When I open up the Bible, there are some verses that make me feel uncomfortable.
Sometimes, Jesus makes something hard and calls it easy. Sometimes (and most times), He causes me to relearn and ‘un-educate’ myself in certain things. One of these things is in Matthew 5:48 (TNIV) where Jesus says to His disciples, “Be perfect, therefore, as your Father in heaven is perfect.”
Having dwelt with mankind, He should have known our tendencies to foul-up, to repeat mistakes and deliberately sin. Jesus, being fully man and fully God, should have known us better—yet, calls us to be perfect. Perfection scares me because it’s unattainable and it makes me uncomfortable. I knew Jesus was perfect, but I didn’t know He was a perfectionist and a borderline obsessive compulsive.
I wasn’t satisfied with that explanation. Like a person infatuated, I wanted to read in between the lines of His words to know what He actually meant. I looked up the Greek lexicon and found out that the word translated into ‘perfect’ in English is telios in Greek. Telios means whole, complete, mature and finished. Perfect doesn’t even come close. It doesn’t mean flawlessly sinless.
He calls us to be whole and complete, just as the Father is whole and complete.
When we think of wholeness, we think of a complete set of collection, a finished jigsaw puzzle with all its once missing pieces in place. Or maybe, a painter adding the finishing touches to a painting or the feeling of accomplishment when you completed a book. Or even something as simple and abstract as a circle. We feel a sense of joy or fulfilment.
After God had made the planetary system, the animals and man, God rested in the seventh day (Genesis 2:2-3). God did not rest because He was tired. God rested because He finished His work and saw that it was very good (notice: creation was all good, but when He made the woman, it was very good. A woman is God’s finishing touch in creation, the cherry on top—but this is for another topic for another time).
The word for rest here is shabbat/sabbath and it means to cease doing. It’s also very similar to the Greek word for rest which is katapauo. It translates to cease and this is also where we get the word ‘pause’ (pauo in Greek) in the English language.
So this is God’s Sabbath. When God had finished creating and creation was complete/whole and without lack, He rested and delighted in His creation. He stopped. He rested. He enjoyed. No more working or striving or doing. The Jews understood this. On a Sabbath, they do not work. They cease doing. They basically stopped exercising their dominion over creation on Sabbath—no electricity, touching or picking up the hammer or even plucking a rose.
Yet when we think about that, we call it legalism and think that there is no way we’d ever want to emulate that. And we call it legalism because Jesus rebuked the Pharisees for their hypocrisy and religious mindsets. They said He broke the Law by healing on the Sabbath. But when Jesus healed the blind, the invalid and restored a man’s shrivelled arm on Sabbath, He was breaking the religious mindsets of what it meant to keep the Law and the Sabbath.
He was turning them back to the original.
He made man whole again. He restored the sick and healed the wounded.
He wasn’t ‘working’, it was who God is. It’s in God’s nature to restore. Jesus was being Himself.
The first line in the Bible relates to God in His work (Genesis 1:1). He’s the Creator, He created. But in Genesis 2:2-3, God ceased creating. God was no longer defined by what He does when He rested. So when we enter into God’s rest, we are no longer defined by what we do: the ministries we serve, the occupations we hold and responsibilities we carry.
No longer defined by doing, but by simply being.
We are whole and complete when we are at rest.
“There remains, then, a Sabbath-rest for the people of God; for anyone who enters God's rest also rests from his own work, just as God did from his.” –Hebrews 4:9-10 (NIV)
Do we ever rest or stop? Do we find the time to pause and catch our breath or allow ourselves to be swept away in awe?
When do we delight ourselves in God as He delights Himself in us?
In the early chapters of the gospel of Mark, we find Jesus constantly drawing away from the crowd to be by a lake or mountain.
Alone.
In Mark 6:31, He invites His disciples to come and join Him in pausing and resting.
“Come with Me by yourselves to a quiet place and get some rest.”
He was inviting them to wholeness… to find ourselves in God and not in our works.
Just you and Him.
Complete.
Whole.
One. |
