to bring something all the way to its intended goal: to complete, finish, or make full and mature.
This word comes from the family of "end" and "goal" words in Greek, and that is its heartbeat. It does not mean simply to stop or to use something up. It means to carry a thing through to the finished, intended state it was always aimed at. A task is done down to the last piece of it, a stretch of time runs its full course, love grows up into the real thing, a person is brought to the standing before God that God meant for them.
Because the goal changes with the subject, English has to keep changing words: finish and accomplish for a task, complete for a span of days, fulfill for what Scripture said, make perfect or mature for love and faith and people. Underneath all of them is one idea, reaching the point where nothing is lacking and the purpose is fully realized.
Two warnings help here. When the word is translated "perfect," it is not talking about being flawless or sinless. It is talking about being brought to completion, which is why the letter to the Hebrews can even say that Christ himself was "made perfect," meaning brought fully to the goal of his saving work, not that any fault in him was fixed. And in Hebrews the word carries a special weight, describing how people are at last qualified and brought near to God, something the old system could never finish.
Nuances
Disputed
What the word means in the letter to the Hebrews (2:10; 5:9; 7:19, 28; 9:9; 10:1, 14; 11:40; 12:23): a broad bringing of people to their goal of full, qualified access to God, or the narrower idea of consecrating and ordaining someone to priestly office.
- majorityA broad bringing to the goal: people (and Christ himself as their leader) are brought to the finished standing of full, unhindered access to God, a vocational and relational completeness that the old sacrificial system could never achieve.; David Peterson, Hebrews and Perfection: An Examination of the Concept of Perfection in the Epistle to the Hebrews (SNTSMS 47, 1982); Harold W. Attridge, Hebrews (Hermeneia, 1989)
- minorityA narrower cultic sense of consecration to priestly service, drawing on the Greek Old Testament's use of the word for the ordination idiom "to fill the hands."; Otto Michel, Der Brief an die Hebraer (KEK, 1966)