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First in a Series on
Peter Today we begin a new series of Lord's Day morning sermons. I have never preached through First Peter before and am looking forward to it. It is good for us, from time to time, to take such shorter summary statements of Christian belief and Christian life as we have in a letter like First Peter. It puts the whole before us in a nutshell and reminds us of the connection that must exist between our faith and our life, our doctrine and our behavior as Christians. And that is what we have here in this short letter. In this way, it is very much like Paul's letters. In Paul you typically find an account of God's grace and saving work first. That is then followed by a description of the Christian life. The two sections of his letters are then connected by a "therefore." That is, because God has been so gracious to us, because he has accomplished our salvation in this way through Jesus Christ, therefore we ought to live in this manner. You have that in Romans. After eleven chapters of the Bible's most complete exposition of God's work of salvation for and in us, chapter 12 begins: "Therefore, I urge you, in view of God's mercy, to present your bodies living sacrifices, holy and acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service." You have the same in Ephesians. After three wonderful chapters on the way of salvation and God's grace toward sinners, Paul begins his exposition of the Christian life with the words, "I urge you therefore to walk worthy of the grace you have received." And then he proceeds to tell us what "walking worthy" of that divine grace amounts to. You have the same thing in Colossians. After two chapters on the saving grace of God, we read in 3:1, "Since, therefore, you have been raised with Christ, set your minds on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God." At other places in his letters Paul follows the same order. Theology first, then ethics built upon and flowing from that theology. The Christian life is a life from salvation, not to salvation. Christians live as they do, not in order to be saved but because they have been saved. This is absolutely critical, fundamental to any right understanding of our faith. If you attend a course in the philosophy of religion in almost any American university today, you will be taught that all religions, at bottom, are the same, or, at least, express a similar principle, a quest for God and salvation or whatever. And that is true, if you exclude biblical Christianity from consideration! All the other religions are, in fact, various expressions of the same religious impulse. All of them teach, all of them exist to teach this one thing: do this and you shall be saved. They will define "this" differently -- the Hindu will bathe in the Ganges, the Muslim will observe "the five pillars" especially his five-times-a-day prayer, the modern Jew, if he is orthodox will observe dietary and ritual laws, the worship of the synagogue, if he is an American liberal Jew he will try to be nice to people and give to charity -- and so on. And, they will define salvation differently, exactly what reward God will give you for your faithful observance of requirements -- the Muslim will describe a very earthly paradise in which you will live in the future, the Hindu will speak of Nirvana as the absorption into the nothingness at the heart of the universe. But, all of them are telling you this same thing -- do this and you will be saved. Not so Christianity. Its message is utterly different. It does not ask you to earn your salvation by pious works. It tells you plainly that you cannot, that your situation is hopeless insofar as it depends on you. You are guilty, comprehensively guilty of all manner of sins against a holy God who will not, who cannot clear the guilty, whose eyes are too pure to behold the iniquity of which your life is full. No, what must be done, you cannot do. But, what you cannot do, God has himself done, sending his Son in the flesh to live for you the life you should have lived and did not, and to suffer and die for you the death you deserved to die. All of this Christ did in your place, on your behalf, and what he did for you, he can impart to you, the righteousness he performed can become your righteousness, the payment he made for sins can be applied to your guilt. Receive the gift he stands ready to give you. And then live as someone will who loves God for loving him when he was God's enemy and who is grateful for God's grace and mercy. Live as someone will who wants to please the one who saved him from sin and death at such great cost to himself. If you love me, Jesus said, you will keep my commandments. And, as John writes, "We love him because he first loved us." That is Christianity! Well, it is the same here in Peter. You will see the same order in the very first chapter. Peter begins his letter with an account of salvation by grace through Christ. He praises God for so great a salvation in vv. 3ff. He is still talking about God's salvation in v. 10. Its greatness and mystery are such that even angels long to peer into such things. (Hollywood thinks it is reasonable to suppose that an angel would really prefer to become a human being so that he could marry Meg Ryan, because Hollywood cannot imagine that an angel would find true fulfillment with nothing else to do but to love, worship, and serve God, or that an angel would find unending satisfaction and pleasure in admiring God's work of grace and mercy in us benighted and rebellious human beings.) But, so great is God's salvation that real angels find it mesmerizing. But, then, notice v. 13. "Therefore, prepare your minds for action..." and Peter begins to describe the life that is a worthy response to so great a salvation. Unlike Paul, he does not so much divide his argument into two parts as weave the two parts together throughout his letter. You get more theology in vv. 23-25 followed by another "Therefore" in 3:1. And so on. We all tend to one extreme or another, to one pole or the other. Some of us are theorists, others are practical; some of us thrive on doctrinal reading and discussion, we want to know the right interpretation of the Bible's teaching on various themes while others of us are far more interested in the practical questions of daily living. J.I. Packer begins his famous and splendid book Knowing God in this way.
Well, the Bible, by and large, is a book for travelers, not for 'balconeers.' It rarely interests itself in purely theoretical problems, but is intensely interested in the practical problems faced by those who must navigate the waters of this world and come successfully safe ashore in heaven. It is little interested, for example, in the theoretical problem of evil -- how evil can exist in God's world -- but it is deeply interested in helping God's people think rightly and well about the evil they themselves face, the evil they suffer, and about their own response to evil as they encounter it. Those are much more practical problems and questions. But, you see, those practical issues are all, first, issues of belief, of doctrine. One must first believe rightly and think rightly before one can live and choose rightly. The mind is first in the Bible. For example, to respond to evil in the world in a wise and godly way, one must apply what one knows about God's sovereignty and goodness, about sin, about the Devil, about the purposes of trials and tribulations in the counsel of God, and so on. And so in First Peter as elsewhere in the Bible we find a mix of doctrine and practice and a definite relationship between the two, the doctrine laid down as the foundation of the practice and the practice drawn out of the doctrine by applying it to the questions of daily life. And why not? Peter was himself a traveler. I don't suppose there is a major figure in New Testament history that ordinary believers such as you and I find so accessible, so easy to know and relate to as Peter. We know more about him, certainly more about his personality and personal history, than about anyone else in the New Testament, including Paul. And we know those very kinds of things that make us gravitate to the man. We know that Paul, for example, continued to be a sinner after he became a Christian, an inveterate sinner, who did what he ought not to have done and did not do what he should have done. We know this because Paul tells us and does so in the most moving and convincing way in Romans 7. But, apart from one rather curious instance, we never see Paul sin; we don't observe the failures over which he mourns so in Romans 7. We never see him lose his temper, or shoot off his mouth, or shrink from some danger, or clamor for public attention. But we see this in Peter. We even see it in Mark's Gospel which is really Peter's Gospel, Mark writing it under Peter's authority. Peter is like Luther's artist friend, Albert Durer, who put his own head and face on his famous portrait of the Prodigal Son. He is like those Christian men and women through the ages who have told the painters of their portraits to paint them as they really are, warts and all. We see Peter always at the front of the band of disciples, speaking first, even when he should have had the sense to keep his mouth shut. We see him getting into trouble time and again with his words -- as when he blurted out his opinion on the Mountain of the Transfiguration and was as much as told to shut up by God himself, speaking from the cloud. And then, after the Lord had spoken about the difficulty of salvation, how it is harder than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, Peter had the audacity to say, and apparently to mean, "Lord, We have left everything to follow you! What then will there be for us? Or, in other words, "We've made this big sacrifice; what's in it for us?" [Matt. 19:27] And then we see him in his terrible fall, first boldly and proudly proclaiming before the entire room, the night of the last supper, his invincible loyalty to the Lord Jesus and then, that same night, denying the Lord publicly three times for fear of some indefinite and uncertain danger he feared he might face if he were identified as Christ's disciple. Imagine Peter facing that group of disciples, his friends, afterward. How ridiculous and pathetic his former boast must have seemed to him then. But that is not all. We might well suppose that the resurrection and Pentecost afterward, and Peter's deliverance from prison with the aid of an angel, would have destroyed his cowardice never to surface again. But Peter was no John Knox. He was a man who never got over fearing the face of man. And later, in Antioch, he threw the progress of the gospel into terrible jeopardy by failing to stand up for the freedom of the Gentiles which God himself had explicitly taught him and which he himself had taught to the rest of the church! The possible criticism of one party of Christians had him cowed. How much like Peter we all are. How hard won our victories, how easily hard-won ground is lost again. But, then, there is the other side of Peter: the humility, the heroism, the nobility of spirit that jostles in his character with all of that frailty and foolishness and cowardice. It was Peter who first came out into the clear at Caesarea Philippi and, before and in front of his comrades, declared that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of the Living God. It was Peter who at the miraculous catch of fish fell down at Jesus' feet and, with the truest and purest humility pled with the Lord, "Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man." When others who had followed the Lord were deserting him after his controversial sermon on the "Bread of Life," it was Peter who spoke for the rest of the twelve, "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life." It was to Peter that the Lord spoke after his resurrection concerning the pastoral ministry of his church, surely indicating the way in which Peter had all along been and continued to be the first among equals in the Twelve. And so it was Peter whose great sermon on Pentecost Sunday was the opening salvo in Christianity's battle for the soul of the world. It was Peter, the loyal Jew, who, with open arms, welcomed Cornelius the Gentile (and Roman soldier to boot) into the Christian church and convinced others to do the same. And, one thing more about Peter. There are some touches, just touches mind you, that suggest that in many ways, Peter was an ordinary man. We know from a remark of the Apostle Paul in 1 Cor. 9 that Peter was married. Now most men in that day were married as most men are today. But, still, it humanizes Peter to us to think of him a married man, indeed, as a man, Paul tells us, who traveled with his wife when he went places in the service of the gospel. No so Paul, for example. We can hardly even think of Paul as married. Paul, for all his undoubted open-heartedness, for all his personal friendship, for all the colleagues that he brought beside himself into the ministry of the gospel, there is still a sense of being apart of solitariness with Paul, standing high above, the Christian titan, in splendid isolation. Not so Peter. And, then, there is that remark, that revealing, that winning, that so honest remark in 2 Peter 3:16 about there being in Paul's letters some things that are hard to understand. We cannot be certain of this, I suppose, but is it not the case that most readers of the New Testament, most of the readers who are familiar with Peter himself from the pages of the New Testament, naturally assume that Peter is including himself among the number of those who have had some difficulty understanding some things in the writings of that supremely powerful intellect we know as the Apostle Paul? Peter wasn't a scholar, he wasn't a rabbi as Paul was. He certainly wasn't the well-read philosopher that Paul was. He was a fisherman by trade. And even very powerful intellects have struggled with some expressions of the great Apostle to the Gentiles. There would be nothing surprising at all in Peter's having some difficulties as well. He's our kind of guy! This is one of the wonderful things about our faith. It is faith for real people, people like you and me who are always stubbing our toes, who are stumbling over the same stumbling stones we tripped over years ago. People who lie in bed at night weeping bitter tears over one more failure to live worthy of the grace they have received, and yet who are, nevertheless, living a genuine Christian life and serving God. We need Paul, we need a champion, a mind capable of jousting with and leaving dead in the field the enemies of the truth of God. But, we need Peter, also, to remind us how it is that God has chosen to build his kingdom with the likes of folk as ordinary, as unremarkable, as frail as we are. Peter was a Galilean and even the Jews in Jerusalem had difficulty believing he could be as influential as he became. We read in Acts 4:13 that it astonished them that such an unschooled and ordinary man could create such a stir. But they knew he had been with Jesus! No one ever said that about the Apostle Paul!
And when, as it were, God asked his beloved Son, to whom shall we give the honor and the task of proving this to the world and showing this to the world, the Lord Christ said, I'm sure with a smile, "Give it to the big fisherman!" He is my man for that! |
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