Word of Salvation – March 2011
GRACE AND PEACE TO GOD’S ELECT, Rev. John de Jongh
(Sermon 1 in a series on 1 Peter)
Reading – Jeremiah 1:4-10
Text – 1 Peter 1:1-2
Songs: 378:1-3; The price is paid; Psalm 148 (Michelle Lodder version); I sought the Lord; 533
Outline (for bulletin)
1: From …
Peter
an apostle of Jesus Christ
2: To …
God’s elect
resident aliens
scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynia,
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
3: Christian greetings
Grace and peace be yours in abundance.
And so: God’s grace and peace be with you!
You see here at the beginning of this letter, that Peter starts in a similar kind of way that we still start letters today. First you write who it’s from and some relevant detail. Next you put who it’s sent to, and some detail about them. Then we would put the date, which Peter hasn’t done. And finally we would have dear so-and-so, and instead of that Peter has a greeting.
And can’t you just imagine Peter sitting there, probably writing from Rome, beginning this letter to believers that he isn’t able to visit personally and so laying down in writing, inspired by the Holy Spirit, things he believes they need to hear.
Point 1
You see first of all that the author is Peter.
And so you need to think all the way back to Matthew chapter 4. Jesus begins to preach repentance after his temptation in the desert. One day as he walks beside the Sea of Galilee, and sees two brothers, Simon called Peter and his brother Andrew, fishing for a living. Jesus says, ‘Come, follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.’ At once they left their nets and followed him.
This same Peter was the first disciple to confess Jesus as the Christ, the Messiah. Some were saying that he was John the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah, or one of the prophets. Peter was the first one to be given the insight and have the courage to say, ‘You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.’
But then this same Peter tried to stop Jesus being arrested and going to the cross – Jesus had to tell him to put his sword away. He’s also the one who disowned Jesus 3 times, and needed to be reinstated after the resurrection.
But then again he’s the Peter who changed dramatically with the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost – he preached the Pentecost sermon in Acts chapter 2 that God used to bring 3000 people to salvation.
He’s the Peter who dominates the early chapters of the book of Acts, courageously preaching the gospel in spite of persecution. He became one of the pillars of the early NT church.
As you read this letter, it helps to remember that this is the Peter who wrote it.
He describes himself as an apostle of Jesus Christ.
‘Apostle’ generally means a messenger, sent with authority, to carry out the will of the one who sent him.
Peter was an apostle of Jesus Christ. One of the Twelve. Chosen by Jesus himself. Chosen to be an eye-witness to Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. Not only sent to proclaim the gospel message in Jerusalem on Pentecost Sunday, but wherever his Lord might send him throughout his lifetime.
And so as you read the early chapters of Acts, that’s what you see Peter doing, committed to his central task of prayer and proclaiming the gospel.
As he wrote this letter, that was the work he was still committed to.
In fact the worldwide church continues to have this mandate today. God calls his church to this kind of apostolic ministry still today. In the Nicene Creed we confess the church to be God’s holy, catholic, and apostolic church. God calls us to continue to be witnesses to Jesus and his resurrection today, wherever we go, in the way we think and live and speak – challenging and encouraging people with the gospel.
Point 2
Peter then notes here those he is writing to.
He describes them as God’s elect, God’s chosen ones.
And doesn’t that strike a chord with Reformed folk. We immediately think of the line drawn in the sand in the early 1600s.
On one side you have us Reformed folk who, as we read our Bibles, discover the God who, in his electing love, from before the creation of the world, set his sovereign plan and purpose, deciding in accordance with his good pleasure and will, who would be his people, holy and blameless in Jesus Christ, destined for eternity with him on the New Earth. We read passages like the first half of Ephesians 1 and Romans 8:29&30, and many other passages in the Bible that talk about God choosing people and nations for his specific purpose and destiny, and we can draw no other conclusion.
But on the other side of the line you have the Arminians, who believe that God wouldn’t make the conscious decision from eternity past to leave many people out of his plan of salvation. They focus on the Gospel call to repent and believe, and interpret passages on election and predestination to suit. They believe that ultimately coming to salvation through faith in Jesus Christ is in the hands of each person, not subject to the sovereign will of God from eternity past.
And it’s not that we Reformed disagree that God calls everyone to repent and believe, but we understand that that is his means to bring his elect to salvation. But he has already decided the outcome from eternity past. God is sovereign in everything, including our salvation. In fact, if he doesn’t give life to cold, dead hearts we can’t even respond to him – we are dead in sin. If God doesn’t work faith in our hearts by his Holy Spirit, we never would respond to his gospel call – we don’t want to.
God electing us to salvation then means that we are strangers in this world. A better translation might actually be ‘resident aliens’ – we live here, but our citizenship is in heaven, our true home is the New Earth.
It’s an idea that the Jews in Peter’s day could easily relate to. A lot of Jews had never returned home to Israel after the exile into Babylon more than 400 years before. They still lived in countries a long way away, and yet they still felt to some degree that Israel was their true home. They were resident aliens in foreign lands.
And that’s the kind of idea Peter describes here. Believers live in this world, but we don’t belong in this world – we’re resident aliens. Our citizenship is in heaven; our true home is the New Earth. We have permanent residency here for as long as it’s needed. But when the time is right we will be taken home.
That idea that we are resident aliens should then have a huge impact on the way we live. Our life here should already be lived according to the principles of heaven and the New Earth, rather than the example of the average Aussie. And so Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount guides his disciples to godly belief and life, rather than accepted Jewish practice. And the NT writers regularly write things like, ‘set your minds on things above, not on earthly things’, and then give whole lists of how this will affect every area of life. New Christians can’t just continue to live the way they used to. We can’t live lives that are no different to your average Aussie.
And then you see that the believers Peter is writing to are God’s elect scattered throughout the areas mentioned here. They’re the early believers in northern Asia Minor, which today is Turkey. When Peter wrote, it was a ‘backwater’ of the Roman Empire. And as Peter writes this, his mind actually wanders along the route that his messenger will take, starting at the Black Sea, and ending up back there again, following the known travel routes of the day.
Some people from this area had already heard the gospel first in Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost as they were visiting there for continuation of the Passover feast. Paul also covered some of this territory in his missionary journeys. And it seems that Peter must have spent time here as well, although it’s not described in the book of Acts. From chapter 1:14 & 18 you see that the churches were predominantly Gentile. It is also the case that they were being persecuted for their faith.
Peter reminds them that their situation is completely in accord with God’s eternal sovereign plan. They have nothing to fear. And he gives a Trinitarian defense of that, referring to the work of Father, Holy Spirit, and the Son.
Their situation was completely in accord with the foreknowledge of God the Father.
That doesn’t come out so clearly in the NIV. But the original isn’t written as a tidy English sentence, and so the NIV has inserted the word ‘chosen’ here in v2, reflecting back on ‘elect’ in v1, to clean up the grammar. But the original simply says ‘to the elect, resident aliens, scattered in [these places], according to the foreknowledge of God the Father’.
Their situation of living in a Roman ‘backwater’, at this time in history, and coming to faith in Jesus Christ as small scattered communities of believers, suffering persecution, with little support from distant fellow Christians, was all planned and known by God from eternity past.
And again, Arminians would disagree with us on that. They would say that this foreknowledge is only God looking forward in time and seeing what the future held, and then basing his election for salvation on their future foreseen faith.
But the difficulty is that that isn’t how the Bible uses the word ‘foreknow’. Romans 8:29 also says that ‘those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son … . And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.’
Arminians would say that before time, God looked into the future, and foresaw who would believe in Christ, and therefore set the eternal destiny of those believers, and so now calls us through the gospel so that we can accept it. But that becomes a circular argument that doesn’t make sense.
And there are other problems with that view as well.
The clear meaning of Romans 8:29 is that those whom God knew beforehand in his own mind, as his people, from before the creation of the world, they are the ones he destines in advance for eternal salvation; and then effectively calls by the gospel accompanied by his Holy Spirit; and then justifies – he declares them to be holy and blameless based on the obedience and atonement of Jesus Christ; and then glorifies so that on the last day they will be like Jesus Christ – holy and blameless.
From before time, God knew us in a personal, loving, fatherly way; and he acted on that knowledge in time. So he also said to the prophet Jeremiah, ‘Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.’
What that means for us, and all believers, is a level of spiritual security and comfort that we couldn’t otherwise have. In spite of our doubts and fears from time to time; in spite of our falling into sin and needing to repent over and over again; God has loved us from before creation, he has set our eternal destiny on the New Earth, he works in us now by his word and Holy Spirit conforming us to the likeness of Jesus Christ. He will preserve us for eternal salvation in spite of our human weakness. We can have assurance of our salvation in Jesus Christ.
And then during our lifetime, God has worked out his foreknowledge and our destiny, by the sanctifying of the Holy Spirit, for obedience to Jesus Christ and sprinkling by his blood.
The Holy Spirit had worked the gospel in the minds and hearts of Peter’s readers, leading them to repentance and faith, and increasingly into a life of growing practical holiness, with God’s goal a growing obedience to Jesus Christ. And like the sacrificial blood sprinkled in the OT as a part of the ceremonies connected with Israel’s covenant relationship with God, it was as if Jesus’ blood, shed on the cross, had been sprinkled on them directly, making them holy, setting them apart for covenant relationship with God, for all eternity.
Point 3
Then Peter finishes the introduction here with the fairly standard Christian greeting that you find at the beginning of many of the letters in one form or another – ‘Grace and peace’.
‘Grace’ was a wordplay on the traditional Greek opening of letters – ‘greetings’. Change the Greek letters a bit and ‘greetings’ becomes ‘grace’.
And ‘Peace’ comes from the OT blessing of God’s perfect peace and well-being upon his people.
Put them together and you have an ideal Christian opening for a letter – wishing believers God’s gracious gift of forgiveness for sin and eternal life, and his perfect peaceful well-being in every way.
And don’t many Christians still do the same sort of thing today when they write a letter to another Christian. They use ‘God bless’ or ‘yours in Christ’ or something like that to finish, rather than the standard ‘yours sincerely’ or ‘regards’?
Conclusion
These early couple of verses in this letter open up before us the mind of God from eternity past, and lead us to his grace and peace to those who respond to him in repentance, faith and obedience through Jesus Christ.
The comfort here is knowing that our salvation doesn’t rest in our own hands, it doesn’t depend on ourselves but rests in God’s secret will from before creation.
But the challenge is for us to then live up to what we are in Christ – to live as resident aliens in a foreign land, living here for a time, but knowing that our citizenship is in heaven, and our true home is the New Earth. God calls us to live in this world, but not be of this world.
Amen