Dying to Sin, Living to Righteousness
None of us really like authorities over us all that much. Whether it’s our kindergarten teacher, a police officer, Congress, or God Himself, we have this delusion that we always know exactly what’s best for us paired with the reality that, other than God, the authorities over us are unjust sinners. This makes passages like these remarkable. Not only are we called to serve others, but to serve them when they treat us unjustly. Not only are we called to submit to authorities, but to submit to authorities as to God, who put them there. And not only do we suffer, but we suffer because we have been called to suffer, just like Christ.
Jesus the Living Cornerstone
The most important part of any building is the cornerstone. It’s the first stone laid. It bears the whole weight of the structure. It sets the alignment of the entire foundation. In this section, Peter identifies Christ as our cornerstone and we are the stones laid around Him. This has several implications for us. First, our identity is to rest on and take its direction from Christ, our cornerstone. But also, our identity is found in community. We are not living stones sitting in a quarry, but living stones built on Christ to form a dwelling place for God, a temple. Do our lives reflect that Jesus is our cornerstone or do we try to rest all of our lives on an idol? Do we try to make ourselves our own cornerstone, trying to be a living stone by ourselves and resting on our own strength?
A People of Holiness
Just like last week, 1 Peter is calling us to live holy lives. “So put away all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander.” We’re given another long list of things to do/not do. And again we’re called to be holy because it is already our identity in Christ. But here we see that this identity isn’t personal. Our identity is as a body, the church. We are called to live as a community, as the one people of God, not the several persons of God. So why live in community? Because it’s who we are. We are not merely Christians, we are the church.
Hope & Holiness
This section of 1 Peter 1 is a call to our own sanity. Peter calls us to prepare our minds for action, for holiness. His prescription for this sober-minded holiness? Remember the Gospel. Peter gives two commands in this section (be holy as God is holy and love each other earnestly), but both are book-ended by calls to remember the Gospel and the fact that we were ransomed from the sin of our old lives. We can approach the daunting commands of God because Jesus has already done it for us and that is our identity in Christ.
Called to Be Holy
By God’s grace through Jesus Christ on the cross, our sins are forgiven and we are made righteous with God. There is nothing at all that we can do to earn our salvation. Yet we are called to obedience. Scripture commands us to be holy as God Himself is holy. We are to work out our salvation as God works it in us. So do we work for our salvation or do we not? The answer lies in the Gospel. Our identity is radically changed, not just the circumstances of our afterlife. If our identity is in the Gospel, it only makes sense that we would act in obedience to God. But what should this look like?
Joyful Exile: A Christian Life
One of our deacons, Jeff Beisel, opens to us Peter’s response to the church’s sufferings: remember the Gospel. How is this helpful? How can remembering a story from 2,000 years ago possibly soothe the soul of a parent who lost their baby to cancer? The Gospel shows us our greater inheritance. The Gospel shows us that our sufferings aren’t meaningless. The Gospel shows us that our trials aren’t a time to lament God’s absence, but rather to rejoice that we have the opportunity to identify with God in our loss and to do work to advance His Kingdom through it.
Profile of an Exile: Joy and Hope
Peter’s letter is written to a church in the midst of sufferings, trials, and persecutions. So what does he tell them? Jesus Christ died and rose again, breathing into us the new life of rebirth. Why say that? The basics sound so trite and even cliché. But the Gospel doesn’t disappoint. Peter encouraged the church then—just as we are encouraged now—to have joy and hope in our trials because we have a better inheritance. Our prize is Christ, both in our present here and in our eternity in heaven. Our pursuit of any other source of joy or our best life now is doomed to fail because only Jesus took the sin and death that mars our world to the grave and then rose back from death. Only Jesus delivers like that. No other job, relationship, car, house, or prestige can lay a finger on that standard.
The Gospel of Comfort and Calling
These two verses are two of the most dense verses that we have grappled with as a church . . . and they’re just the introduction to the letter. To a people suffering persecution and Dispersion, Peter comforts them with their identity in the Gospel and, similar to the Jews of the Babylonian exile (Jeremiah 29), the knowledge that God has called them to be there. We are also Elect Exiles, called by God to a new way of living in a world that is not our home. Our call to simply obey, is really a grand calling to participate in the greater work that God is doing for His Kingdom in our day.