Holy Spirit. After we understand that we are created and placed on this absolutely perfect, eternal, infinite, granite-solid assurance of God’s perfection and our safety in His hands, then we can continue to investigate His revelation and learn about the Serpent and his rebellion and how the first humans fell for his lies and all the damage that was introduced by their fall from God’s grace.
Not even that terrible ‘decapitation’ that the human race suffered because of the lies of the Serpent and the damage done to us by Sin, can change or stop or over-ride the perfect eternal love that our perfect God is and has for us, through His Perfect Lamb.
“The LORD God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife, and clothed them.” (Genesis 3:21)
It Is Finished!
God’s perfect Creation included our eventual redemption, cleansing and full restoration to God’s fellowship and intimacy. Everything we will ever encounter in the present or the future has already been foreseen and earned and provided for us and given to us in the past. It was done in the very beginning. And that is why God commanded us to join Him in His eternal, perfect Sabbath Rest. When the Work is already done to perfection there is nothing else to do but to rest and rejoice in God. And so He commands us to celebrate and rest with Him and rejoice in His perfect, holy Eternal Sabbath on every Sabbath Day that we experience in space and time. We are children of His awesome eternal Perfection, sons of His Covenant Love. Every other consideration or challenge we may face is incidental, compared to the perfection of His original Creation and Blessing and the awesome value and esteem He places on those who are made in His own image and likeness! Everything else is relatively less important. God loves eternally. And as long as we hear His voice and believe, embrace and obey His Word, nothing can ever take that wonderful reality from us. And it is only right that we acknowledge God in all of His Perfection and celebrate being His regenerated sons and eternal heirs.
“What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him over for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things? Who will bring a charge against God’s elect? God is the one who justifies; who is the one who condemns? Christ Jesus is He who died, yes, rather who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who also intercedes for us. Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? Just as it is written,
“FOR YOUR SAKE WE ARE BEING PUT TO DEATH ALL DAY LONG;
WE WERE CONSIDERED AS SHEEP TO BE SLAUGHTERED.”
“But in all these things we overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:31-39, emphasis added)
It has clearly been revealed to us that we have a God that is absolutely ‘air-tight’ in His perfect love and perfect provision and perfect Covenant loyalty and faithfulness toward us. That means that every human being under the sun can afford to embrace and maintain and remain eternally rooted in an air-tight faith, trust and confidence in His all-encompassing Perfection. If we believe and obey Him, we can always afford to rejoice and rest in Him and with Him. Because He is Perfect and because Perfection never changes, we know for sure that He will never disappoint those who entrust themselves to His tender, loving care! So because He has all of eternity in which to fulfill His promises, we need not obsess over what does or does not happen in space and time. Because we know God as He is, we can afford to trust Him with airtight, never-failing, everlasting faith, no matter what. The question is, will we do it?
Thus says the LORD: “Heaven is My throne and the earth is My footstool. Where then is a house you could build for Me? And where is a place that I may rest? For My hand made all these things, thus all these things came into being,” declares the LORD. “But to this one I will look, to him who is humble and contrite of spirit, and who trembles at My word.” (Isaiah 66:1-2)
“Then He began to denounce the cities in which most of His miracles were done, because they did not repent. ‘Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the miracles had occurred in Tyre and Sidon which occurred in you, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes. Nevertheless I say to you, it will be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon in the day of judgment than for you. And you, Capernaum, will not be exalted to heaven, will you? You will descend to Hades; for if the miracles had occurred in Sodom which occurred in you, it would have remained to this day. Nevertheless I say to you that it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom in the day of judgment, than for you.’
“At that time Jesus said, ‘I praise You, Father, Lord of heaven and earth that You have hidden these things from the wise and intelligent and have revealed them to infants. Yes, Father, for this way was well-pleasing in Your sight. All things have been handed over to Me by My Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father; nor does anyone know the Father except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son wills to reveal Him. Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and YOU WILL FIND REST FOR YOUR SOULS. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.” (Matthew 11:20-30)
Our Firm Foundation
This is the perfect, granite-solid foundation upon which our faith in God must be based. We will continue to refer back to this Original Perfection and All-Sufficient grace as we continue to learn about and ponder God’s story with the human race and learn what it means to be disciples of God’s living Word. We must know our Perfect God as He really is. If we do not know His perfection, our ‘faith’ and our practices will be built on shifting sand and ever-liable to eventual collapse. Without this perfect foundation which the Torah gave to us in the past, anything we do or try to accomplish in the future will collapse sooner or later, and we will be left desolate and totally devastated.
But if we are solidly rooted into our awesome, perfect Living God, no storm will be able to shake us. No earthquake will be able to shake our security or destroy us and our households. No demon-induced darkness will ever be able to remove or replace the Light of the World which dwells within us and lights up the world around us like a living menorah (lampstand) that God’s Presence causes to shine forth from our lives!