Welcome to EBible Fellowship’s Bible study in the Book of Genesis. This is study #13 of Genesis, chapter 6 and we are going to read Genesis 6:9-10:

These are the generations of Noah: Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God. And Noah begat three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth.

I will stop reading there. We looked at this a little bit in our last study, like the statement where God said that Noah was a just man. Tonight we are going to take a closer look at the Hebrew word translated as “perfect,” which is Strong’s #8549. This word is found a little further on in the Book of Genesis, in Genesis 17:1:

And when Abram was ninety years old and nine, JEHOVAH appeared to Abram, and said unto him, I am the Almighty God; walk before me, and be thou perfect.

Here, God is commanding Abram to be “perfect.” We are not surprised by that because God Himself is perfect. Remember what we read in the New Testament in Matthew, chapter 5 in the Sermon on the Mount. It says in Matthew 5:48:

Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.

God commands perfection from mankind. He created man perfect. He created man good and upright and just. When God originally created man, man was perfect and without sin of any kind and he was able to do the will of God perfectly in both body and soul. This is God’s standard. God does not have a standard of 90% obedience or even 99.9% obedience. God’s absolute standard cannot be lowered for anyone in any way and it requires perfect obedience. There must be complete and total faithfulness to everything God says and there must be 100% compliance with the Law of God. This is what God does: “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” This verse in the Book of Matthew comes from Deuteronomy 18:13:

Thou shalt be perfect with JEHOVAH thy God.

This word translated as “perfect” is the same word we are looking at in Genesis, chapter 6 in regard to Noah and it was the same word God commanded to Abram. This word does not allow for even one sin. Of course, we wonder, “Who among us can be perfect?” The answer is that none of us can be perfect of our own accord or our own doing. None of us can obtain perfect righteousness in the flesh and that is why it is such a hopeless cause to try to get right with God through the keeping of the Law because anyone that goes down that road will fail. Normally, someone that chooses to go down that road just has a few Laws he thinks he can keep in order to be right with God. For example, the Jews kept some of the sacrifices, holy days and ceremonial laws that they thought would make them right with God, but it has to be a complete and perfect standard. If you try to keep the Law, then you have to keep the whole Law perfectly in regard to the entire Bible. Obviously, this is impossible for (fallen) man to do and that is why the Bible says that all come short of the glory of God. There is not one that is righteous. There are no people anywhere that are able to be perfect before God.

Someone may say, “If that is true, then God would not command us to be perfect.” There are some that are found in today’s Christian churches that say, “God would never command a man to do something that he cannot do.” They like to say that, especially in reference to the command, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.” That is because they like the idea of simply exercising their belief to be saved and this places salvation in their own hands where they want it to be. So when the elect point out to them that the Bible tells us that we are “dead in sins” and we cannot become saved by our own faith, but by the faith of Christ, then these people come back and say, “Well, then God is commanding us to do something we cannot do. That is not right and God would not issue that kind of commandment.” However, the Lord Jesus just commanded in Matthew 5:48: “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” This is a command. And God constantly commands things that man is unable to perform in his fallen condition because he is now a sinner and desperately wicked in heart and, therefore, he is unable to perform it. However, God commands us to be perfect because in the original creation man was created perfect. Just imagine if God had said to Adam and Eve before the fall, “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” Would there have been a problem with Adam and Eve giving perfect obedience to everything God had said? No, there was not because they had an ability to do so because they were perfect. God views mankind as responsible agents and that is how He created them; they were created with an ability and obligation to obey Him: “Be ye therefore perfect.” Man was originally able to do this, but now he is not able. His fallen condition is no excuse, however, and it does not justify his sin and he is guilty before God for failing to be perfect.

So, when people say, “God will never give a command we cannot obey,” you can direct them to Matthew 5, verse 48 where Christ commanded men to be perfect; or, you can direct them to Deuteronomy 10, verse 16 where God commands men: “Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart.” Who can obey that kind of command? It is impossible for man to obey God’s command to circumcise the foreskins of their hearts. It is a spiritual command to receive a new heart and be born again and have your sins cut off. All of those actions can only be performed by God and that is why God gave the command.

Of course, the entire Bible is truth, but every now and then God presents a Scripture that gives great insight into many other Scriptures. Man can fool himself by seeing other commands in the Bible that seem “do-able.” So man says, “Well, God commands me to do this and He thinks I can do it, so I am going to do it.” Man deceives himself into thinking he can be obedient to the point of obtaining salvation, such as the command to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. It is total self-deception on man’s part when he grabs hold of that commandment and he thinks, “I will keep this Law and become justified.” Yet, he willfully ignores many other commandments. People who hold onto the “free will doctrine” willfully ignore other Scriptures, like when the Bible says that man is not justified by the works of the Law. The command to believe on the Lord Jesus is a command and, therefore, part of the Law of God and you cannot be justified in God’s sight through the keeping of the Law of God, whether that law is physical circumcision or whether that law is a command to believe on the Lord Jesus. Neither of these acts of obedience could ever justify the sinner. You have to believe from the heart and in order to believe from the heart, you need a “new heart” and only God can do that.

Let us go back to Genesis 6:9:

… Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations…

Again, that word “perfect” is Strong’s #8549 and it is also translated as “without blemish” and “without spot.” It is the same word that is found in Exodus 12:5-6:

Your lamb shall be without blemish, a male of the first year: ye shall take it out from the sheep, or from the goats: And ye shall keep it up until the fourteenth day of the same month: and the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill it in the evening.

This is speaking of the Passover lamb. It is an historical parable. It is a type and a figure of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God. The lamb must be “without blemish” or “perfect.” We know exactly what God means. It cannot have spot or wrinkle because that would be as though there was sin in the perfect sacrifice and there is no sin in the Lord Jesus, so God makes a point to emphasize this through the sacrificial laws by commanding that the lamb be without blemish. The Lord Jesus was and is perfect, just as the Bible says that the Father in heaven is perfect and Christ is one with the Father; He is eternal God. He is the child that should be born, according to Isaiah, chapter 9, and one of His names is “The everlasting Father.” Christ is perfect and when He offered up Himself before the foundation of the world before God had created anything related to this creation, Christ died as the spotless Lamb of God. He had no sin. He had never transgressed the Law of God and the Word of God was magnified above all His name. He was in total and perfect submission to all the commandments of God from all eternity past. God’s perfection is not something new – He has always been perfect. He is the perfect Being from all past eternity to all future eternity and, therefore, since Jesus was that perfect God He offered Himself and there was not a spot of any kind on this Lamb. He was without sin and it was necessary He be without sin so He could bear the sins of His people and became laden with our iniquities. He became filthy with the sins of all those He would save and He paid the price for all those dirty, rotten, filthy sins and He became sin for us and died in our place. Through death He purged the sin by paying the penalty in full and He was raised from the dead and He was, once again, without spot.

Our mountain of sin that was laid upon Him would have dwarfed any mountains that are in the world today. It would have been an enormous mass of ugly deeds, thoughts and actions, but they were all paid for by Christ and they were washed away. That is what “baptism” really means. Christ was baptized through the fires of “hell” or death. God’s wrath and the fire and brimstone of His Word washed away our sins from Christ and He emerged cleansed and we were baptized with the baptism He was baptized with because it was our sin. Therefore, we are clean, as it says concerning Noah who found grace in the eyes of the Lord, we become “just” and “perfect” in God’s eyes. We no longer have any blemish. We are without blemish. There is no better way to say it – there is not one blemish or spot.

In our physical bodies (because of the curse God placed on the creation) we are born imperfect. All of us have marks or imperfections in our bodies and as we age the wrinkles appear and there are spots and moles. The body shows progressive corruption and the effects of sin. If man had never fallen into sin, his body would have remained perfect and there would have been no imperfections of any kind. When God resurrects His people and grants them spiritual resurrected bodies to match their souls, we will all be perfect in body once again. There will be no blemish of any kind and that is how God views all His elect right now – He sees no blemishes of any kind. This is why the Bible speaks of all the elect as being in clean and white linen, the righteousness of the saints. It is why God speaks of His people as a holy priesthood. He looks at His people as being pure.

Do we still sin after salvation while in our physical bodies? Yes. Does God see it on any level? Yes, He is aware if we say something or do something that is against His Law and He may chastise and correct us for it, but on another level, God does not “see” our sin because Christ paid for all our sins. In the case of David and his sins in regard to Bathsheba, God said that he would not die, but David was chastised. He did not die because he was a child of God. If God “saw” our sin, we would die. However, He does not see the sins of those He has saved because we are baptized with the baptism that Christ was baptized with.

Remember what it said in Ephesians, chapter 5, which is also good instruction for husbands in regard to how they are to treat and consider their wives. It says in Ephesians 5:25-27:

Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it; That he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word, That he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish.

This “glorious church” is the eternal church of the elect, not the corporate church. Do you see how God has completely taken care of the sin problem when it comes to His elect people? He has “washed” them. It is past tense. All the elect have been washed through His sacrifice. The application of the atoning work of the Lord Jesus Christ was made through the hearing of the Word of God as the Gospel went forth into the world. The Words reached the hearts of God’s elect and God created new hearts within them, washing away all sin and they were baptized with the Holy Spirit and made a new creature in Christ, pure and clean in the sight of God.

At times we may be disgusted with ourselves because of wrong that we have done when we do not maintain proper dominion and control over our bodies, but the truth is that the sins that may still afflict us from time to time are not spots or blemishes upon us in any way because they have all been washed away. So, really, the thing we should do when we do fall into a sin is not to mope and feel sorry for ourselves or condemn ourselves because there is no more condemnation to those that are in Christ Jesus. We should think, “God has paid for this sin, too. Just look at all the sins in my life that Jesus Christ has died for and He has commanded me to be perfect as my Father in heaven.”

We should approach sin in our life just as the woman who was caught in adultery, after her accusers went away and Christ asked her, “Woman, where are those thine accusers? hath no man condemned thee? She said, No man, Lord. And Jesus said unto her, Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.” That should be the perspective of the child of God, forgetting those things that are behind. We cannot change them. We then press toward the thing before us. And what is before us today? It is to take up our cross and obey the Word of God and to be “perfect,” as much as lieth in us by God’s Spirit as we desire to keep His commandments out of love for Christ. At the end of the day, when there have been failures we turn to the Lord and we say, “O, Lord. I sinned in this matter. Strengthen me and help me not to sin again.” As Christ said to the woman caught in adultery, “Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.” It is a daily renewal of the commandment to do the will of God.