Are Fear and Hope Imperfect?

You have indeed spoken powerfully and grandly about the perfect love of God. But one thing still troubles us. While you were exalting this love with such praise, you said that the fear of God and the hope of eternal reward were imperfect. Yet the prophet seems to have thought quite differently about them when he said: “Fear the Lord, all you his saints, for those who fear him lack nothing.” [a]

Again, on keeping God’s righteous acts, he admits that he did them with an eye to the reward, saying: “I have inclined my heart to do your righteous acts forever, for the reward.” And the apostle says: “By faith Moses, when he was grown up, denied that he was the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, choosing rather to suffer hardship with the people of God than to have the pleasure of sin for a time, counting the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures of the Egyptians, for he looked to the reward.”

How, then, can we think that these are imperfect, if the blessed David boasted that he did God’s righteous acts in hope of a recompense, and if the giver of the Law is said to have looked to a future reward, and so to have despised adoption into royal rank and preferred the most terrible hardship to the treasures of the Egyptians?