Admittedly, we don’t usually think of these words as belonging together: rejoicing and suffering. We rather think of them as mutually exclusive terms, incompatible terms, the one canceling out the other.
Taken together, rejoicing & suffering seem to come across as something of an oxymoron–two words conveying opposite meanings placed side by side as in the following popular phrases used regularly by many:
“Same difference”
“Clearly confused”
“Random order”
“Open secret”
Rejoicing and suffering.
Conventional wisdom suggests that joy is found in the absence of suffering. For the Christian, however, joy is not exclusively defined this way.
For the Christian, joy is not experienced in the absence of suffering; joy is the very means by which the Christian endures suffering.
The gospel makes possible rejoicing through suffering.
Last week we began a short series of expositions in 1 Peter. We studied verses 1 and 2 and did something of an overview of this brief letter of five chapters. Remember that Peter is writing to Christians to whom he refers as pilgrims, or sojourners; temporary residents passing through this world.
The Christians to whom Peter was writing were scattered among the area of modern Turkey and were “pilgrims” or “sojourners” both socially and spiritually. They were socially ostracized from the Romans in those provinces listed in verse 1 and they were also spiritual pilgrims in the sense that this world was not their home. This is how you and I should feel as we sojourn through the world. We’re just passing through. This world is not our home!
Peter writes about salvation in verse 2 and then elaborates on this salvation in verses 3 and following (1 Peter 1:3-9), the subject of today’s post.
To be “saved” is to be rescued from the penalty of our sin. All humanity is naturally separated from God because of sin. The only way anyone may have peace and fellowship with God is through salvation, by being “saved” or “rescued” from the fallen, human condition of sin.
What we have in verses 3-12 is actually one long sentence in the original Greek. Talk about a run-on sentence! My English teacher would not be pleased. But you can do this sort of thing in Greek.
So verses 3-12 are all about salvation–and Peter is praising God for this salvation. That’s why the first words in verse 3 are the phrase “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
In today and tomorrow’s post, we’ll examine just verses 3-9, saving verses 10-12 for a future post.
Note first that there are two main, overarching truths about salvation that emerge from this text:
- Salvation is a gift that lasts for eternity (verses 3-5)
- Salvation leads to growth during times of adversity (verses 6-9)
Salvation Is A Gift That Lasts For Eternity
Salvation is a God-given gift that lasts forever. Under this first main heading, let’s consider three descriptive words about this salvation. First:
It is a Sovereign Salvation
What we mean by sovereign is that God is the One who gives it. God is the One who makes it happen. It is God-given to a people who do not deserve it and are incapable of earning it. See the underlined words here:
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His abundant mercy has begotten us again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, (verse 3)
Mercy is our “not getting what we deserve.” The opposite of mercy is grace. Grace is God’s unmerited favor given to those deserving only His wrath. So mercy is our not receiving God’s wrath–which is what we do deserve!
The point is that none of us deserves salvation and, furthermore, we are incapable of earning it.
Note also the phrase in verse 3 “begotten us again.” The word “begotten” in this text means “to give life.”
If God, according to His abundant mercy, “has begotten us again” then the implication is that we needed “begetting.” This is another way of saying that we were, as Paul writes in Ephesians 2, “dead in trespasses and sins” (Ephesians 2:1).
As spiritually dead persons, we are incapable of giving ourselves life. So God comes to us in His sovereign way, says Peter, and according to His abundant mercy “has begotten us again.”
We have been “born again.” You’ll remember Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus in John’s Gospel. Essentially, Jesus says, “Nicodemus, you may be a good and religious man, but you need to be “begotten again,” born again (John 3:3).
It is a sovereign salvation. God initiates it and God sees it through to completion.
No person reading this post planned his or her physical birth. Am I right?! None of us planned our physical birth. None of us planned to live. No baby plans to live or even plans the day he is born into the world.
Spiritually, it is no different. We are dead in trespasses and sins and God initiates our salvation. He comes to us and “begets us again.” We who are elect (verse 1) are spiritually born because God in His sovereignty first comes to us and gives us life. He initiates the process.
As God initiates, we participate; participating in the same way a baby is delivered on its birthday. The only reason a baby participates in the birth is because someone else initiated the process.
This is what we mean when we say that our salvation is a sovereign salvation. By necessity, God initiates life because without Him we remain spiritually dead. We are in need of rescue from our fallen condition of spiritual death. We need someone to get us out of our grave, someone to “beget us again!”
Peter goes on in verse 3 to say that God has begotten us again “to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.”
God has re-birthed us “to a living hope.” This word “hope” is not hope in the sense we use it in today’s parlance, a word connoting an element of uncertainty. Someone asks, for example, “Is it going to be sunny today?” Another replies: “I hope so.” The outcome is uncertain.
In the New Testament, however, the word “hope” is frequently used to describe the confident expectation of something that will most certainly come to pass. It’s a thing that will happen, an experience or event that is guaranteed to come. It’s still future in terms of completion, but it will come to fruition.
Because Jesus Christ died on the cross and rose again from the dead, He made possible a salvation that lasts for eternity. This is what Peter describes as a “living hope.”
Because God has given this salvation–sovereignly initiating it Himself–Christians may be absolutely certain that their salvation will last forever, culminating in a future, final salvation where their bodies rise from the grave and they enter into the final state of glorification.
Our hope is a living certainty. In other words, it’s what gets us through today as we live in this imperfect world, this fallen world of suffering. We have a living hope, a guaranteed hope which is contrasted with what we may call “hopelessness.”
A few summers ago I was doing some reading on the beach during a family vacation. Like many, I had already read Hemingway’s classic, The Old Man and the Sea, so I thought I might enjoy more Hemingway and downloaded a book onto my Kindle: The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. I started reading it and it seemed every single one of the stories I read ended either in tragedy or death. I told my wife, “I’m tired of reading these stories, everybody dies in the end!
And I couldn’t help but think that these stories must have reflected something of Hemingway himself, a man who by all accounts was successful, traveled the world, knew many people of power and position, yet tragically took his own life, dying in utter hopelessness.
Hardly a week goes by that we don’t read similar kinds of tragedies in the major news; some musician, some athlete, some entertainer who seemed to have everything, ending his or her life of quiet desperation, dying of utter hopelessness.
It is from this sense of hopelessness the Christian has been saved, “begotten again to a living hope,” a living, confident, certain, expectation that we have meaning and purpose and life!!
Salvation is a gift that lasts for eternity. It is a sovereign salvation. Peter goes on to teach that not only is our salvation a sovereign salvation, but secondly:
It is a Secure Salvation
Our salvation is secure. It will stand the test of time. Look at verse 4 now as Peter refers to this living hope as “an inheritance.”
to an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled and that does not fade away, reserved in heaven for you, (verse 4)
So this living hope of verse 3 is described now as an inheritance in verse 4. An inheritance is something that awaits us.
Maybe you’ve had the experience of receiving an inheritance. Somebody in your family or a friend passed along to you personal property or savings and you were the one to inherit this gift when the loved one died. So your inheritance is a gift given to you by another. Someone else did the work necessary to procure the gift and once he or she died, the gift was passed along to you.
Now think of your salvation. Your salvation is a gift passed along to you when a loved one died. Our Loved One, the Lord Jesus Christ, died. He did the work necessary to procure the gift. He died for you and has passed along to you an inheritance, an inheritance of salvation.
Then Peter describes the security of this salvation. Look again at verse 4: “an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled and that does not fade away.” That word “incorruptible” may also be translated “imperishable.”
When you go to the grocery store and buy fruit you are buying “perishables.” In other words, you are buying things that need to be eaten fairly quickly. If you buy some fruit and put it out on the kitchen counter in a big bowl, it looks great, doesn’t it? Big bowl of luscious looking grapes and apples–but if you just leave it there and go on vacation and come back a month later, what do you have? You have a mess and it’s gross! Why? Because that fruit is perishable. It will not keep. It will spoil.
Peter says you’re inheritance will never spoil. Through faith in Christ Jesus you have received an inheritance, a future and final salvation that will never perish. It is incorruptible. It will keep. It is secure. It will last forever. It is a secure salvation!
This is remarkable, isn’t it?! No matter how many times I may disappoint the Lord by my actions, because I am saved, my salvation is secure. He loves me no less because He loves me perfectly in His Son Jesus Christ.
And Peter adds that your future and final salvation “does not fade away” and is “reserved in heaven for you.” There’s a place there for the Christian, a reservation. It belongs to you. It belongs to no one else.
Have you ever gone to a fancy theater and you’re looking for a seat? You look way up front and you can tell there are some seats right up there close to the stage and you think, “Awesome! Let’s go up there and get those seats!”
So you go up there only to find yellow tape wrapped around the seats with the word “Reserved” on the tape. And now you feel kind of funny, so you act like you really weren’t interested in those seats. You don’t want anyone to think you actually believed they were free, you know! So you slink back to the entrance and humbly climb the steps to the balcony.
Thankfully, the Christian’s inheritance is not at all like that! You have a special place reserved for you. It’s like going into that theater and walking confidently up the front aisle because you know you have a seat there. It’s roped off and it has your name on it. That’s what awaits us in heaven. Praise God!
Salvation is a gift that lasts for eternity. Our salvation is a sovereign salvation and our salvation is a secure salvation. Thirdly:
It is a Sustained Salvation
In other words, God sustains our faith in Christ. He keeps us believing in Him. This is a fascinating teaching. Look again at verse 5. Peter is writing to those who are saved and he adds:
who are kept by the power of God through faith for salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. (vese 5)
Remember earlier where we said that God initiates salvation and we participate in salvation? We participate by placing our faith in Jesus Christ.
Once we believe, God sees that our faith is both secured and sustained. Christians are those “who are kept by the power of God through faith for salvation.” God sustains our salvation by sustaining our faith. Through God’s mighty power, God sees to it that we continue believing.
The word “kept” there means to be guarded. It’s like God builds a fortress around our faith to guard us from the enemy of unbelief.
Of course, God’s power does not work independently of our faith. God’s power works through our faith. God sustains our salvation by sustaining our faith. In fact, the verb describes something that is ongoing. God continually keeps us and guards us and sustains our faith by His mighty power. Is this incredible or what?!
So our salvation is a sovereign, secure, and sustained salvation.
And this salvation is that which will be revealed in its fullest sense in the future. That’s what Peter means when he refers to our salvation at the end of verse 5 as a “salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.”
We will receive a salvation in the future that is a salvation in its fullest and final sense.
There are three tenses to salvation: past tense, present tense, and future tense. When we speak of our salvation we rightly say, “I have been saved (past tense), I am being saved (present tense), and I will be saved (future tense.)”
“I have been saved from sin’s penalty. I am being saved from sin’s power. I will be saved from sin’s presence.”
Past salvation has in view justification–being declared righteous. Present salvation has in view sanctification–daily growth in the Lord–and future salvation has in view glorification, the perfect and final state of the Christian.
So Peter reminds us that right now we know only of past and present salvation.
One day, when Christ returns and God creates a new heaven and a new earth, we will enter into the future salvation, the final state of our salvation, a wonderful state known as glorification. That’s what Peter means when he refers to our salvation at the end of verse 5 as a salvation “ready to be revealed in the last time.”
Salvation is a gift that lasts for eternity!
In our next post we’ll see how this salvation serves as a motivator and encouragement during times of struggle. We’re going to see next time how to get through trials and difficulties by remembering our future salvation.
What About You?
- Why is it important to understand that God alone “takes the initiative” in the Christian’s salvation?
- How can the “three tenses of salvation” mentioned above encourage new Christians struggling with recurring temptations?
- With whom can you share the good news of the gospel this week?
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