Jesus Wept
It is tempting and natural to invent aspects of perfection to apply to God, but it breaks our understanding of who He actually is.
Listening to Away in a Manger this year over Christmas sparked new thoughts for me as a dad when I got to the verse of:
The cattle are lowing
The Baby awakes
But little Lord Jesus
No crying He makes
It's a perfectly peaceful scene. Or is it? Jesus is perfect and without sin, but does that mean that as a (newborn) baby He wouldn't have cried when woken up unexpectedly? I don't think so. But I do think that this popular song reveals a mistake we frequently make.
Redefining Perfection
The song lays out a scene where baby Jesus is woken up by lowing cattle, and doesn't cry. But the thing is, babies cry. A lot. And my experience is that when a baby is unexpectedly woken up it is particularly prone to crying.
The author of the song creates a (comparatively innocent) attribute of perfection and places it on God (that part of Jesus' perfect sinlessness would mean that He somehow wouldn't cry when startled as a baby), but by doing that creates an image of God that isn't actually God.
I've written previously about how God satisfies our functional need for a moral constant; to that point, when we are the origin of some idea for what perfection needs to include, we uncalibrate from a fixed moral constant (who God really is) and calibrate on some new value dependent on our current views.
By applying our definitions of perfection to God cause real harm to ourselves and others. It's how people end up with views like "God hates gay people," or "a loving God could never allow people to go to hell." Both views are wrong and harmful, and result from applying some deeply-held conviction to God, without going to God first as our moral constant and seeing who He really is and what He thinks.