Perfection

Question: Can a person live a faultless life?

No one lives a faultless life, and no one can live a faultless life unless he is perfect in knowledge. The sincerest men and women may make mistakes in moral judgment. We are constantly growing in our knowledge of God's will as we study His Word. If, at any point, we fall below God highest will, our lives are not faultless.

However, while we cannot live a faultless life, we can live a "blameless" life; that is, we can live up to our highest understanding of God's will as revealed in His Word. We are not to blame for what w do not know, except when our lack of knowledge is the result of our own neglect (Colossians 1:21 23; 1 Thessalonians 2:10; 3:13; 5:23). Every child of God should aim to lead a blameless life, but those who lead the most blameless lives are the most conscious of their deficiencies and know how far their lives are from being absolutely faultless.

Question: Is the doctrine of sinless perfection scriptural? How can the sixth and ninth verses of 1 John 3 and related passages in that epistle be adequately reconciled with the eighth and tenth verses of 1 John 1?

They can be adequately reconciled by noticing exactly what John said. In 1 John 3:6, he said, "Whoever abides in [Christ' does not sin." The phrase "does not sin" literally mans "is not sinning," that is, is not practicing sin. The verb is in the present tense, which denotes continuous present action. John did not say that the believer never sins, but that he does not make a practice of sinning, does not continue sinning. This is the exact force of the language used here. The same thing may be said of 1 John 3:9. The literal translation of the words of this verse is, "Every one begotten out of God is not doing sin (that is, sin is not his practice), because His seed (that is, God's seed) abides in him, and he cannot be sinning (be making a practice of sin) because he is begotten out of God."

We should also bear in mind John's definition of sin in the fourth verse of the same chapter: "Sin is lawlessness." In John's usage here, sin is the conscious doing of what is known to be contrary to the will of God. Of course, one who is begotten of God may do that which is contrary to the will of God but which he does not know is contrary to the will of God; therefore, he does not sin in the strict sense in which "sin" is used here. Afterward, when he comes to know the will of God, he will see that it is wrong and will confess and forsake it. However, anyone who is begotten of God will not be making a practice of doing what is known to be contrary to the will of God.

Now, it is plain that there is no contradiction between what John actually said in the sixth and ninth verses of 1 John 3 and what John actually said in the eighth and tenth verses of 1 John 1. In the eighth verse, he said, "If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves." This does not man that anyone who says he is not sinning at the present moment, that he is not doing what he knows at the present moment is contrary to the will of God, is deceiving himself. There are certainly moments when we can say that we are not doing what we know is contrary to the will of God. But what John said is that if a man says he has no sins to be forgiven, no sins to be cleansed by the blood of Jesus (1 John 1:7-9), that is, that he has never sinned, he deceives himself, and the truth is not in him.

In the tenth verse, John added, "If we say that we have not sinned," we not only deceive ourselves but "we make [God] a liar, and His word is not in us." A person may not be practicing sin at the present moment - and if a person is born of God, he will not be practicing sin at the present moment - but nevertheless, he has sinned in the past. If he says he has not, he makes God a liar, and God's Word is not in him. The reconciliation here, as in every other apparent contradiction in the Bible, is found by looking at exactly what the inspired authors said.

~R. A. Torrey~