1 Peter 1:14-19
Be Sober and Holy
1Pet 1:13. After the explanation about what has to do with Christ and His suffering and His glory, Peter speaks about the practical consequences that go together with these facts. You may know what your blessings are, but according to God’s thoughts you only have a right understanding of them if they also have an effect in your life. To work that out, Peter exhorts to take certain actions. He does so in forceful, imperative language. First he says that you must “prepare your minds for actions” or “having girded up the loins of your mind” (Darby Translation). To ‘gird up’ has to do with making yourself ready to set out, prepare yourself to leave. You see that when the people of Israel had to make themselves ready to leave Egypt (Exo 12:11). This is how you should be ready for the call of the Lord to leave the world and enter into the kingdom. This is the proper attitude of the pilgrim and that prevents you from settling yourself here on earth as if your future is here below. Other aspects that are related to girding up, are service and struggle (Lk 12:35; 37; Jn 13:4-5; Eph 6:14). What we must gird up, is ‘the loins’. The loins indicate the strength to walk (Deu 33:11; Job 40:16; Pro 31:17). If you have an ailment in your loins you can forget about a brisk walk. Here the loins are connected to your mind. The exhortation to gird up the loins of your mind means that you are exhorted to let yourself to be guided in your thinking by Christ from Whom you have received your mind, to be strengthened with power and spiritually be enlightened (1Jn 5:20). You have a mind, which means insight by God’s Spirit and God’s Word, of the things that will happen. Remain focused on those things and don’t let yourself be distracted by all kinds of matters that may seem interesting, but which are only ideas of people. To that the next exhortation, “keep sober”, is connected. You are sober if you see reality as it really is. That reality is the coming revelation of Jesus Christ Who will come to judge the world and to establish His kingdom. Your soberness will disappear if you do not focus your mind on the future, but on the here and now. I have heard about a quite serious story that illustrates this biblical soberness well. It is about the proclamation of the gospel to cannibals. Some evangelists went to cannibals to preach the gospel to them. Two of them were killed and eaten by them. Another one had the chance to escape. Still, a certain John persisted to go there to bring the gospel to those people. When he talked about this with an old theologian, the latter tried to persuade him with apparently sober argument to stop him from going. The answer of John was: ‘You will soon be buried and be eaten by worms. It is not a big difference whether I will be buried here and be eaten by worms or go there and be eaten by cannibals.’ That is ‘soberly thinking’ in the biblical sense of the word. The result is that the gospel reached that place and people came to faith there. This soberness focuses the thoughts on the future that is totally controlled by the Lord Jesus. If you belong to Him, you will also share in His future, in His revelation or appearance. Then, after the exhortations to gird up your mind, you are exhorted to fully hope “on the grace to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ”. You must “fully” hope on that. Therefore you should not allow anything to diminish that hope. No worry or illness should cause you hope less on that grace. It goes without saying that you are not to allow a certain sin to be the cause of that. When there is sin in your life you will not even hope on that grace. Then you will keep the thought of the revelation of the Lord Jesus at a distance. To look forward again to His coming with desire it is necessary for you to confess your sin. If there is sin in your life, you must make haste to remove that hindrance. 1Pet 1:14. Maybe there is no concrete sin in your life, but there is the inclination to give in to sin. You feel that you are drawn to commit a certain sin. That may be caused by your desires of the past. Considering that, the next exhortation comes to you: ‘Be as a child of obedience not conformed to the former lusts.’ Do you remember what 1Pet 1:2 says? You have been called to the obedience of Jesus Christ. Literally it is not ‘obedient children’, but “children of obedience”, children who live according to the principle of obedience. That you are able to live as a child of obedience is the result of the fact that you are a child of God. You are born of God and due to that you have received God’s nature (2Pet 1:4). It seems strange that Peter speaks to them about “former … in your ignorance”, while in their past they were so familiar with God. The Jews were treating the ignorant Gentiles with contempt and thought that only they had the knowledge regarding the true God (Rom 2:17-20). It is true that God revealed Himself to them in a special way. However, that’s what made them arrogant. Their whole history has shown that they only boasted in their outward position and at the same time they were following their fleshly lusts. Before the time that the Jews, to whom this letter is addressed, had come to faith in the Lord Jesus as the Messiah, they were also living like that. They abandoned that when they converted, but the danger to fall back is always there. For that reason they need to be warned not to live like that again.1Pet 1:15. After this warning not to do something an exhortation follows to do something. The Scripture is always balanced. Scripture speaks about putting aside something and putting on something (Col 3:8; 12). The point here is about not being conformed to something of the past and instead becoming holy in all your behavior. In this respect, you can compare your life to a garden. A garden is more than the absence of weed. It is necessary to weed, but it is not an occupation in itself. The important thing is that the garden exposes a sea of flowers or that it bears fruits. This is how your life as a Christian is like. That life is not characterized by things that are not there, but by things that are there or things that are still to come. Here the point is that everything in your life, “all [your] walk”, thus your whole appearance, is holy, meaning completely consecrated to God. The essential thing is that Christ, the Man Who is completely consecrated to God, becomes visible in your life. To be holy seems negative. That is true if you only see it as being set apart from the wrong. But to be holy is positive. The main idea is in fact: to be set apart for (something). You derive that from the first time the word ‘sanctify’ in the Bible is used. That is at the creation when God sanctifies the seventh day (Gen 2:3). At that time there was nothing wrong yet in the creation. Everything that God had made was very good. Still God sanctified the seventh day. He set that day apart from all the other days as a day for Himself. 1Pet 1:16. To underline the importance of holiness Peter quotes a verse from the Old Testament. There God appeals to His people to be holy, because He is holy (Lev 11:44; Lev 19:2; Lev 20:26-27). But would His holiness only apply to the Old Testament and not to the New Testament? If you give this some thought, it will be clear to you that the holy God of the Old Testament is the same holy God of the New Testament. Nowhere has that become more evident than when He did not spare His own Son on the cross. In the Old Testament He could not have anything to do with sin and in the New Testament He cannot either. The appeal to be holy is obvious because God is holy. He can apply no lower standard than Himself to a people associated with Him, regardless of whether they are an Old Testament or a New Testament people. The message concerning God’s holiness that resounds in the Old Testament resonates just as clearly here through Peter here in the New Testament. That call should lead you to consecrate yourself completely to Him.Now read 1 Peter 1:13-16 again.Reflection: Why is it important to be ‘sober’ and ‘holy’?Redeemed With Precious Blood
1Pet 1:17. Peter adds another argument to the appeal to be holy. That argument comes from the great privilege that you now have, that you may call God your Father. That privilege is indeed great. By the Spirit Who dwells in you, you cry out “Abba, Father” (Rom 8:15; Gal 4:6). You may call on Him, honor Him, glorify and worship Him. However, to that privilege is also attached a responsibility. God is a Father Who loves you and Who, because of His love for you, also disciplines you if He sees that you are in danger to drift away. God is not an earthly father, who often does not discipline or sometimes even practices discipline out of a wrong motive (Heb 12:9-10). He is a Father Who only disciplines when it is necessary. He perfectly judges each one’s work without giving preference to or being detrimental to anyone. He doesn’t only discipline to test your faith, but He also disciplines when your holiness is in lack of something (see Heb 12:10b). The judgment of the Father that Peter talks about here, does not refer to the judgment after this earthly life. That judgment has been given to the Lord Jesus by Him (Jn 5:27). The judgment of the Father relates to your life as a pilgrim. If your life honors Him, it has His approval. If your life dishonors Him He will come your way to clarify to you that something has to be changed. Therefore, you must go your way on earth “in fear”. Fear does not imply to be afraid of God or of still going to perish. Fear here means to fear for yourself because you know what is still within yourself that may cause you to do something that will grieve God your Father. Consider that you are His child and that you have become that by the redemption that the Lord Jesus has accomplished for you. What a huge price did He pay for that! How could you still walk in the desires of the past, while you have been redeemed in such a way? The fear to do something that is not to the honor of God ought to characterize you “during the time of your stay [on earth]”. The expression ‘stay’ or ‘sojourning’ indicates that you have no permanent residence on earth. As you have seen earlier you are addressed in this letter as a pilgrim. You are a stranger on earth, on the way to your inheritance. That is something you should continually be aware of, for otherwise you will be distracted from the goal by various attractive things around you. The path of a sojourner is the path of the Lord Jesus. He has been the true Stranger and Sojourner on earth. He had no home, even no place where He could lay His head (Mt 8:20). If you stay focused on Him you will walk throughout the time of your stay here in a way that is pleasing to God. 1Pet 1:18. From this verse can be derived that it is not about a fear to still be able to perish or a fear because of the uncertainty whether you are or are not a child of God. Peter says clearly “knowing”. That rules out every possible doubt. And what do they know precisely? That they have been redeemed. They know what had certainly not and what certainly had redeemed them. They also know what they have been redeemed from: from all their rituals and traditions, from the walk of their ancestors. By doing whatever you did before, you could not be redeemed. A walk after tradition, after copied and transmitted rituals, doesn’t bring a man any closer to redemption. On the contrary. To one who in his heart rely on an outward walk, true redemption will disappear more and more out of sight. Such a person will get stuck more and more in outer appearances. Such a walk bears no fruit at all; it makes a person ‘unfruitful’ in the sense of meaningless. To partake of the blessings of God, it is essential to get redeemed from such a walk. Such a walk is like a prison. Those to whom Peter is writing could not be redeemed from that prison by perishable things like silver and gold. They know about a redemption by silver and gold (Exo 30:12), but that was an outward redemption and not deliverance from a system that kept them imprisoned. It is the same as the blood of bulls and goats that cannot take away sins (Heb 10:4).1Pet 1:19. In contrast to that completely inadequate blood is the “precious blood … of Christ”. That blood has certainly been sufficient to work the true and definite redemption. The blood of Christ was shed for the forgiveness of all your sins and for the redemption from all powers that were keeping you in bondage. It is the blood as of a lamb unblemished and spotless. The lamb was the basis of the redemption of God’s earthly people from Egypt, whom by the blood were protected against the judgment of God (Exo 12:1-13). The Lamb, Christ, is the basis of Christendom. Through the surrender of Christ in death and the shedding of His blood God’s judgment passes over each one who hides behind it. This applies to all who believe that Christ also shed His blood for their sins. Everyone who believes that partakes of the eternal redemption (Heb 9:12).1Pet 1:20. God had the Lamb in mind already “before the foundation of the world”. Our redemption did not arise in God when He saw that sin entered the world and how miserable our condition was. God was not surprised by the fall of man. He knew what man would do. Before man had sinned, indeed before the world was created, His mind was already focused on His Son, of Whom He knew that He was going to be the Lamb. This is what makes our position as Christians much more wonderful than that of Israel. Israel is a people that is chosen by God from the foundation of the world and that is destined for the earth (Mt 25:34; Rev 13:8). The New Testament believers are chosen before the foundation of the world (Eph 1:4) and are destined for heaven. What God already knew before the foundation of the world He did not keep to Himself alone. Christ has been revealed as the Lamb. He revealed Himself to His people and to the world. That’s why John could point to Him and say: “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” (Jn 1:29). The last times began when the Lord Jesus came into the world as the Lamb. In all previous times God tried to move the most privileged people on earth, His people, to obedience to Him. Again and again man made clear that he was not willing to. Then, as the final test, His Son came on earth. But instead of listening to Him the sin of man is exposed in the most horrible way. Men rejected and murdered the Son. In this way the obduracy of man was definitely determined. In a striking way this is all illustrated in the parable of the wicked vine-growers that is told by the Lord Jesus (Mt 21:33-46). What means man ends, has given God the opportunity to make a new beginning. On the one hand the Lord Jesus has been revealed as the Lamb to determine the sin of man in the most obvious way. When man rejects God, Who has revealed Himself in goodness, his condition is hopeless. On the other hand, the Lord Jesus has revealed Himself as the Lamb for the sake of each who believes, thus also for your sake. Through Him you believe in God. In Him you see that God is not an angry and vindictive God. On the basis of what the Lord Jesus has done for you, you know that God is not against you anymore, but He is for you (Rom 8:31-32). After all He gave His Son as the Lamb.1Pet 1:21. Therefore you not only believe in the Lord Jesus as the One Who protects you against the wrath of God, but you also believe in God as the One Who made everything well. By raising Christ from the dead God has given the convincing evidence that He has considered and accepted the work of His Son as perfect. God gave Him the glory due to Him. Your faith and hope are focused on God. All originated in Him. By the faith in what God has done with His Christ He will lead you to the goal. With this is connected the hope that the same Lord Who is with God now will one day return to reign and you will be with Him then.Now read 1 Peter 1:17-21 again.Reflection: What do you learn in this section about the work of God, about the work of Christ and about yourself?
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