1 Peter 1:1 and 2 part 3

It is one thing to know the right perspective, it is another to have the right perspective in the middle of trials. 

Take the nation of Israel.

I mean, just go back in your minds to the Exodus.

They cried out.

God heard their cries.

He delivers them in an absolutely miraculous way.

He speaks to them.

He personally guides them.

He provides for them.

He protects them.

It all seems so obvious and yet, in the wilderness, when they start experiencing some difficulties on the way to the Promised Land, they totally lose perspective and start crying out and asking God to let them go back to Egypt.

Which seems, you know, insane.

Except that the same thing sometimes happens to us.

Life becomes difficult.

And we start thinking we deserve better.

Or that God has forgotten about us and doesn’t care about us because we are trying to do what is right and it just isn’t working.

Or even that what we are doing must be the wrong thing for us to be doing because if we were just doing the right thing then certainly things would be going better.

It is important to maintain the right perspective, that the suffering and rejection we experience in this world doesn’t ultimately define us, that while life is hard and difficult, at the same time we as believers can be confident that we are chosen and dearly loved by God Himself, but it is difficult to maintain that perspective, it is very tempting to allow the difficulties of your circumstances to get you thinking that maybe God isn’t really all that for you and isn’t all that interested in your situation, which is why it is so important to go deep.

Sometimes people say life is too busy to be concerned much with theology.

I say, life is too hard not to be serious about theology.

And in verse 2, we find Peter taking what he has been saying about our election I think specifically, and going deeper; real deep, “according to the…in the…for the…” which are all phrases that look back to verse 1, he is pounding home the sermon he preached in verse 1 you might say by reminding us of just how actively involved each member of the Trinity has been in our lives and in our salvation. 

When we begin losing perspective and I going to put this in terms of practical application, meditate on you election, by looking for one thing at exactly when you were chosen.

The terms Peter uses are, “according to the foreknowledge of God the Father” which is a word Peter uses later to actually describe the Father’s relation to Jesus Christ.

1:20

There are some who take this word and try to make it mean something sort of cold, like God the Father just knowing a fact, but it is much more intense and personal than that.

If it just mean knowing facts beforehand, it would mean basically nothing here, it would add nothing to Peter’s argument in the least, there would be no special comfort in God’s foreknowledge if all it meant was knowing facts about believer’s lives, because he has that kind of information about everyone, not just Christians.

It has to do with God the Father’s “knowing people with a personal, loving fatherly knowledge;” quoting one commentator.

When we think about what is happening to us and God’s choice of us, we can look back and rejoice in the fact that before the beginning of the world God the Father looked forward at us, that we have been objects of God’s loving concern from all eternity.

To even kick it up a notch, we are part of His predetermined plan.  That’s how Peter uses the term foreknowledge in his sermon in Acts 2, he looks at the crucifixion of Christ and says that Jesus was delivered up according to the predetermined plan and foreknowledge of God the Father; while men looked at what happened to Jesus and thought it was chaos Peter said in reality it was the opposite, God in His great eternal wisdom was using the rebellion of men to accomplish His gracious redeeming plan and here Peter reminds us that as we look at our lives and what is happening to us, the situation is no different.

We are strangers, chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father.

In the sanctification of the Spirit.

Continuing on with this theme of God’s active concern, Peter uses a second phrase to describe our condition, “in the sanctification of the Spirit” or we might say when you are beginning to lose perspective, think about how you were converted.

Sanctification is a word that means to set something apart, to consecrate or to make holy.  Sometimes the Bible talks about sanctification in terms of our ongoing role in turning from sin and pursuing righteousness, and sometimes it speaks of it in terms of a one-time act, which was completely a work of God; which is how I think Peter is speaking of it here.

If you are a Christian you can look back before the world began and see that you were one of God’s elect, but as you look at your life from the time you were born onwards, you were not always saved.  You weren’t always following Christ, that happened at a point in time, there was a conversion, a great change that took place in your life where you went from being dead in sin to alive, blind to seeing, impure to pure, unclean to clean and as you look back on that instantaneous, radical, life-changing transformation it provides yet another reason for trusting in God’s loving concern for you.

Not only did God the Father plan your salvation in eternity past, God the Holy Spirit worked in your life to do what you absolutely could not do on your own, setting you apart to be someone choice and precious for God Himself.

We are chosen, in the foreknowledge of God the Father, by the sanctification of the Spirit, for obedience and sprinkling with the blood of Jesus Christ.

We can look back to when we were chosen for encouragement, to how we were converted for strength, and to why we were called for motivation.

Peter says God has done all this that we might live our lives in obedience to His Word and in an on-going at peace relationship with Him through the work of Jesus Christ on our behalf. 

The imagery Peter is using here is once again drawn from the Old Testament; I think from right after the Exodus actually, God had chosen Israel, delivered Israel, revealed Himself to Israel, and Israel at Mount Sinai responded with a commitment to obedience.

They said, everything God wants we will do.

Then Moses made this great sacrifice and he took some of the blood from the animals he sacrifice, and Exodus 24:8 says, “sprinkled it on the people, saying, ‘Behold the blood of the covenant, which the Lord has made with you in accordance with all these words.”  The sprinkling of the blood was a symbolic sealing of the covenant, it symbolized the sealing of their unique relationship with God as the people of God and likewise, quoting John MacArthur actually, “in the New Covenant, faith in the shedding of Christ’s blood on the cross not only activates God’s promise of perfect satisfaction for sin but also brings the believer into a new relationship with God Himself, a covenant relationship.”

In other words, God has chosen us for Himself from before the beginning of the world, set us apart through the work of the Spirit, in order that we might become part of a new community of people marked by a lifestyle of obedience to Him; which I think should change our perspective on our lives in this world quite a bit.

We are very different from the world in which we live.

We are strangers.

Rejected by men.

But that does not mean God has rejected us.

In fact, just the opposite.

We are rejected by men because we have been selected by God.

We have not been forgotten.

We have not been abandoned.

We are not on our own. 

God’s attitude towards those who put their faith in Jesus Christ could not be more certain. 

He has chosen us.

The Father planned out our salvation in eternity past.

The Spirit activated our salvation at some point in the course of our lives.

And Jesus has accomplished our salvation through His death on our behalf, enabling us to enter into a peaceful relationship with God marked by a lifestyle of radical obedience.