"The Meaning of History"
1 Peter 1:10-12
May 17, 1998

v.10 "prophets" certainly the OT prophets and especially those who wrote of the future, as most of them did to some degree. But the term extends to the entire Scripture and its doctrine of the future. David is called a prophet in the NT and the psalms are cited as containing prophecy. So does the law of Moses. Really, "the prophets" would include the entire written Scripture.

v.11 The NT never hesitates to speak of Christ as already active in the OT, that is, of God the Son being the person of the Godhead with which Israel had chiefly to do in her history and in salvation. It is even willing to speak of God the Son in his pre-incarnate activity, before he became a man and entered the world, as "Jesus" or "Christ," the names he would have later as a man. The NT reminds us that it was God the Son the Lord Christ who delivered his people from bondage in Egypt, gave the law at Sinai, who provided for Israel in the wilderness, whose glory Isaiah saw in the temple, etc. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever!

"sufferings...and glories to follow" One of the most interesting features of OT prophecy is just its tendency to see the future in one large vision and not, necessarily, to see the sequence of events as taking as much time as it eventually did. (The illustration of the mountain ranges: one sees the successive peaks but not the valleys in between or the true width of those valleys.)

v.12 It sounds as though Peter did not evangelize this people; others did.

This is an extraordinarily interesting and important text. In some ways, it is especially a text for our times. I wish, in a way, that all of you might have first read books like Neil Postman's Technopoly and, much more, David Wells' trilogy No Place for Truth, God in the Wasteland, and Losing our Virtue, all of which explore, in different ways, the way modern people have come to think about life and about their lives. All these books, and others, demonstrate the way in which our culture's view of life, of the meaning of individual existence, and of the self has been profoundly altered by the loss of two things: an abiding sense of the essentially moral character of life and of the loss of a sense of life as part of a larger story, a transcendent history. They do not see their lives, modern people in general, as part of the history of the world that has moral meaning and is proceeding to a definite conclusion and fulfillment in a day of divine judgment of human lives.

Nowadays, for the generality of people, and, as David Wells argues, for all too many Christians, the moral cast and character of life has faded, grown dim. It has been replaced by a therapeutic view of life that looks not first for what is right and wrong, does not base its understanding of life first and foremost on the existence of a divine lawgiver, a holy judge, who will call all men to account for their deeds. In this new view, one thinks rather of what is helpful to a people in the present, what will enable them to think better of themselves, to enjoy their lives more, to fulfill themselves in those ways that are most popular in our time. Even in the church the prospect of divine judgment does not loom over God's people in any persuasive way and people do not speak of or think about "fearing the Lord" in the way in which the Bible describes that fear as an essential component of true holiness of life and a living faith in Christ. Christians still believe in God and pray to him and trust him and love him, but the God they have in mind is much less the transcendent and holy other God of the Scriptures, the God who will by no means clear the guilty, the God who is prepared to judge the world and condemn those still in their sins, the God whom no man has seen or can see. He is much more, in our day, the immanent and kindly God, what these writers do not hesitate to call "the therapeutic god." As such his holiness and the prospect of his judgment no longer loom over life and determine its meaning for people.

They still believe in salvation of a sort, but it is a secular salvation, and its priests are the various experts who tell us in one way or another how to be happy, healthy, and prosperous and the advertisers who teach us what it takes to live the good life.

What is more, the present is so powerful in our day that it virtually overwhelms us. We live, in an unprecedented way, under the tyranny of the present and of the visible. We bring it into our homes via the television or the internet. We live amid noise, from the radio or television, at home, at work, in the car. We have news constantly of events everywhere, both small and great. We are bombarded by messages every day from advertisers. We think of our lives, without even realizing what we are doing, in terms of today's sports events, today's products, today's celebrities. We can, via TV and movies, actually share the experiences of other people, even fill up our lives with what other people are doing and feeling. We have music playing all the time to distract our thoughts. We are so consumed with the present, with the moment, that there is very little time and still less reason to think about the connection of our lives with anything larger, more transcendent than this particular moment as it hurtles by.

The costs of these losses have been very steep and are likely to get steeper. Anyone can see that. The culture and its institutions are sick and dying. You don't have to be a Christian to see that. But, you have to be a Christian to see the true character of this loss, the falsehood of this life we are living and our culture around us, how inauthentic it is, and how bound to lead to ruin.

And Peter tells us why in these three verses. He makes two points and each of them is a fundamental repudiation of our culture's philosophy of life and human existence, or, as we might put it, each of them is a complete rejection of our culture's understanding of the meaning of history.

What was it that the prophets, those who spoke for God and who communicated the truth of God to the world, what was it that they sought to know? What for them held the key to everything else? "The sufferings of Christ and the glories that would follow."

Now we know what the "sufferings" are. Peter is speaking of the humiliation of Jesus Christ, his rejection by his own people, the hatred and opposition he faced, but still, much more, all that he suffered when he bore in his own body the punishment of the sins of his people, culminating as those punishments did on the cross and his abandonment by his Father in heaven. "By his stripes we are healed."

But what are the glories? We might have thought first of the Lord's resurrection from the dead on the third day and then of his ascension to the Right Hand. No doubt Peter would say he did not mean to exclude those wonderful things. But, it is clear in the letter that he is thinking especially of the Lord's future return in triumph to this world, to the second-coming. He mentions this specifically in v. 13, he speaks of it again in 4:13 in a statement like the one we have here in 1:11, and, in fact, the entire letter is shot through with the Christian's hope of eventual glory when Christ comes again.

It may be, as I said earlier, that the OT prophets did not know how much time would separate the Lord's sufferings from the full manifestation of his glory in the world, but they saw the future in these terms, and these terms only: the sufferings of Christ and the glories that would follow. That is the meaning of history! Indeed, in the similar statement in 4:13, Peter makes the history of Christ the pattern for the history of every Christian: "rejoice that you participate in the sufferings of Christ, so that you may be overjoyed when his glory is revealed." This is the scheme of history, this is where it is going, where everything is headed -- the revelation of the glory of Jesus Christ, and what makes that so infinitely significant is the fact that Christ already visited this world once before and when he was here, the Son of God suffered for the sins of the world.

Nothing compares to this. Not the present that more and more overwhelms us every day of our lives, not the vast changes that are shifting the ground under the feet of people today, not the developments in technology, not the comings and goings, risings and fallings of celebrities that we hear about every day or the fortunes of our sports heros or the performance of the stock market or our own individual company. All of that comes and goes and, in very truth, doesn't matter a tinker's dam in the larger scheme of things.

Not even the rise and fall of nations. The Soviet Union has come and gone. Well, empires have risen and fallen before and they will rise and fall again, and the meaning of human history will be the same after as it was before. History will still be making its inexorable march to one endpoint, an endpoint which is what it has always been, the second coming of Jesus Christ and the revelation of his divine glory to mankind.

I am reading Paul Johnson's highly interesting new book, A History of the American People. Now I find Paul Johnson, by and large, a most interesting and informative writer. I often find myself agreeing with him when he disagrees with the consensus of opinion as he often does. Johnson is even a Christian of some kind, a Roman Catholic who takes his faith with some seriousness, though I have often been disappointed by his theological outlook given the fact that he represents himself as a Christian. Still, his is one of the freshest and most worthwhile voices speaking about and to our culture today.

But I almost gagged on the opening sentences of his new history of the United States.

"The creation of the United States of America is the greatest of all human adventures. No other national story holds such tremendous lessons, for the American people themselves and for the rest of mankind. It now spans four centuries and, as we enter the new millennium, we need to retell it, for if we can learn these lessons and build upon them, the whole of humanity will benefit in the new age which is now opening." [p. 3]

He speaks of us Americans, "thrown together by fate in that swirling maelstrom of history" as "the most remarkable people the world has ever seen."

Well, I doubt that. I can think of others more remarkable by far: the Jews and the Christians, e.g. And here at the end of the 20th century, when even Americans themselves are beginning to suspect that their great experiment is coming to ruin, when our institutions seem no longer capable to cope with our collapsing civilization, and when our chief exports to the rest of the world are the poisons of our popular culture -- our movies, TV shows, our fastfood, our chic clothing, our sexual ethics, our naked materialism and naturalism -- it takes a great deal of faith to believe that the world of the 21st century is going to be a more happy, fruitful, and civil century because of what the United States will contribute to it.

America is but one more moment in the history of mankind, one more political development that has waxed and now begins to wane and, if the Lord tarries, if he does not return for centuries yet, there will be many more such cycles as before. And so the world turns.

This nation, these political developments, are not the meaning of history nor are they in any sense the answer to the questions of history. Those lie in a completely different realm: the sufferings of Christ years ago and his return to earth in glory sometime in the future. Everything else is meaningful only in relation to these things and to him. Nothing else can save a man, nothing else can give his life meaning, nothing else can grant him hope of something beyond death, nothing else can even give meaning to the march of events in the world. But, what is more, it is Christ and his history that is of central interest to God himself.

We are always concentrating on things that are of secondary importance to God and neglecting the very things that are the great purpose for which God made the world and gave each of us life.

He has determined that everything, that all things be from Christ and to Christ and for Christ. Nothing has any meaning whatever except in relation to him, nothing will last that is not rooted in him, and nothing will be considered good by God that is not in the service of Christ's name.

Therefore, the only wise man or woman is the one who thinks about all that he sees and all that she hears and all that they do in terms of the sufferings of Christ and the glories that will follow in due time. This world and all that is in it is passing away. But the word of the Lord endures forever. How this word rebukes me! And does it not do the same to you?

O, Christian, how little we think of the only things that matter: what Christ has done and what he will do. How little we live our lives strictly and gladly in terms of those two great historical points: his sufferings and his future glory! What does this mean in view of the cross of Jesus Christ? What should I think about this or do about that in view of the coming revelation of the glory of Christ? But, don't you see, we waste every moment of our time, throw it away on nothing, that is not spent with our eyes open to those two events, which are the meaning and explanation and purpose of everything! Absolutely everything! I must hurry on.

The reason there is such a thing as a human being, made in the image of God, is because there is such a thing as salvation and eternal life. The fact that there is and that there is, conversely, the possibility of missing this salvation and falling under divine judgment instead, is the whole significance of existence, of the life of the world, of the march of human events (as Peter will say explicitly in 2 Peter 3), and of the life of every individual human being.

This too is a conviction, a point-of-view that, however dim before, has virtually disappeared from public view in our culture. That the world exists as the venue for the great story of personal salvation, that everything takes its importance from the role it plays in the moral history of human beings is a philosophy of life and culture now wholly alien to the mind of modern man, however clearly it is the viewpoint of Holy Scripture.

What gives man his surpassing value is precisely that he is the object of the moral interest of the living God. "Look at the birds of the air...are you not of much more value than they?" Jesus asked. Why is man so much more valuable? Because he is made for the knowledge of God and for eternal life, and because his life is measured in the scales of the divine justice.

What else did Jesus mean when he said, "For what does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? For what can a man give in return for his soul?" (Mark 8:36-37) Our culture no longer really pays any attention to the reality which that statement alone is meaningful: the fundamentally moral nature of human life, lived as it is in the presence and before the view of a Holy God who is our Maker, the reality of man in actual relationship with this God, of a coming judgment, of eternity in heaven or hell, bliss or damnation. It no longer sees human beings as set apart by the supernatural element within them, the eternal soul, that every human being has whatever his or her condition of life.

The Marxists in our own day would have gladly sacrificed, and did in fact sacrifice, millions of lives to gain the whole world. In the West we have sacrificed millions of unborn children, we have sold our souls in the pursuit of personal peace and affluence, all because it is no longer credible to this culture that people should view their existence in terms of the salvation of God and the promise of eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. But God has spoken. Human beings are eternal beings, beings made for relationship with God, beings to be judged and to be treated forever in terms of their loving God and trusting God and walking with God or their unbelief in God and rebellion against him.

Salvation is the great thing, really, it is the only thing. Everything else, when put beside it -- health, wealth, happiness, success -- is a trifle.

And the proof of that, Peter says, is that angels themselves think so. That is an interesting word that Peter uses in v. 12, the last sentence. "Even angels long to look into these things." It is the same word we find in the Gospel accounts of the resurrection. People came to the garden that Easter morning and stooped down to peer into the empty tomb. That is the idea, the image, here. Angels peering down with studied gaze, longing to know more of this great salvation. There was no salvation for them. The angels that fell were damned. Those that did not were established forever in fellowship with God. That was all. But, for men and women -- in so many ways lower beings than the mighty angels -- there is this divine love and grace and mercy; there is this titanic achievement on the part of Jesus Christ to remove their guilt and sin; there is the present work of the Holy Spirit, and there is the promise of a stupendous consummation of salvation when Jesus comes again, apparently an event the angels don't know much more about than we do. This is utterly captivating to them.

Oh, angels know about nations, they have to do with their rise and fall. We read that in Daniel! They know about the rise and fall of political fortunes -- from Persia to the present day -- they know about the life of the world. But, salvation, this is what takes their breath away! This is what the most powerful beings in the universe, short of God himself, think about and speak about to one another.

Hollywood imagines that angelic beings would be taken up with what Hollywood is taken up with: romance, sensual pleasures, perhaps doing good deeds to people in crises to make them happy again. But all of this is small potatoes to the angels that actually exist. It is salvation, eternal peace with God that moves and stirs the angels in heaven. In Wesley's lines:

Angels in fix'd amazement
Around our altars hover,
with eager gaze
adore the grace
Of our eternal Lover.

Well, but you might ask: how can I concentrate my attention on that salvation and on the sufferings of Christ and the future glories; how can we keep our focus on that, in the midst of all our culture forces upon us every day -- the last episode of Seinfeld, the death of Frank Sinatra, TV shows, sports, politics, the economy, ads without number, articles, shopping, and what is going on at school and at work?

The answer is, of course, you can't. You cannot harmonize modern culture and a Christian view of life. You cannot be of this world and also live a faithful Christian life.

It used to be said, "When vice prevails...the post of honor is a private station." But, it could just as well be said, that when a culture has built itself and its way of life on unbelief, it is the Christian's calling, his summons, her duty to be an outsider! Christians must more and more reject what is customary -- in the way they spend their time and money, the importance they attach to things, the way they entertain themselves, the way they think about and use technology, the way they relate to other people, the way they live their lives in every way. You cannot fear God and live as this culture lives which does not fear him and has made not fearing God the principle of its daily life. You cannot work out your salvation in fear and trembling as the one great thing you have to do in life and at the same time remain at peace with and following the lead of a culture that has been constructed on the denial that there is such a thing as an eternal salvation, purchased at terrible cost, to which men and women are summoned, or such a thing as eternal damnation which awaits those who ignore the offered mercy and repudiate God's rule over their lives. You must be very different!

At point after point every day, whether it is your use of your computer, or your reading of an ad, or your decision about a TV show, or the importance you attach to a news story, or the way in which you relate to a neighbor, or your own children, or the choice you make about how to spend your time or money, or the way you think about the problems you face or your hopes for the future -- it comes down to this: everything is meaningful, everything is important only in its relation to the sufferings of Christ and the glories to follow; nothing can be good or right accept in its relation to the salvation that God offers the world in Jesus Christ, that salvation the angels think is the truly extraordinary thing about human existence. What a perfect week as a prelude to this text and sermon. First, the immense attention devoted to the last episode of the Seinfeld Show and then the shift to Frank Sinatra. In the case of the TV show, all this excitement over nothing, literally nothing, in the scheme of things. All this attention while God and salvation are utterly ignored. And then Frank Sinatra, whose life was lived in defiance of the holiness of God. A life that missed the only thing that matters. What of a looming damnation -- not a word -- for a single word of that would make "I did it my way" stomach turning tragedy!

You cannot attach a Christian understanding of life and human history to this culture's life. You must stand apart. Absolutely. You must, though in this world, not be of it, defiantly and determinedly not of it! I tell you, it is your calling and your only hope. You cannot be right or safe if you are longing to look more closely at Seinfeld while the angels of God are longing to see more of God's salvation. This world and all that is in it is passing away and all will be lost forever that is built upon and invested in the hopes of this world. It is the glory to come and the salvation of God, that is the true and only meaning of things. God has spoken. "Let God be true and every man a liar."