Audio
In 1 Corinthians 15:17, Paul says, “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins.” What he means there is that if Christ is not risen from the dead, then He has not defeated sin or its penalty for us, and thus there is still a price to pay for sin that we must pay ourselves. That price will be eternal separation from God in suffering and perishing in that horrific place the Bible calls hell. But if Christ has been raised, as we preach and believe, then He has made a sufficient sacrifice for our sins so that we can be born again by faith in Him. All the sins of our past are removed. Our nature is transformed by His indwelling presence within us, and eternal life will be ours to enjoy forever with Him and our new family in Christ.
Peter is writing these words to people who have made that commitment to believe in Christ alone to save them from their sins. They have been born again. And as a result of their commitment to Christ, many of them have suffered great loss in their lives. They may have been cut off from family, they may have lost friends, they may be undergoing persecution from others, but Peter calls them to worship God, because Christ is risen, and as a result of His resurrection we have been born again into a new life and given a new family with a new Father in Heaven, and new brothers and sisters in the Church of Jesus Christ. And this is true for all of us as well. Christ is risen, and therefore we can be born again and have new life, abundant life, and eternal life in Him. Praise God for the Risen Christ who makes it possible for us to be born again.
II. Because of the Resurrection, we have a living hope (v3)
To most of us, the word “hope” conjures up the idea of something we are less than certain of. You may say, “I hope my team wins the game.” You don’t know if they will, and they could just as easily lose, but you are pulling for them, wishing and wanting them to win. But that is not the way the word “hope” is used by New Testament writers. In the New Testament hope looks toward the future, but not with uncertain wishing and wanting; it looks toward the future with certainty and confidence. To have hope is the opposite of facing the future with fear. As one New Testament scholar said, “To have hope is a sign that things are well with us.”[1] A Christian’s hope is more than wishful thinking, it is a confident expectation of what will be. The logic of the passage is this: the resurrection makes the new birth possible, and the new birth brings hope, and this hope is living.
Israel
longed for the homeland that God had promised them; but they couldn’t keep it.
Because of their own sin, and because of repeated invasions from foreign
powers, they lost that inheritance. But this inheritance that is promised to
believers in Jesus is eternally secure. Peter said that it is reserved in heaven for us. This glorious
eternal treasure has been stored up for us and is being guarded by the Christ
who conquered death and lives forever more. It will never be taken away from
those to whom it has been promised.
When the Patriarch Jacob met the Pharaoh of Egypt in Genesis
47, the Bible tells us that Pharaoh asked him, “How many years have you lived?”
Jacob responded “The years of my sojourning are one hundred and thirty; few and
unpleasant have been the years of my life.” Most of us will not live to the
ripe old age of 130, but all of us can look over the landscape of our lives and
say that our years have been few and difficult. Each of us experiences hardship
on a daily basis. Since the fall of humanity into sin, every person who has
ever lived in this world has been affected by suffering and sorrow in countless
ways.
The original audience of Peter’s first epistle could relate.
In the most plausible reconstruction of the historical background of this
letter, the Christians to whom Peter was writing had been uprooted from Rome and deported under the Emperor Claudius, sent off to
live in the newly established Roman colonies in Asia Minor .
Why? We don’t know for certain, but we have reason to believe that they were
singled out because they were Christians. And they were scattered across this
enormous new territory where they came into contact with people who had lived
there for a long time and were not too pleased about being under Roman control
or having to deal with these new residents. These Christians were treated
harshly by their new neighbors in a number of ways. Peter describes how they
underwent “various trials,” “evil,” “harm,” a “fiery ordeal,” being slandered,
reviled, and socially ostracized because of their faith in Christ. Not all
suffering that we have endured is a direct result of our faith in Christ, but
live long enough and you will experience some of it. Some of you have already
experienced it to a great degree. Your decision to follow Christ may have cost
you relationships, privileges, or possessions. But the Word of God points us to
help and hope by turning our focus to the resurrection of Jesus Christ, which
we celebrate today on Easter.
Peter writes, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, in
verse 3: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” He calls
them to worship the sovereign God of the universe in spite of their difficult
circumstances. Instead of looking at the hardships around them, Peter directs
their focus upward to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ and says,
“Blessed be Him!” In other words, “Praise Him!” Our worship of God is always
rooted in the objective realities of who He is and what He has done. Peter uses
very precise theological language in the opening verses of this letter to
identify the one true God in His Trinitarian Nature, referring in v2 to God the
Father, the Spirit, and Jesus Christ. Here in v3, he refers to Him as the God
and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, further establishing his conviction in the
sovereignty of God and the deity of Christ. He is supremely and uniquely worthy
of our praise and worship because who He is in and of Himself. But then notice
that Peter points to a particular act of God as a foundational basis for this
worship: The resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.
God has done many wondrous things in the history of the
world, and the Lord Jesus did many wondrous things recorded in the Gospels, and
many more that are not. John said that if we recorded everything He said and
did, the whole world wouldn’t contain the books. But the resurrection is the singular
and specific event to which Peter points these struggling Christians. It is
this event in history that he uses as a basis of his call to worship in the
present. Praise God, he says, on the basis of the resurrection of Jesus Christ
from the dead. And in the words that fill this passage, Peter tells us why the
resurrection of Christ is so foundational to our worship as we live out our
lives, few and difficult though our days may be.
I. Because of the Resurrection, we can be born again (v3)
I’m not much of a handy man. When something has to be
assembled, my tendency is to tear into it and start trying to put it together without
looking at the directions. Invariably I reach a point where I realize I am
stuck and pull out the instructions to see where I went wrong. Often it was
with step one. So I have to take it all apart and start over. Don’t you wish
life was like that? Wouldn’t it be great if you could go back and start over,
knowing what you know now? See, by the time we come to understand what God
expects of us in this life, we are already guilty of violating His holy
standard. In fact, we were born guilty because we inherited a sin nature from
Adam. So we are sinners by nature and by choice, from the worst of us to the
best of us. We deserve to be eternally separated from God because of our sins.
But praise the Lord, God has not given us what we deserve. He has shown us
“great mercy.” When the Bible speaks of mercy, it means that God is withholding
from us some penalty or consequence that we deserve. In His great mercy, Peter
says, He has “caused us to be born again.” And this new birth is a direct
result of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.
You remember when Jesus was talking to Nicodemus in John 3.
This man was a religious leader among the Jewish people. As far as human
standards go, he was a good man. But his goodness was not good enough to please
God. Jesus told him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he
cannot see the kingdom
of God
The solution to our spiritual predicament is not to try
harder or do better, but to have a brand new life given to us by God Himself in
the new birth. We need a new nature to replace the sinful nature we are born
with. Thus Jesus told Nicodemus that he must be born again if he would
enter the Kingdom
of God
In 1 Corinthians 15:17, Paul says, “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins.” What he means there is that if Christ is not risen from the dead, then He has not defeated sin or its penalty for us, and thus there is still a price to pay for sin that we must pay ourselves. That price will be eternal separation from God in suffering and perishing in that horrific place the Bible calls hell. But if Christ has been raised, as we preach and believe, then He has made a sufficient sacrifice for our sins so that we can be born again by faith in Him. All the sins of our past are removed. Our nature is transformed by His indwelling presence within us, and eternal life will be ours to enjoy forever with Him and our new family in Christ.
Peter is writing these words to people who have made that commitment to believe in Christ alone to save them from their sins. They have been born again. And as a result of their commitment to Christ, many of them have suffered great loss in their lives. They may have been cut off from family, they may have lost friends, they may be undergoing persecution from others, but Peter calls them to worship God, because Christ is risen, and as a result of His resurrection we have been born again into a new life and given a new family with a new Father in Heaven, and new brothers and sisters in the Church of Jesus Christ. And this is true for all of us as well. Christ is risen, and therefore we can be born again and have new life, abundant life, and eternal life in Him. Praise God for the Risen Christ who makes it possible for us to be born again.
II. Because of the Resurrection, we have a living hope (v3)
To most of us, the word “hope” conjures up the idea of something we are less than certain of. You may say, “I hope my team wins the game.” You don’t know if they will, and they could just as easily lose, but you are pulling for them, wishing and wanting them to win. But that is not the way the word “hope” is used by New Testament writers. In the New Testament hope looks toward the future, but not with uncertain wishing and wanting; it looks toward the future with certainty and confidence. To have hope is the opposite of facing the future with fear. As one New Testament scholar said, “To have hope is a sign that things are well with us.”[1] A Christian’s hope is more than wishful thinking, it is a confident expectation of what will be. The logic of the passage is this: the resurrection makes the new birth possible, and the new birth brings hope, and this hope is living.
What is a “living hope”? To understand that, we would have to
understand its opposite–dead hope. Hope
that is grounded in futile things is dead. In 1 Thessalonians 4:13, Paul refers
to those who do not understand the resurrection as those who “have no hope.”
Their hope is dead. Many whom we know today have no hope – the only hope they
know is a dead hope because it is not based on anything of real substance or
value. The existentialists and materialists of our modern world look for
satisfaction in this life only, and wrestle with the seemingly undeniable
reality that it will not be attained here. Therefore, their only hope is to
endure the hardships of this life until death comes, and at that point, they
believe they will simply cease to exist. Death to them is just nothingness, a
state of nonexistence, like a candle that has been extinguished. This view was
common in the ancient world as well. But this is not how the Christian looks
toward the future. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:19, “If we have hoped in
Christ in this life only, we are of all men most to be pitied.” We are hoping
for something better beyond death. Our hope is a living hope because we
understand that life goes on beyond death. Death is not the end for anyone,
regardless of their spiritual condition. Hebrews 9:27 says that it is appointed
unto man once to die and then the judgment. And in that judgment, some will
enter eternal life and the glory of heaven, while others will perish eternally
in hell. The difference is Jesus Christ. Those who have been born again by
faith in him have a living hope of life beyond death. Jesus said in John 11, “I
am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in Me will live even if he
dies.”
Peter would have his Christian
friends know that life in this world may be hard. People may mistreat us for no
other reason than for our faith in Him. For 2,000 years, many Christians have
even been put to death for their faith, and this continues in much of the world
today. But Peter reminds these believers that we have a living hope. Because
Jesus has conquered death, we will have victory over death as well in Him. What
can this world do to you that Christ cannot overcome? The worst of it is death,
but we have a living hope that enables us to wait with confident expectation
for a better life than this beyond the grave. Living hope means that no matter
what the future holds, the believer in Christ does not have to face the future
with fear. We have faith in the promises of God and await the fulfillment of
those promises with assurance that His word will be found to be true.
How are we to endure the
difficulties of life in this world? By considering the risen Lord Jesus Christ
and worshiping God. He has enabled us to be born again and given us a living
hope.
III. Because of the Resurrection,
we have a glorious inheritance (vv4-5)
In the Old Testament, the Promised
Land of Canaan was often spoken of as Israel ’s inheritance. The various
portions of the land which were allotted to each tribe were referred to as that
tribe’s inheritance. For them, the idea of an inheritance in the land was of
the utmost importance. Many of Israel ’s
ancient laws about land and family had to do with this reality. Ultimately,
that land was lost for centuries to invading powers, and today much of it is
contested.
It is helpful to remember the
likely scenario of Peter’s readers as we come to this discussion about
inheritance. While we do not know for certain, the most likely background
scenario of these Christians is that which I stated before—that they had been
uprooted from Rome and scattered across Asia Minor by the Emperor Claudius. This is important to
keep in mind, because in the ancient world, one’s inheritance often consisted
primarily of land. This is still true in much of the world today. When a parent
dies, the property is passed down to the heirs. But in the case of these
Christians, they have been deported from their earthly homeland, and at this
point, any claim to that inheritance is questionable at best, and completely
forfeited at worst. If their future hope is dependent on what they might
receive in this world, then they are relatively hopeless.
Many Christians today can identify
with this. Some have families with no possessions to speak of to pass on. Some
inherit only debts and hardships. Beyond this, I have known many Christians
around the world, some even here in America , whose grandparents and
parents cut them off when they decided to follow Jesus. Maybe some were
disowned, struck from the inheritance, and severed from the ties of family and
home. When viewed through the lens of life in this world only, that is a very
insecure and hopeless position to find oneself in. And most of us can only
imagine the intensity of the temptation that must be faced as one wrestles with
these realities, understanding that all those things may be restored if only
one would abandon following Jesus. Peter’s friends understood that. Had they
renounced their faith in Christ, they may have been able to return to Rome , be reunited with
their families, and have once again the security of their future inheritance of
land and possessions and wealth.
But Peter tells them here that there is a better inheritance
awaiting them. No matter what your faith in Christ may cause you to lose in
this world will be more than compensated in the life to come. Because of the
resurrection of Christ, we have been born again to a living hope, to obtain an
inheritance which is imperishable, undefiled,
and will not fade away. Nothing we stand to gain in this world can be
described in those terms. Something that is imperishable means that it will not
be corrupted or destroyed. Undefiled means that it is not polluted or stained
by sin. Things that will not fade away are those which will never lose their
splendor. Everything in this world is perishable, defiled by sin, and posses
only a fading beauty. There is nothing you can possess here and now that can’t
be broken, stolen, or spoiled. But the things we stand to inherit in the life
to come are not subject to any of that. That is why Jesus admonished us in the
Sermon on the Mount to “not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where
moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for
yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where
thieves do not break in or steal” (Matt 6:19-20)
What will that inheritance consist of? Well, Paul said in 1
Corinthians 2:9 that God has prepared for those who love Him things which eye
has not seen and ear has not heard; things which have not entered the heart of
man.” What we know is that it will
be an inheritance of pure, imperishable, and eternal glory, consisting
primarily of life in the very presence of this risen Lord Jesus and all the
blood-bought benefits that come through faith in Him.
But what of us? What if somehow we become disqualified from
receiving this inheritance before we obtain it? Not possible! Not only is the
inheritance being reserved for us, but we are also being protected for it. In
v5, Peter says that this inheritance is reserved in heaven for you who are
protected by the power of God through faith. We are not maintaining ourselves
in this relationship with Christ, but are being preserved in it by the power of
God Himself, by the power of the Risen Lord Jesus who saved us and who is alive
to keep us in the grip of this saving grace. In John 10:28-29, Jesus said, “I
give eternal life to them, and they will never perish; and
no one will snatch them out of My hand. My Father, who has given them to Me, is greater than all; and
no one is able to snatch them out of the Father's hand.”
How may we know if we are guarded in this relationship with
Him? If we have put our faith in Christ to save us, then it is certain. We are
“protected by the power of God through faith.” It has been well said that, “Our
faith lays hold on God’s power, and His power strengthens our faith, and in
this manner we are preserved.”[2] If
our faith should grow weak as we walk with Jesus, God’s power works on our
behalf to strengthen us so that no one who has truly been born again will ever
fall away. We have been redeemed into a salvation, the fullness of which will
only be fully and finally revealed in that day when we will see the risen Jesus
face to face and know that our living hope has become fully realized. On that
day, all that was ever lost in this life will fade from view as we behold the
glorious inheritance God has reserved for those who are born again by faith in
Christ.
Yes, life in this world is hard. Our days are few and
difficult as Jacob said. And for the believer in Christ, there are often
hardships that we must face for no other reason than that we have put our faith
in Him. There will be sacrifice, there will be suffering to greater or lesser
degrees, there will be costly decisions made with severe consequence. But the
Word of God says to us today what it said to those to whom Peter wrote this
letter. Praise the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ because Christ has
been resurrected from the dead! And because of this we can be born again to a
living hope and an imperishable, undefiled, incorruptible inheritance that is
guarded for us in heaven, while we are all the while being guarded for it by
the power of God through our faith in this risen Savior, Jesus Christ.
[1] Rudolph
Bultmann, cited in Paige Patterson, A
Pilgrim Priesthood (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982), 31. To quote
Patterson’s assessment of Bultmann as a scholar, “Bultmann is mistaken in
finding in Scripture only a kernel of truth, which must be extracted from its
mythological trappings, but he is frequently correct in his evaluation of what
primitive Christians thought and believed.”
[2] Curtis
Vaughan and Thomas Lea, 1, 2 Peter, Jude (Bible
Study Commentary; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1988), 22.
No comments:
Post a Comment