Series Introduction

Today, we’re starting a series on 1 Peter. I haven’t studied it closely before. I find it difficult, although I’ve often found the books that don’t seem all that helpful on the surface have lots of useful wisdom, if you’re willing to put in some effort to really dig in.  So, over the coming weeks, I’ll be digging into 1 Peter, and I hope you’ll join me.

Let’s start with a quick overview. Simon Peter, who led Jesus’ apostles, wrote this letter. He wrote to“God’s chosen exiles in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia” (1 Peter 1:1). These places were Roman provinces in what is now Turkey. Because Peter calls them ‘exiles,’ early readers thought he was writing mainly to Jewish people. Today, most scholars think Peter uses Israel as a symbol for all of God’s people, And that he’s writing to groups that include both Jewish and Gentile Christians.

One of the main themes in 1 Peter is persecution. Peter wants believers to see their struggles not as a sign that God has abandoned them, but as part of their salvation. He doesn’t say exactly what kind of persecution they’re facing. It could be persecution by the Roman Imperial authorities. After Nero scapegoated Christians for a fire in Rome in AD 64, persecuting Christians became policy. Or it might be local problems, like when a city had a flood or drought and blamed Christians who snubbed the local gods, which sometimes led to violence. Either way, these Christians were in real danger and needed encouragement. That’s what Peter wanted to give them.

Introduction

Talking about inheritances can feel awkward. If you ask your parents, “Mom, Dad, what will I inherit when you die?” it might sound like you’re hoping they’ll pass away soon so you get more. We care about our families and don’t want to think about losing them, even if money is involved. Still, it’s normal to wonder about it.

The Bible often speaks of the blessings we receive from God as an inheritance. Of course, this isn’t like what you’d get from your parents or from your dear aunt Bertha, since God will never die. But, like an inheritance, it’s something we’ll receive in the future. Unlike earthly inheritances, though, this one is guaranteed. If Aunt Bertha made a bad investment, her estate could disappear, but what God promises us is completely secure.

I. A Living Hope

Peter’s audience is going to be getting this inheritance because they’ve been adopted as children by God: As Peter elaborates:

May God be blessed, God the father of our Lord Jesus the Messiah! His mercy is abundant, and so he has become our father in a second birth into a living hope through the resurrection from the dead of Jesus the Messiah. This has brought us into an incorruptible inheritance, which nothing can stain or diminish. At the moment it is kept safe for you in the heavens, while you are being kept safe by God’s power, through faith, for a rescue that is all ready and waiting to be revealed in the final time (1 Peter 1:3-5, The Bible For Everyone).

Peter’s first metaphor is adoption. God has become our father

Sometimes calling God ‘Father’ can feel distant. In Romans 8, Paul says that by the Spirit, we call God “ ‘Abba,’ Father.” Abba is the Aramaic word for Father, but it’s not exactly the same (translations from one language to another seldom are). Someone who addresses their Father as ‘Father’ seems to have a formal, even distant, relationship with their Father Abba denotes deep affection, so words like “Dad” or “Papa” might fit better than the formal “Father.” Peter isn’t talking about a distant relative who adopts fatherless relations to protect his reputation. Instead, he shows God as someone who cares for us with real compassion and affection, like a good father would.

Because God is holy and we are not, mercy is at the centre of this relationship. In the Old Testament, Israel struggled with being an unholy people living with a Holy God. Their sin eventually broke their relationship with God, and they were exiled by the Babylonians. Even when they returned about fifty years later, the sin that caused their exile still affected their relationship with God. Things didn’t return to how they were before.

But because of what Jesus has done, the nature of the relationship has changed. Believers have been made holy by God’s gift of grace, not by strict obedience to a written code. Peter calls this new life a living hope. ‘Living hope’ has become a bit of a Christian cliché. It’s the kind of religious phrase people might use without really knowing what it means. But for Peter’s listeners, this hope mattered. So what does it mean?

Early Christians, like the Jews, stood out for being monotheists. Their pagan neighbours worshiped many gods and used idols as images of those gods. Pagans didn’t think they were worshiping the statue itself, but the god it represented. Old Testament prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah made fun of this kind of religion. They said that those gods didn’t exist, so people were really just worshiping something they made themselves. A living god can only be represented by living images, which is what we are. So, one part of our living hope is that we have a relationship with the living God, not with lifeless idols.

But there’s more. Many religions are often based on ideas about reality. For example, Buddhism teaches that ending desire leads to enlightenment. When someone is enlightened, they can reach nirvana, which is a blissful escape from the cycle of reincarnation and suffering. The thing is, there’s no way to prove whether that’s true or not. You can’t interview a spirit that has reached nirvana; you just have to trust the ideas.

If Christianity were just a set of ideas about what happens after you die, it wouldn’t be any different. What sets it apart is the resurrection of Jesus. By coming back from the dead, Jesus showed that God has power even over death. It’s true that the Bible doesn’t give us all the details we’d like about what happens after death, but God’s power over death is shown in Jesus’ resurrection.

Many people question whether Jesus really rose from the dead. They might say, “Just because someone wrote it in a religious text doesn’t mean it’s true.” I agree that you can’t believe everything you read. But the resurrection of Jesus is supported by what happened to the Apostles.

History tells us that the eyewitnesses to Jesus’ resurrection suffered terrible deaths—beheadings, stabbings, crucifixions. Even John, who reportedly died of old age, was tortured for his faith. Yet none of them took back their story.

They would have known if it was true or not. Either they saw the risen Jesus, or they made it all up. But if they had made it up, it strains credibility that they would face torture and death instead of admitting it was just a story. And if they had recanted, those trying to discredit the movement would have brought them out in front of crowds to say it was false. But that never happened.

Just as Jesus showed God’s love by what he was willing to suffer, the Apostles showed the truth of the empty tomb by what they were willing to endure for their testimony. We are heirs of this same living hope. We aren’t eyewitnesses to the resurrection, but we follow those who gave their lives to testify that it really happened.

Since we can trust that God raised Jesus from the grave, we can trust that we will also share in the inheritance Peter describes. That inheritance is kept safe by God, so it’s not just a wish—it’s a solid promise. While we wait, we know we are under the protection of a God who has shown his power by raising Jesus from the dead. This protection means our status as God’s children can’t be taken away. But it doesn’t mean God will protect us from every kind of suffering. Jesus suffered, and sometimes, so will we.

II. Patient Endurance

We might think that since God has adopted us as his children, he would keep us from pain and suffering. But that’s not what Peter’s audience is experiencing. They live with a paradox: God is protecting them, yet he allows them to go through trials. Peter writes:

That is why you celebrate! Yes, it may well be necessary that, for a while, you may have to suffer trials and tests of all sorts. But this is so that the true value of your faith may be discovered. It is worth more than gold, which is tested by fire even though it can be destroyed. The result will be praise, glory and honour when Jesus the Messiah is revealed (1 Peter 1:6–7, The Bible For Everyone).

Peter is describing a tension that many believers feel. If we have been saved, why do we still face difficulties? As Christians in Canada today, we’re not persecuted for our faith like many Christians were in the first century, but we still struggle with this same question. Why does God allow bad things to happen to us if we’re his beloved children?

This problem has confounded people of every faith throughout history. The Greek philosopher Epicurus explained it most famously. He argued that evil doesn’t fit with the idea of a god who is all-knowing, all-loving, and all-powerful. Evil exists, and so either God doesn’t know about all evil, can’t stop it, or won’t stop it. Since we believe God is all-knowing, all-loving, and all-powerful, how do we reconcile these attributes with the evil we see in the world?

A. Suffering Refines Us

Peter explains that the suffering we face isn’t as pointless as it might seem. He hints at two possible reasons for it. (This isn’t an exhaustive list of why it happens, but these are reasons relevant to what his listeners are going through.

First, suffering can refine our faith. He uses the example of gold. Pure gold is beautiful and valuable ($6,300 Canadian an ounce as I’m writing this), but you don’t find shiny gold bars in the ground. Gold ore is mostly impurities, and ancient metallurgists learned to heat the rock repeatedly to separate the gold from the other stuff they didn’t want. In the same way, going through hardships is a refining process. We are tested again and again, but it makes us stronger and more beautiful.

What does this look like in everyday life? Maybe you spend a lot of time worrying about money. No matter what you do, you can’t seem to get ahead. You fear losing your job or that an unexpected expense will wipe out what little savings you have. This leads to constant stress, and we focus so much on our finances that we have little time or energy left for God. But God tells us we can trust him. but we’re not always sure.

Maybe God lets us go through the financial disaster we feared. At the time, it’s deeply painful. But if we come through it and see that God was faithful in ways we didn’t anticipate, our faith is refined. It becomes stronger and more confident, better able to handle future challenges.

This is similar to what our parents did for us. They wanted to make sure we learned the necessary lessons to function in this world. So, they allowed us to endure some discomfort. They refused to feed us the junk food we craved, instead insisting that we learn to eat vegetables. They refused to let us veg out in front of the TV when we had homework to do, because they saw value in our education. I didn’t enjoy learning math or spelling, but I’m glad I did. My parents forced me to endure a little bit of difficulty because they knew that the sacrifice was less than the reward.

Our heavenly Father does the same. Sometimes he allows us to face discomfort because he knows in the long run it has potential benefits. The payoff of learning arithmetic and spelling is nothing compared to the payoff of eternal glory. Paul, speaking to believers wrestling with this same paradox, says, “This slight momentary trouble of ours is working to produce a weight of glory, passing and surpassing everything, lasting for ever” (1 Corinthians 4:17, The Bible For Normal People). This doesn’t make hardship easy. Far from it. When Paul talks about ‘slight troubles,’ we should remember he was whipped, beaten, stoned, shipwrecked, imprisoned, and later he was executed. He never said it was easy. But the trials were light in a relative sense, because he trusted that God’s rewards would far outweigh the sacrifices he made. It’s the same for us. God loves us, but still lets us face challenges. Sometimes, these challenges are what we need to grow.

B. Suffering Reveals God’s Glory

A second thing suffering does is let us share in the glory of King Jesus. Jesus’ glory comes from faithfully representing God. Christianity teaches that people are made in God’s image, but that image is distorted by sin. Jesus shows us what it looks like when that image isn’t distorted. N. T. Wright describes it as an angled mirror, which lets two people see each other even if they’re not in a direct line of sight. Speaking about God’s original intent for humanity, Wright says:

God has put humans like an angled mirror in his world so that God can reflect his love and care and stewardship of the world through humans. So that the rest of the world can praise the creator through humans.

We don’t reflect God’s image well because of sin, but Jesus does it perfectly. When we look at Jesus, we finally see, in a real person, what God always wanted for humanity. And what does God intend? One of the most striking differences between Jesus and the rest of us was Jesus’ patient endurance in the face of unjust suffering. As the writer of Hebrews says;

We must look ahead, to Jesus. He is the one who carved out the path for faith, and he’s the one who brought it to completion. 

He knew that there was joy spread out and waiting for him. That’s why he endured the cross, making light of its shame, and has now taken his seat at the right hand of God’s throne. He put up with enormous opposition from sinners. Weigh up in your minds just how severe it was; then you won’t find yourselves getting weary and worn out (Hebrews 12:2-3, The Bible For Everyone).

Jesus, who shows us what true glory is, endured suffering to show God’s love to the world. Because of this, he is glorified. To become like Jesus and be restored to our purpose, we may also need to patiently endure injustice for the sake of others. When we follow Jesus’ example, we reveal God’s love to the world and also share in his glory.

We can see how Peter went through this himself. In Acts 4, Peter and John heal a lame man in the temple and tell the crowd that it was done by Jesus’ power. This gets them arrested, imprisoned and dragged before the ruling council (the same council that handed Jesus over to Pilate for execution). Standing before the council, Peter & John speak boldly about how Jesus is the Messiah, The council tried to silence them, but also saw that took note that these unschooled, ordinary men had been with Jesus. The disciples shared in Jesus’ suffering, but also in his glory when people recognized they were like him.

III. A Pattern of Faithfulness

Peter wants these believers not just to trust that God was with them in their difficulties, but to understand how big a thing God had just done through Jesus. Even though they still live in a broken world, Jesus represents the fulfillment of God’s promises and the high point of Israel’s story. That’s why Peter continues:

You love him, even though you’ve never seen him. And even though you don’t see him, you believe in him, and celebrate with a glorified joy that goes beyond anything words can say, since you are receiving the proper goal of your faith, namely, the rescue of your lives. 

The prophets who prophesied about the grace that was to be given to you searched and enquired about this rescue. They asked what sort of time it would be, the time that the Messiah’s spirit within them was indicating when speaking of the Messiah’s sufferings and subsequent glory. 2It was revealed to them that they were not serving themselves, but you, when they were ministering these things—things which have now been announced to you by the holy spirit who was sent from heaven, through those who preached the good news to you. The angels long to gaze on these things! (1 Peter 1:8-12, The Bible For Everyone)

Peter wants his listeners to understand that God keeps his promises, but on his own schedule. The ancient Israelites longed for God’s deliverance during their exile, but in his wisdom, God decided when that would happen. 

The Israelites of the past felt a tension that Peter’s listeners could understand. They saw God do great things to save them, but they still faced challenges. God saved the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, but they still had to live in a land full of temptations. God saved them from the Philistines when David killed Goliath, but that didn’t turn the nation into a perfect place. God saved his people when the Persian king Cyrus conquered the Babylonians and freed the exiled people of Judah, but the Jews still faced many problems after they returned. God’s acts of salvation were real, but none of them were final.

Even though Jesus fulfilled God’s promises, the final fulfillment—Jesus’ return—is still something we hope for in the future. So Peter’s audience could feel a lot like the Israelites from centuries before. They had seen God’s salvation, but they were still waiting for a final rescue that would solve their problems for good.

We’re in the same situation. We say that Jesus brought God’s salvation, but we still see a world that needs saving. There are still wars, crime, and injustice. Every day, people face illness, natural disasters, and life-changing accidents. We long to see everything wrong with the world finally put right. We long to be saved in every sense of the word.

But let’s remember: God has always kept his promises. He will bring that final salvation, and we will experience it, even if it doesn’t happen during our lifetime. The prophets of old longed to see the salvation that Jesus brought. We long for the salvation Jesus will bring when he returns. So we face this time of uncertainty with confidence in God’s faithfulness.

Conclusion

We started today talking about the awkwardness of earthly inheritances how we sometimes worry about “Aunt Bertha’s” investments or wonder what will be left for us when the people we love are gone. We know that in this world, an inheritance is a fragile thing. It can be lost to a bad economy, recklessly spent , or eroded by time. But as we look at the words of Peter, we see a completely different kind of inheritance.

Our inheritance in Christ isn’t dependent on a fluctuating stock market or the frugality of the present owner. It is incorruptible, undefiled, and unfading. And it will never lose its lustre.

If you are in the “fire” right now—if your finances are failing, your health is struggling, or your heart is breaking—it’s easy to feel like you’ve been written out of the will. You might feel like the bank account of God’s grace has run dry. But Peter reminds us of two beautiful truths to take home: First, that your inheritance is being kept for you: It is safely stored in the heavens, beyond the reach of any trial or tragedy. Second, you are being kept for the inheritance: By God’s power, through faith, He is guarding you for the glorious future he has in store for you.

So, no matter your financial position, you can rejoice in the fact that you will never be spiritually bankrupt. You are heirs of the Living God. When you face trials this week, remember that the fire isn’t there to consume your inheritance; it’s there to refine your character so you can enjoy it more fully. We don’t know exactly when the final “reading of the will” will take place.

We don’t know when Jesus will return to set all things right. But we do know the Father. We know His mercy, and we know His power. Because He raised Jesus from the dead, our future is secure, and our “Living Hope” will never leave us empty-handed.