Matthew 5:48 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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Matthew 5:48

Comments

This refers back to the example Christ has given about how God loves his enemies. If we are to be sons of our Father in heaven, is there any limit to the extent to which we should imitate God and be like him? How will we know when our obedience has gone far enough? No, says Christ, there is no limit; we are to follow our Lord all the way to perfection, making him the model of all our behaviour and count ourselves unprofitable servants while we fall short of that standard. The great aim of obedience is that we should be holy as he is holy and we must be content with nothing less. And yet it remains the case that the ground of our salvation is forever the finished work of Christ and that alone. Our obedience, no matter how much God’s work of sanctification in us progresses, can never add anything to the finished work of Christ. This last verse of the chapter again underlines the fact that the Sermon on the Mount was never intended to set a moral standard for men in general, which if they follow will bring them to glory. It is quite impossible for those who have not experienced the quickening power of the Holy Spirit in their lives, to imitate God or come near his perfection. Without faith it is impossible to please God and those who lack faith still have within them that enmity that keeps them at a distance from him. How can any imagine that they could ever succeed in their natural strength to be like God? Only by completely underestimating the character of God, his inflexible justice and holiness, and the extent of his law’s demands on them; only by comparing themselves with other human beings rather than with God himself; only by failing to understand the meaning of the life and death of the Lord Jesus Christ, can they make such a grave mistake. As Martin Lloyd Jones says in answering this question, ‘They never truly understand or grasp what it means to be a Christian.’But in what respect are we to imitate the perfections of God? Obviously not in respect of his incommunicable attributes which are his forever and can never be shared with us – his aseity, eternity, omnipotence, omniscience. Only in those moral attributes which he made part of our original human nature can we be like him. God’s love for his enemies is a perfection which we can imitate, but it is a very searching standard. Actually the verb is in the future tense. It implies that we should aim at being complete. We do not get there overnight. That is not a reason for being slack, but aim at going forward and being complete and being a whole and wholesome Christian character. One the one hand we should not despair that we are not yet like our heavenly Father; on the other hand we should never give up trying to be like him.

Application

Much more is expected of believers than unbelievers and rightly so. We have the greatest blessings imaginable; we have Christ; we have deliverance from condemnation; we have life and eternal life. Doesn’t the Lord have the right to expect much from us? We know God and we know Christ and we love him; we have his friendship; we have him as our perfect example; we have a new nature. We are born again; we have Christ-likeness, and the presence of the Holy Spirit. Should we not have more expected of us than unbelievers?

Is somebody behaving unreasonably towards me? Is somebody hurting me and insulting me? Somebody taking some action against me? Yes, but I am a believer, and I have a duty to the Lord to stand in character to absorb all the lesser things, to pray, to mount a witness, to show strength of character. That duty should carry me through and carry me above the problem. God’s honour is at stake and his power is with me.

Questions

The Greek verb, which is future tense, is indicative om form but has the sense of an imperative or a directive rather than a prediction, and so should be translated ‘shall’ not ‘will’. The presence of the second person plural pronoun adds emphasis, which can be expressed by taking that word on its own at the front of the sentence as the American Standard Version: ‘Ye therefore shall be perfect’.

Does this verse teach that perfection in this life is possible for the Christian; that he can arrive at a state of perfection even before he comes to heaven? No. Christ is not telling us that any believer has ever reached perfection or ever can do so while we are still in the flesh. The Scripture is very clear that while we are in the body, the sinful nature cleaves to us and continues to affect us so that we have a continual struggle with it (Romans 7). Nevertheless, the believer is not to lower his standard, but to continue to strive for ‘holiness, without which no one will see the Lord’ (Hebrews12:14). Unless we make the Lord’s perfection our standard we will never advance at all. How can we be content with anything less? From the moment that we were regenerated by the Spirit, we became committed to his perfect righteousness; this aspiration is a distinguishing mark of the believer. If it is missing, and if we settle for only relative improvement, there is something dreadfully wrong. The gospel is about transforming us into the image of Christ. Every sin in our hearts must be opposed and to try to accommodate ourselves to even one sin is lethal. We should daily repent of all known sin and keep up our struggle against it. We should be deeply distressed at every setback and see lost ground as that which we have no choice but to make good again.

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Matthew 5:48 Commentary and Bible Study