There’s a general attitude in the world today that Christians shouldn’t do bad things. Somehow, being a believer in Christ is supposed to make people perfect, unable to do bad things. Unfortunately, this is anything but true. Even the best of us fails in meeting our own expectations of how we should act, let alone the expectations of others.
It is actually understandable that people who don’t understand Christianity or the Bible would have this image, even though it is false. Most people know enough about the Bible to know that there are things that God tells us not to do. They add to that understanding things that they think are wrong, creating their own image of what a Christian should be. That’s the standard they hold believers to, even while being unwilling to live up to it themselves.
This false image is at least partially responsible for why people see Christians as being hypocrites. But it is not all of the story. We can’t just blame the failings of believers on the ideas of unbelievers. We must also take into account the fact that believers struggle to meet their own standards, let alone the Bible’s standards. None of us is perfect, yet believers and unbelievers alike expect us to be perfect.
So, why are believers not perfect? Let’s just take two short verses to start with.
As it is written: “There is none righteous, no, not one – Romans 3:10 (paraphrased from Psalms 14:1-3)
For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. – Romans 3:23
While God created us, He did not create us perfect. That may sound like a contradiction, as God Himself is perfect. With that being the case, would not everything He creates be perfect?
Many people point to 2 Corinthians 5:17, where it says of believers: “he is a new creation.” We look at that and expect that everything about the person is new. The verse even ends with the phrase “all things become new.” There are a couple of problems here. First, the words “he is” do not exist in the original Greek text. Those have been added by the translators of the Bible. We know this, because they are italicized in both the King James and New King James translations. Unfortunately, other translations don’t provide this clue.
The other problem is that the word which is translated as “become” is understood in our modern use of the English language to mean that it is a finished work that is already completed. But in reality, the word in the Greek refers to a continuing, ongoing work. Looking at both of these, we can see that the verse refers to believers being an ongoing work of being perfected, not a finished work. Isn’t that what we actually see when we look at most believers? They’re not perfect yet, but if we could look at their back-story, we’d see that they’re better than they used to be.
Another problem that gets in our way here, in our deciding that God made man to be perfect. God had specific things in mind when He made Adam. I can find nowhere in scripture that supports the idea that perfect was on the list. Rather, we are told that we are created in God’s image (Genesis 1:27). While that can be interpreted as requiring us to be perfect, like God is (Matthew 5:48), that would be a misinterpretation of the Bible. To be like God, the distinguishing characteristic has to be that we are like God in love. For as it says in 1 John 4:8 & 16, “God is love.”
To give the ability to love, God also had to give us freedom of choice, as there is no love without choosing to love. Were God to make us in a way that we were forced to love Him, it would not be love, it would be nothing more than computer programming. Nevertheless, it is in this love that we find true perfection; for Jesus said in Matthew:
Therefore you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect. – Matthew 5:48
Notice the first word in that verse, “therefore.” What this means is that the verse is a conclusion, based on what comes before it. When we look at that, we find the perfection that is being talked about here, is perfection that is brought about by our learning how to love.
You have hard that it was said, ‘you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy” (an old Jewish teaching)2 44 But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you, 45 that you may be sons of your Father in heaven; for He makes His sun to shine on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust. – Matthew 5:43-45
There are a couple more verses before the one about being perfect, but this gives us the idea. It is through learning how to love, that we are made perfect. Not just loving those who love us or treat us well, but in loving all, even those who mistreat us.
Obviously, this is not something that comes naturally to us; it is something that must be learned. Just as we have to learn how not to do the things which the Bible refers to as “sin,” we must also learn how to do the things that the Bible tells us to do, chiefly amongst which is to love as God does. That’s not something which anyone learns overnight, any more than we learn to be a new creation overnight. In reality, we are all in a process of being taught by God, or more specifically His Holy Spirit, to become who He has created us to be. That’s why Paul wrote to the Romans:
For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren. – Romans 8:29
We who believe in Christ are in the process of becoming more like Christ. We aren’t there yet; but we are on the way there. How quickly we become like Him depends on many factors, such as what kind of condition we were in when we first received Christ, how long we have been saved, what influenced our live before getting saved, what influences have existed in our lives since our salvation experience, and finally, just how much we have cooperated with the Holy Spirit’s work in transforming us into the image of Jesus Christ.
So, Where Does the Bad Come From?
We are all born with a sin nature, as in implied by the first couple of verses we looked at. The Roman Catholic church makes reference to this when they talk about “original sin.” While that is technically about the sin that Adam and Eve committed, eating of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, it also refers to our natural propensity to sin; to go our own way, rather than that which God wants us to.
All we have to do is to look at a baby or toddler to see this. Children, even children that small, don’t need to be taught how to misbehave; they have to be taught how to behave. It’s not the devil; it’s not that there’s something wrong with them; it’s that they’re human and we humans have a tendency towards sin. As one author put it, “Children are savages. They have to be taught how to behave.”
Unless we are taught to be something other than savages, we stay savages. As King Solomon stated in the book of Proverbs:
Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it. – Proverbs 22:6
Children need training; but not all of them get that training. Some parents just leave them to grow up on their own. That’s what has happened to a large percentage of the criminals in our penal system. They weren’t taught the way they should go, so they chose their own way, often thinking they were smarter for doing so. They get plenty of help along the way, from others who are willing to teach them how to be even better criminals.
But those aren’t good people doing bad things, they are, by definition, bad people doing bad things. So, how do good people, or at least people we think should be good, still end up doing bad things?
The basic difference between criminals and others is training. Specifically, I’m referring to the training to do good, instead of bad. But even those who are trained to do good are not experts in it. For that matter, they may not even be motivated to do good. What good they do may just be out of habit or because they are afraid of the consequences of not doing good.
When someone accepts Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior, becoming saved, they aren’t instantly changed into a different person, as we discussed earlier. Rather, they start on a journey of learning, working towards becoming that new person. There’s still plenty of the old in there and that old is perfectly willing to do the wrong things. Even Paul, the great apostle who wrote two-thirds of the New Testament struggled with doing the right thing, as he wrote:
For the good that I will to do, I do not do; but the evil I will not to do, that I practice. – Romans 7:19
There is more in the verses that precede and follow this verse which talk about more of the same thing, but this verse is the key. As great a believer as Paul was, giving his life for the sake of the Gospel, he still struggled with doing the right thing, finding himself doing wrong things that he didn’t want to do.
If Paul, who we might consider to be the greatest believer that ever lived, had a struggle with sin, what makes any of us think that we won’t? What makes anyone look at any believer, expecting them to be better than Paul was?
The truth of the matter is that all believers are sinners too. We have been forgiven of our sin; but that hasn’t made us perfect. We are just as capable of doing bad things as anyone else. the only true difference is the restraint that we have, when we submit to Christ.
This is why there is so much in the New Testament which talks about personal holiness. Paul understood the struggle that believers throughout the ages would have and wrote specifically to that struggle. It was the same struggle that he himself had, as we read above. While he wrote about many other things, his constant message was to allow the Holy Spirit to work in us, directing us, guiding us and teaching us how to become more like Christ. That is our only chance at overcoming the tendency we all have to do bad things.
There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit. 2 For the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death. 3 For that the law could not do in that is was weak through the flesh, God did by sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, on account of sin: He condemned sin in the flesh – Romans 8:1-2
Some translations of the Bible only include the first part of verse one above, cutting off the part about “who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit.” But both the King James and the New King James versions have those phrases, which exist in the original Greek. They are key, in that they totally transform the meaning of that verse. Without them, it can appear that Christians can do anything, but are not condemned for it. But that’s not what it says, when we have the whole verse. Why? Because it is being led by the Spirit which keeps us from sin.
We are weak in the face of sin, in and of ourselves. Yet the Holy Spirit can fortify us, directing us and keeping us from sin, when we let Him. That’s the key. God won’t take away our will in this area, any more than He will force us to love Him. Rather, as Jesus said, we show that we love Jesus and God by obeying their commandments (John 14:15).
Jesus followed that verse with the one where He promised that He would ask His Father to send us a helper, the Holy Spirit. The connection between the two is obvious. He knew we couldn’t be good on our own, so promised the help that we needed. When we listen to and follow the guidance of the Holy Spirit, that Spirit will help us to keep our sin nature from being in control of our lives.