As I said below, I believe Biblical moral perfection is not literally never sinning but living, in action and attitude, in obedience to Christ with all the knowledge of how to obey Him that you have.
As far as unintentional sin, I would like to phrase this issue more as unknown sin. We are finite beings. We work on a sin and overcome it, and oftentimes after this God reveals another sin in our lives we didn't fully realize we had a problem with. If we are living with an attitude of wanting God to reveal the sins in our lives we don't yet know we have a problem with, then I think we are on the correct path in Christ and are headed toward that moral perfection.
I don't think every true Christian will obtain full moral perfection in this life, but as long as when we die we are still sincerely walking on that path, making that journey, we will spend eternity with our Lord.
God's law was always in place from the beginning of time; it was just codified at Mount Sinai.
As far as Malachi's accountability, I personally think eight is too young to be truly able to come to Christ. To truly begin your own relationship with Christ, you need to understand and have the level of responsibility where you can grasp that Christianity is for life. You can't just practice it for a few days and forget about it, not like that dog you begged your parents to get you for Christmas. You also have to be able to truly grasp the idea of turning your life around, able to truly recognize the difference between the way most people live and the way Jesus commands us to live. I doubt at eight Malachi has these concepts down.
It strikes me the hypercalvinist objection to the perfection the Bible commands goes back to the Catholic church. We know the whore of Babylon is a giant fallen woman with many faces. The Catholic church is the main face, but she also has thousands of Protestant or Evangelical faces. These faces claim to be different, but they are really all reflective of the Catholic face.
In the Catholic church, one never obtains Biblical perfection. You are taught that you will sin every day all your life, and that if you just confess those sins to a priest and say 50 million "Hail Marys", you are good to go. You may even have to spend time in interim Hell, i.e. purgatory, before you are deemed acceptible to enter Heaven. Strip away the more extreme elements of the confession booth and purgatory, and you have the same bare bones doctrine permeating the church world.
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