Legal Versus Christian Perfection

BLJ: How can men and women be perfect before God? We need to know what is meant by Christian Perfection.

If the law is uncompromising in its claims, and the best Christian is defective, because of powers enfeebled by the fall, how can men be perfect?

Legal perfection is one thing, and evangelical Christian perfection is another.

1. Under the evangelical law of grace, "Love is the fulfilling of the law." Although our powers are impaired by the fall, St. Paul says: What the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin condemned sin in the flesh; that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the spirit."

The fulfillment of the law was epitomized by our Saviour, -- "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with al thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and thy neighbor as thyself;" and, "On these two hang all the law and the prophets." Grace to observe this is provided, and promised in the Old Testament, -- "The Lord thy God will circumcise (purify) thine heart, and the heart of thy seed, to love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, that thou mayest live." (Deut. xxx. 6.)

2. No one is responsible for a deficiency of capacity, or for enfeebled powers which his own agency had no part in bringing about. God is just, and never inflicts penalty on any one for deficiency of capacity or power for which they are not responsible; nor does he require of any one services above what he can render by natural or graciously acquired ability. "If there be first a willing mind, it is accepted according to that a man hath, and not according to that he hath not."

3. God's plan of saving man is not by the law, not upon condition of faultless obedience to the law. We are saved "by grace through faith." The law is our schoolmaster to bring us to Christ our Redeemer. Although the powers of the entirely sanctified are less than those of primitive man, having been impaired by the fall of Adam, and of necessity less than the law requires, yet he is accepted for Christ's sake; he always needing and always having, the merit of his death. He, the second Adam, is "the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth." The entirely sanctified Christian is "complete in him," not only in respect inward purity, but also in his relations to the law. His merit pardons, his blood cleanses, and his atonement and intercession magnify the law, and answer as an equivalent to our unavoidable defects and deficiencies.