One of the features of Holy Scripture that no honest reader can fail to observe and note is its terrible seriousness. It is a book of almost unrelenting seriousness. It is a book with a happy side, to be sure. But even its joy is a serious joy. Even its message of peace and hope and love is never detached from this seriousness and solemnity that characterize every page. And, of course, it is serious because the living God who speaks in its pages has such serious things to say to mankind and to his people.

The Lord Jesus himself, was a man of almost unremitting seriousness. Efforts have been made through the years to find in the Four Gospels some evidence of the Lord's sense of humor, but there is really none to be found. I do not deny that the Lord had a sense of humor. I imagine that he had a wonderful and wonderfully pure sense of humor and that he was, in the ordinary sense, a man delightful to be around. He knew how to enjoy the good things that God gives. Indeed, he was accused by his enemies of being a drunk and a glutton. That at least indicates that the Lord was no ascetic. He knew how to appreciate good food and drink. But, there can be no doubt that the main characteristic of that face he turned to the world and even to his friends was seriousness, gravity, and solemnity. We hear of his weeping, we hear of his anger, we hear of his pleading with men in view of the coming judgment of God, but we never hear of him laughing about anything. A serious man is without question the picture the Gospels paint. I have heard some argue that certain of his sayings must have been delivered with a smile, such as the one about the camel going through the eye of a needle. But I'm sure not, because that saying was an illustration of how hard it is to be saved, something like what Peter is talking about here. And I can't imagine the Son of Man smiling as he talked about the camel going through the eye of a needle, for his remark was prompted by the rich young ruler who had asked him how to be saved, the young man the Gospels said that Jesus had compassion for, going away from him because he loved his money more than his soul.

And no wonder it is so hard to find evidence of the Lord's lightheartedness. The Lord Jesus came into the world to suffer and die. He was, from the beginning of his life, the "Man of Sorrows." When his public ministry began he was immediately condemned by the powerful among the people and he could see already what their opposition must mean for him at last. And, quite apart from all that, no one knew as clearly as he knew what the true issue of human life is and must be: salvation or damnation, peace with God or the wrath of God. Too much is at stake, too much was at stake in his life for him to be faithful and at the same time light-hearted, sentimental, unthinking, or superficial.

I remember some years ago Carl F.H. Henry interviewing Martin Lloyd-Jones for Christianity Today. Lloyd-Jones was the celebrated London preacher, perhaps the greatest Christian preacher of the 20th century. In that interview Henry asked Lloyd-Jones why, though everyone who knew him said that he had a wonderful sense of humor, it never surfaced in his preaching. Lloyd-Jones' answer was that he found that his situation as a man standing between human beings and their eternal destiny, as a man responsible to direct other men away from hell to heaven, simply too appalling for humor. Certainly it must have been very much more so for the Lord Jesus.

His apostles learned seriousness from him and then communicated it to his church for all time. Amongst all the characteristics that unite the various authors of the books of the New Testament, this holy seriousness stands out among the chief of them.

And, so it has been of all those who have learned their Christianity well from these books and these men. Whenever the church has been healthy and spiritually vigorous, she has been full of men and women who have taken their faith in Christ and their life of following him in deadly earnest.

Take, as just one example, the English Puritans, the Reformation party of the English Church in the 16th and 17th centuries. In many ways, doctrinal, liturgical, and spiritual, these men and women were our Christian ancestors. And characteristic of their lives as Christians was their seriousness about their faith, about the faith. They took the Bible seriously, because they believed it absolutely. And the result was that they were as earnest and as resolute and as indomitable in their faith as any Christians have been. And from that seriousness came their great influence on the church and the world of their day.

They believed absolutely in the transitoriness of life, its brevity and uncertainty. They believed that, in comparison with other things, nothing mattered much at all besides salvation. They saw this life as "the gymnasium and dressing-room" where men and women are prepared for heaven or, contrarily, where they lose their souls forever. And to be sure, perhaps in some ways, it was easier for them to be as serious about life and about faith in Christ than it is for us.

They were systematically persecuted for their faith -- as were these Christians to whom Peter is writing -- and we are not. Life itself was much more painful, uncertain, and full of sorrow for them than it is for the majority of us. What we take for granted as the comforts of life were largely unknown to them. Medicine and surgery were rudimentary at best, often doing more harm than good. They had no aspirin for the headaches they got just as often as we get them, no sleeping pills, no anti-depressants. They had no social security or life insurance in a day when more than half the adult population died young and when well more than half of children died in infancy. Infectious diseases were common and deadly, they lived with pain to an extent we have no experience of whatsoever. In other words, they consciously lived on the edge of death and eternity in a way that we do not. They reckoned with the meaning of life, its brevity, its uncertainty, and the absolute necessity of being ready to die and face God in a way that we do not. [Packer, Quest for Godliness, 13-14]

Now for all of this they have been characterized and demonized in subsequent history as fanatics, as dour, humorless, depressingly solemn folk who made life a misery for themselves and everyone around them. That prejudice still exists in some uneducated quarters, akin to the idea that people in Columbus' day thought the world was flat. But even unsympathetic historians have been forced to admit that the evidence is otherwise. They were, for all this seriousness, a happy people with a zest for life who loved games of various kinds and prized the fellowship of friends. Far from immobilizing them, their seriousness made of them wise parents, loving spouses, and industrious and prosperous workers. So we are not speaking about a personality trait, as if we were recommending for your imitation people who were dour and gloomy. We mean something very different and very much more important.

As in the New Testament, the seriousness of their Christian faith was not in any way a destructive or harmful thing, it was a life-giving and wholesome thing. Peter, after all, has already in his letter twice spoken of the inexpressible joy that characterizes the true Christian life. So it was for the Puritans and so it has been for all Christians in times of spiritual health and prosperity. For, this seriousness is nothing other than a willingness, a readiness, a determination to take the teaching of God's Word at face value and live accordingly! You cannot believe the Bible to be true, its teaching to be the truth about life and death, its promises and its warnings to be the very Word of God itself, and not take life seriously and your own life especially. No, I will say this plainly, the first thing the Bible does is to make a person take a serious view of life.

You cannot really believe and then daily think about the fact that people around you are estranged from God and liable to suffer his wrath and judgment and take a light-hearted and superficial view of life (the narrow gate and way…). You cannot believe what the Bible says about the divine majesty and holiness and then think it is a small thing to know this living and almighty God or a small thing to know that he cares how you live before him. You cannot learn from the Bible the ugliness and offensiveness of sin in God's sight and then live unconcerned with the amount of sin that still remains in your life and your heart each day. You cannot consider the fact that we must all stand before the judgment seat of Christ to give an account of our lives and take a cavalier approach to living. And you cannot behold the Lord Jesus himself, suffering so terribly for the salvation of his people, and then think that love and that salvation something to take for granted, something that does not require anything very special of you in return.

Take Peter here, my brothers and sisters. He speaks here of "the difficulty of salvation." That used to be a doctrine that ministers preached about. But no so much in our effeminate and superficial and pleasure-oriented age. Ministers will tell a modern congregation how Christ can make you happy; few will add that following him is going to prove a costly and very difficult thing. And those who are already in the church are much more likely today to hear of the advantages of being a Christian than they are to be warned to respond to the inevitable suffering in a proper way because judgment begins with the family of God. As Martin Marty, the Lutheran historian of American Christianity and American religious trends, wrote in 1985, "Hell has disappeared and no one noticed." [Cited in Peterson, Hell on Trial, 239]

But that is Peter's point here. The reality of divine judgment must alter one's perspective root and branch. There must be, for Christians, a preparatory cleansing to test them and to make them ready for the great judgment at the end of the world. Christians must suffer now so that they will not suffer then. Because it is by this suffering that their faith is not only tested -- as he said in v. 12 -- but strengthened and purified.

Paul says a very similar thing in 1 Corinthians 11:31-32:

"When we are judged by the Lord, we are being disciplined so that we will not be condemned with the world."

We know how that works. It is by sufferings of various kinds that sin's grip and this world's grip upon our hearts is broken; it is by circumstances in which we must hold fast to the Lord by faith in his Word even when the evidence of our eyes may seem to be against our faith that our faith is strengthened and made fast and firm; it is by standing for the Lord in the face of opposition, even the threat of some loss or punishment, that our faith is proved genuine -- to ourselves as well as to others, the kind of faith that then will not waver when further difficulties come.

It is in this sense that Peter says that it is hard for the righteous to be saved. And he is simply reiterating what we read many times in the Bible. Anyone who would live a godly life in this world will suffer persecution, Paul says. In another place, through many afflictions it is necessary to enter the kingdom of God. In another place, we are counted as sheep to be slaughtered. And so on.

There is no starry-eyed optimism here. Nothing of the health and wealth preachers; not even the almost exclusive concentration on the happy side of the faith that we get so regularly in American Christianity. No, what we get here in Peter is a perspective shaped by and dominated by the real prospect of divine judgment and the real prospect of being condemned in that judgment. That changes everything! What Peter is saying is that no wonder God is so hard on the church, his people, if what he is protecting them from is hell. No wonder he batters them as he does, if it is precisely to protect them from a false faith, a sentimental and irreal faith that will not stand up to the test of the judgment day. No wonder that Christians should have to suffer now in order to ensure that they do not suffer far more terribly in the world to come. Christians are better off than they appear when they suffer, for this suffering is trying and testing and purifying them so that they will stand in the judgment. And if Christians must be treated so sternly, what will become of the ungodly and the sinner?

This was exactly the perspective that dominated our Savior's teaching about the judgment day. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God! How much better to have your faith tested now and proved true, than to have it tested and proved false when it is too late to do anything about it!

And it must be suffering. Nothing else will bring the issues home. After all, it is a most remarkable thing, very much worth our consideration, that so few people take the prospect of divine judgment seriously. Still today, in our secular and superficial age, a majority of people still believe in hell. A recent Hollywood movie, a new age piece entitled "What dreams may come", I was interested to read had both heaven and hell in the future of the human race, however sentimentally and unbiblically these prospects were portrayed. But hardly anyone takes the prospect of the future world seriously, though almost everyone in our culture still believes in some form of heaven. Why, for goodness sake? Why would someone discount the seriousness of hell, why would the majority of people pay so little attention to divine wrath, when there is so much hell all around us all the time in our world. Can anyone look around this world and say that God has not given us more than enough intimations of his judgment and his wrath -- war, famine, natural disaster, cruelty, alienation, disappointment, despair, death, loss, frustration of every kind? And on top of all that, the uneasy conscience that plagues us all, the knowledge we have of our own failure to live a good life, to meet the standards we expect of others. And our sense, inescapable sense, that there should be judgment and punishment for others, even if not for ourselves.

But mankind, in his unbelief, in his refusal to credit the Word of God, in his determination not to give God, his Maker, his due, ignores the evidence of his own eyes and goes through life as if there were no reason whatsoever to worry about the wrath and the judgment of God. He devotes his worries to other things, temporal things.

On the 22nd of October, 1939, C.S. Lewis lectured to a large group of Oxford undergraduates. The war had begun. And remember, these were people for whom the horrors of the First World War were still fresh in everyone's mind. Everyone was distressed; terrified of what lay ahead. Because Lewis was an ex-soldier, a university professor, and a Christian, it was thought that he would have something useful, helpful to say. And so he began.

"A university is a society for the pursuit of learning. As students you will be expected to make yourselves...into philosophers, scientists, scholars, critics, or historians. And at first sight this seems to be an odd thing to do during a great war. What is the use of beginning a task which we have so little chance of finishing? Or, even if we ourselves should happen not to be interrupted by death or military service, why should we -- indeed how can we -- continue to take an interest in these placid occupations when the lives of our friends and the liberties of Europe are in the balance? Is it not like fiddling while Rome burns?

Well, those were obvious questions. But Lewis went on.

"Now it seems to me that we shall not be able to answer these questions until we have put them by the side of certain other questions which every Christian ought to have asked himself in peacetime. I spoke just now of fiddling while Rome burns. But to a Christian the true tragedy of Nero must be not that he fiddled while the city was on fire but that he fiddled on the brink of hell. You must forgive me for the crude monosyllable. I know that many...Christians...these days do not like to mention ...hell even in a pulpit. I know, too, that nearly all the references to this subject in the New Testament come from a single source. But then the source is Our Lord Himself....These overwhelming doctrines.... are not really removable from the teaching of Christ or of His Church. If we do not believe them, our presence in this church is great tomfoolery. If we do, we must sometime overcome our spiritual prudery and mention them.

"The moment we do so we can see that every Christian who comes to a university must at all times face a question compared with which the questions raised by the war are relatively unimportant. He must ask himself how it is right, or even psychologically possible, for creatures who are every moment advancing either to Heaven or to Hell to spend any fraction of the little time allowed them in this world on such comparative trivialities as literature or art, mathematics, or biology. If human culture can stand up to that, it can stand up to anything. To admit that we can retain our interest in learning under the shadow of these eternal issues but not under the shadow of a European war would be to admit that our ears are closed to the voice of reason and very wide open to the voice of our nerves and our mass emotions.

"For that reason I think it important to try to see the present calamity in a true perspective. The war creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself."

You see the point. The prospect of divine judgment changes everything, fundamentally alters one's perspective on life, gives a new and true meaning to everything else in one's life, renders certain things important other things trivial, certain things understandable and bearable that otherwise would terribly darken life. That is Peter's point. Suffering is one thing if it is being used by God to purify and temper one's faith so that one will escape the wrath to come. Suffering is another thing altogether if it is simply the foretaste of worse to come.

That is Peter's point here. You may, as a Christian, have to suffer. Indeed, you will have to suffer. But it is for a reason so mighty as to make that suffering not only bearable, but something that no Christian would want to be without, for fear his faith, untested and untried, may prove itself false and worthless on the Judgment Day.

Samuel Rutherford once wrote to Lady Kenmure, one of his favorite correspondents:

"I thought it had been an easy thing to be a Christian, and that to seek God had been at the next door; but, oh, the windings, the turnings, the ups and downs He hath led me through."

But, this is the same Rutherford who also said that when he was finally in heaven, safely there, all danger past, he would think then of his life, with all the suffering and all the death that he had to experience,

"It were a well-spent journey though seven deaths lay between."

Amy Carmichael brings together the two strands of Peter's argument we have been considering over these past two Lord's Days:our sufferings being a participation in Christ's sufferings for us and our salvation on the one hand, and, on the other, our sufferings testing and purifying our faith to make it strong to carry us all the way to heaven.

From subtle love of softening things,
From easy choices, weakenings,
Not thus are spirits fortified,
Not this way went the Crucified,
From all that dims thy Calvary,
O Lamb of God, deliver me.

"Rejoice that you participate in the sufferings of Christ so that you may be overjoyed when his glory is revealed."