The Living Hope
1 Peter 1:1-12
March 5, 2006


Today’s message is from 1 Peter 1:1-12. As we read the passage, remember that we are reading the word of God which has been breathed (or inspired) by God’s Holy Spirit. It’s alive and powerful!

Also, as always, I encourage you to read the word of God—your Bible—every day. Don’t neglect what sustains your life!

[Prayer]

Now let’s read the passage, 1 Peter 1:1-12:

1 Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ,

To God's elect, strangers in the world, scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynia, 2who have been chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through the sanctifying work of the Spirit, for obedience to Jesus Christ and sprinkling by his blood:

Grace and peace be yours in abundance.

Praise to God for a Living Hope
3Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, 4and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade– kept in heaven for you, 5who through faith are shielded by God's power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time. 6In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. 7These have come so that your faith– of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire– may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. 8Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, 9for you are receiving the goal of your faith, the salvation of your souls.
10Concerning this salvation, the prophets, who spoke of the grace that was to come to you, searched intently and with the greatest care, 11trying to find out the time and circumstances to which the Spirit of Christ in them was pointing when he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the glories that would follow. 12It was revealed to them that they were not serving themselves but you, when they spoke of the things that have now been told you by those who have preached the gospel to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven. Even angels long to look into these things. (1 Peter 1:1-12 –NIV)

Now let’s look at the first two verses: “Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, To God’s elect, strangers in the world, scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynia, who have been chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through the sanctifying work of the Spirit, for obedience to Jesus Christ and sprinkling by his blood: Grace and peace be yours in abundance.”

The first two verses of Peter’s letter are like the “To/From” and salutation part of a present-day letter. They tell us who wrote the letter and who is supposed to receive it. They also have a what amounts to a greeting: “Grace and peace be yours in abundance.”  We might tend to think that this part of the letter is not too important as far as content is concerned, but this is a letter that was inspired by the Holy Spirit, so that every part of it is precious and valuable for building us up in the faith to become like Jesus. This introductory part is too!

This letter was written to God’s elect by the apostle Peter. Peter was the fisherman who Jesus called to leave everything and become a fisher of men. He was with Jesus the entire time he went around teaching and preaching about the Kingdom of God and healing the sick. He was the one to whom God revealed that Jesus was the “Christ, the Son of the living God.”  He saw Jesus glorified on the mount of transfiguration. Peter was the one who said that he would go to his death rather than deny Jesus, but then, after Jesus was arrested, denied him three times just as Jesus had said he would. He was the one who, after he returned, as Jesus knew he would, was able to also restore his brothers. He is the one who, after Jesus was taken up to heaven, preached the gospel at Pentecost and 3000 believed. (And no PA system, either!)

This is Peter. This first letter is said by the experts to have been written in the early 60’s AD.  That would be around 30 years after Peter’s preaching at Pentecost. He was writing to God’s elect, strangers in the world, scattered throughout Asia minor. Usually, commentators take “scattered” to refer to the Jewish dispersion, but I don’t really think Peter would restrict his writing to Jewish believers only. At any rate, I am convinced that the Holy Spirit meant this letter for all believers. That includes us. We are God’s elect!

We are God’s elect. We were chosen by God and are strangers in the world—aliens, visitors, sojourners—we don’t belong here. Our citizenship is in heaven. Philippians 3:20 says so! Let me quote some more of what the apostle Paul wrote in this passage from Philippians that tells us that our citizenship is in heaven:

18For, as I have often told you before and now say again even with tears, many live as enemies of the cross of Christ. 19Their destiny is destruction, their god is their stomach, and their glory is in their shame. Their mind is on earthly things. 20But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, 21who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body. (Philip. 3:18-21 –NIV)

Peter, in his introduction to 1 Peter, calls us God’s elect. What a difference there is between us and those who are not God’s elect! They are enemies of the cross of Christ, while, for us, all of our life and hope is through the cross. It is our salvation. Their destiny is destruction. Our destiny is glory, honor and immortality. Their god is their stomach. Our God is the Lord Jesus Christ for whom and through whom all things were made. Their mind is on earthly things. Our minds are on heavenly things. They are citizens of this present corrupt world which is perishing. Our citizenship is in heaven. They can only look forward to eternal condemnation. We eagerly await a Savior from heaven, the Lord Jesus, who will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body. What a vast, enormous, incredible difference there is!

We are God’s elect because he chose us according to his own foreknowledge. God the Father knew us and he chose us! We didn’t, through our superior knowledge or wisdom, choose him. He chose us— for obedience to Jesus through the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit and for sprinkling by his blood. In the Old Testament times, people and things were cleansed and purified ceremonially by sprinkling with the blood of sacrificial animals. But we are cleansed and purified in truth from all of our sin and rebellion through sprinkling of the blood of Jesus, God’s sacrificial lamb.

All these things set us apart completely from the world. Though we live in the world, we do not belong to the world. Righteousness and wickedness have absolutely nothing in common. Light and darkness cannot possibly have fellowship together. There is no harmony between Christ and Belial. Believers and unbelievers have absolutely nothing in common. (2 Cor. 6:14,15)

If any of you have read C. S. Lewis’s children’s fantasies, “The Chronicles of Narnia,” you may remember the story of The Silver Chair. In that story, high on the mountain in the far east where the air was very clear, Eustace and Jill, the main characters, were given a mission by Aslan, the Christ figure in the stories. To help them on their way, Aslan gave them four signs which they were to memorize and to repeat daily and to look for while they were on their mission. The signs would help them to know what to do. Aslan told them that up on his mountain where the air was clear, the signs seemed very simple and obvious. But down where he was sending them, the air was thick and they would have to be very diligent in remembering, repeating and recognizing the signs. (As it turned out, after a while, they weren’t very diligent about the signs and, as a result, got into all kinds of trouble. Aslan had to help them out.)

The things Peter tells us at the beginning of his letter (and, in fact, throughout the rest of his letter) may seem very clear when we are on the high mountain where the air is clear. But in the world, the air is thick and it’s easy to lose sight of the “signs.”  We have to be diligent in remembering the word of God. We have to remember who we are in Christ or we will get into all kinds of trouble. Nevertheless, Jesus died for us and he won’t let us fail.

Before Jesus went to the cross, he knew that Satan had asked to test the disciples, to sift them like wheat. He told them that he had prayed for them that their faith would not fail. That’s when Peter insisted that he was willing to die for Jesus. But even when Peter denied Jesus, his faith did not fail. I know that this is true because Jesus had prayed for him, for his faith not to fail. God always answers Jesus’s prayers. And Jesus right now is at the right hand of God interceding for us. Who will separate us from the love of Christ (Rom. 8:34,35)? The answer: No one! No one will ever separate us from the love of Christ!

Now let’s look at verses 3 through 9 in today’s passage. I’ll read them:

3Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, 4and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade-- kept in heaven for you, 5who through faith are shielded by God's power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time. 6In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. 7These have come so that your faith— of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire— may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. 8Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, 9for you are receiving the goal of your faith, the salvation of your souls. (1 Peter 1:3-9 –NIV)

Peter is writing to God’s elect, the ones God chose through the sanctifying work of his Holy Spirit for obedience to Christ and for sprinkling by his blood. We are God’s elect. He has chosen us to obey everything that Jesus taught, just as Jesus obeyed everything his Father taught him. He made us to be pure and innocent, not guilty of any sin, just as Jesus is pure and innocent, through the sprinkling of Jesus’s own blood. Peter is praising God because of this, “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,” and spells out in detail what it means.

First, God did what he did through his mercy. He chose each of us to be pure and innocent and obedient because of his mercy. None of us deserved this. When trying to explain God’s salvation to someone who seems to have it all together and seems to be living a moral and upright life, we like to quote Romans 3:10: “As it is written, ‘There is no one righteous, not even one;” and Romans 3:23: “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”  And these are true statements. It’s the word of God. But somehow, when you compare the life of someone who seems pretty good with the life of someone who seems to live only for evil and depravity, it seems like a technicality to say that no one is righteous. But no matter what your life was before you knew Christ, you were God’s enemy!

I know a man who lived a fairly innocent life. People considered him innocent of any serious sin. But his testimony was this: “At some point in my life I realized that I hated God!”  It is true for each of us, too— that we hated God. We hated the idea of anyone having authority over us or telling us what to do. Think about it. Isn’t it true that you hated God? It is truly God’s mercy that he loved those who hated him. Here’s what he did.

In his great mercy, God gave us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Romans 8:7 says, “The sinful (literally, carnal or fleshly) mind is hostile to God. It does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so.”  Before God gave us this new birth, it was impossible for us to not hate God. But through the sanctifying work of the Spirit, God changed us. Through the Holy Spirit he set us apart from the world to be cleansed by the blood of Jesus Christ and to become like him.

We are born again, through the work of the Holy Spirit, into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. The hope we have is because of the fact that Jesus rose from the dead. The certain knowledge of the resurrection of Jesus was what enabled his disciples to give their lives, even literally, to spread the good news of salvation to all the world. God raised Jesus from the dead and he will also raise us from the dead!

And not only will God raise us from the dead, but he has an inheritance for us, kept in heaven, that can never perish spoil or fade. When we were in the world—when we were part of the world—all we had were the things of this world, which perish, spoil and fade. Even our own bodies perish, spoil and fade. But now we have an inheritance that will last forever. In the end, when Jesus comes, our salvation will be revealed. We will never lose God’s salvation because we are shielded by his power through faith. That faith is also God’s gift. Our salvation doesn’t depend on us, but on God who is absolutely faithful.

Peter, speaking by the Holy Spirit, says that we greatly rejoice in this salvation, even though we have had to face many trials and suffer grief so that our faith may be proved genuine. To God, our faith is the most precious thing there is. Our faith is not tested so that God can find out whether or not it is genuine. God knows it is genuine. He knows all things. He is the one who gave us our faith, and he knows that it is genuine. He wants to demonstrate to all of creation and all of the powers of heaven, and to us also, that our faith is genuine. When Jesus comes, this will result in praise, glory and honor. Peter doesn’t say who will praise whom, but I think everyone will both give and receive praise and all of us will praise, honor and glorify God. We all will rejoice together with Jesus before God. Are you looking forward to this?

Peter says that even though we have not seen Jesus, we love him; and even though we do not see him now, we believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, for we are receiving the goal of our faith, the salvation of our souls.

Do you feel this way? Do you rejoice even when you have to suffer grief in all kinds of trials? Are you filled with inexpressible and glorious joy because you are receiving the goal of your faith, the salvation of your soul? Do you know that you love Jesus? Peter says that you actually do all these things. If you don’t think so, maybe it’s because you have not been thinking about all of the things that Peter is telling us God has done.

Think about all that God has done. Put yourself in his place. How would you want to deal with someone to whom you provided everything he needed for life—and that person still hated you and wanted to have nothing to do with you? Would you, then, instead of taking vengeance on that person, sacrifice your son for him. Praise God who sacrificed his Son for us. He didn’t withhold his own Son, but gave him up for us all. Praise the Lord!

Now let’s go on to verses 10 through 12. I’ll read them:

10Concerning this salvation, the prophets, who spoke of the grace that was to come to you, searched intently and with the greatest care, 11trying to find out the time and circumstances to which the Spirit of Christ in them was pointing when he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the glories that would follow. 12It was revealed to them that they were not serving themselves but you, when they spoke of the things that have now been told you by those who have preached the gospel to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven. Even angels long to look into these things. (1 Peter 1:10-12 –NIV)

Today’s passage, as well as the entire book of first Peter (and the whole bible, too), is written to us. According to Peter’s greeting in verses 1 and 2 at the beginning of today’s passage, we have been chosen according to God’s foreknowledge, through the sanctifying work of the Spirit, for obedience to Jesus Christ and sprinkling by his blood. God knew us before he made us and chose us to be purified from all sin through the blood of Jesus (1 John 1:7)— that is through his death on the cross for our sin. He also chose us to be obedient to Jesus.

What do you think about being obedient to Jesus? If you are happy to have eternal life in a perfect, imperishable body, is obedience to Jesus just something you have to put up with because it’s part of the package? Concerning this, just as a start, I’ll mention a few things for which God has chosen us: We have been chosen to be reconciled with our brothers. We have been chosen to be honest, sincere and unhypocritical. We have been chosen to be generous. We have been chosen to love our enemies so that we may be sons of our Father in heaven. God’s Son, Jesus, loved his enemies (us). We have been chosen to be perfect, just as our Father in heaven is perfect. We have been chosen to be pure and holy, beautiful and wonderful, just as Jesus is pure and holy and beautiful and wonderful.

According to verses 10 through 12, Christ, himself, through the Holy Spirit, guided the Old Testament prophets to write about what he was going to do— to suffer and die for us and to be raised to glory at the right hand of God the Father. According to the writer of Hebrews, we see Jesus now crowned with glory and honor because he suffered death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone (Heb. 2:9). All of this is “the grace that was to come” in verse 10.

But the Old Testament prophets did not predict the “glory” (singular) to follow, but rather, the “glories” (plural) that would follow. The writer of Hebrews says that in bringing many sons to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the author of their salvation (Jesus) perfect through suffering (Heb. 2:10).

These are the things that God revealed through the Old Testament prophets. They understood that they were writing them down so that we could read them in this present age. They were written for us. Peter preached these things through the Holy Spirit and now the same Holy Spirit makes them alive to us as we read them!

Isn’t God amazing? He loved us before he formed our bodies— in fact, before he formed anything. He loved us even knowing that we would rebel against him. The angels long to look into these things. They have never rebelled against God. But we have, and God sacrificed and suffered unimaginably to save us! Praise the Lord! Amen!

Pray that we may understand these things more and more deeply day by day. Pray that we may know God’s heart more today than we did yesterday, and more tomorrow than we do today. Pray that we may know and understand the love of Christ more and more and desire with all of our hearts to be like him in every way. These things are God’s will for us. God answers our prayers when we pray according to his will.

[Prayer]