Let me start by telling you a little bit about my work. I work for IFES the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students, which helps to facilitate Christian student groups in universities in over 150 countries around the world. UCCF is the UK part of IFES. I work with young Christians as they make the move out of university into the working world, helping them to know how to connect their faith to the post-university world, and primarily to their places of work. The region I cover runs from Iceland to the far end of Siberia and down as far as Israel. In this region there are 47 countries and IFES currently operates in 44 of them.

Within this region there are about 870 million people, of whom about 17 million would be identified as Bible believing Christians, as opposed to others who are either culturally ‘Christian’ or specifically non-Christian. That represents a little over 2% of the total population. But of that 17 million approximately half live in just 3 countries – Germany the Netherlands and the UK. And in fact, the largest Bible believing Christian population in the whole of my region is found in the UK.

The point of this is that although we often think the church here is on its back foot and facing constant decline, in many other parts of our continent the situation is far far worse.

Probably the greatest threat to the church in Europe is liberal-secularism and a materialist mindset which wants to banish the spiritual (or the world of the unseen) to the margins, claiming it is just for the deluded.

You know this because it is the latent hostility we encounter every time we pluck up the courage to make Christ known to those we share our lives with.

The result is that the church and the views of Christians are consistently marginalised and treated as irrelevant by those who formulate policy, those who determine educational standards and even those who control our economy and the places where we work.

And the sad reality is that many of us live as if our belief is nothing more than one of many lifestyle choices. It is a thing we do in our spare time which doesn’t significantly impact on who we are in public.

 

Introduction to the Letter

Some letters in the NT are written to encourage unity, some to correct specific moral or theological issues, and some are written purely to give Christian insight on specific items.

This letter however is of a general nature, and seems to have one over-arching theme which is how the people of God are to survive and bear fruit for Jesus in an aggressively non-believing world. There is a very strong possibility that this letter was written by Peter from Rome, and as he faced imminent death from Nero. In his mind he’s desperately aware of the persecution of the church that has either started in full force or is just about to start.

The church as Peter wrote was more vulnerable than it has ever been since. It was still young, it had opponents all around, it was mainly concentrated within the Roman Empire, and that Empire was just about to try to eradicate it from all it’s territories. For many Christians it may have appeared that the end of the great church adventure was imminent.

You could almost think of it as part of Peter’s last will and testament as he seeks to ensure that the church in the generations after him is able to continue living as he has done. And it seems to me, on reading this letter again and again, that as Peter faced the end of his life, it was Jesus’ final command and final assurance which filled his mind and inspired his heart – remember Jesus’ final words in Matthew’s Gospel – the command to go and make disciples of all nations, and the assurance that Jesus will be with His people even unto the ends of the earth.

So this letter seems to me to be almost a sermon on Jesus’ last command. It is visionary but also practical, it is realistic but it is bursting with assurance. It is written to a people who were ethnically diverse and scattered far and wide, but to a people united in origin, passion and purpose.

We may not face the physical brutality of the Roman Empire in the West, though undoubtedly in countries such Sudan or Afghanistan the opposition to Jesus Christ and His people is as bloody and brutal as it ever has been. Nonetheless it seems to me that in Europe today the church faces a threat of eradication from our countries every bit as real as the threat it faced in first century Turkey. The problem for us is that because this threat hasn’t yet caused many of us the slightest discomfort we seem to live as if the threat doesn’t exist or as if church decline and Christian minority is a sociological inevitability.

You see the letter has a relevance for us today because the issues faced by its original recipients was so similar to ours. They faced the possible destruction of the church, as we today face the continuing decline of church numbers and influence in society.

So, let me ask you this... is the church in the UK, or in Europe purely a sociological construct? Is it just a community of like minded people or people sharing a common interest? Is it a tradition or a fashion which is now being increasingly proven to be irrelevant? Or is there more to it than that?

This is the issue Peter wants to address. His desire is that even if he faces death at the hands of the Romans, even if thousands of fellow believers are massacred, he wants to ensure that the church will survive, and not only survive but flourish. So you see for us living in a continent which is also threatened with extermination of the church, Peter’s letter might have some useful pointers for us to ensure that the presence of a Christian witness in our lands is not obliterated by the pervasive forces arrayed against it.

Interestingly what we’ll see is that at no stage does Peter counter a passive defeatism, but rather he sets the stage for a submissive offence, which is why when we go through this letter we find Christian witness as the underscoring theme of all he says.

 

Framework – Living as Signposts

A signpost or a road sign directing travellers on their way from one destination to another needs three essential components if it is to be any good. Of course most obviously it needs words written out clearly to show you the direction you should be travelling. But for these words to be effective they need to be lifted up so that they are clearly visible for passers by – after all a road sign that lies on the ground beside the road is useless. And finally, because we live in a world of storms and tempests, the structure on which the road sign is written needs to be securely founded in the ground, because no matter how good the structure is, nor how clearly the directions are spelled out, if the structure is not capable of standing firmly through rain or shine, then one day sooner or later the road sign will find itself flat on the ground and as useless as if it had never existed.

The Christian life of witness – both for individuals and the church – operates in some ways just like a road sign. We need to be verbally pointing people in the direction of hope in Jesus; and our words need to be supported by lives of authentic discipleship; and our lives need a secure foundation lest the perils of our time seek to undermine us or knock us clean off our feet.

Broadly speaking this is a framework which we can use to help us understand the flow of this letter.

So first we’re going to be looking at the foundation in the first half of chapter 1, then the structure, which flows all the way from 1:13 through to 3:9 and then the words in 3:15-16.

As we look through this letter we will see how Peter’s advice to the church will indeed build them into a robust and secure signpost, so that not only will the church have the potential to overcome its oppressors but also that it will have the ability to continue shining like a star in the night.

Before we go further though there is something else I need to explain. Peter’s letter is about Christian witness, but in the whole letter, the section related to the words which we have to convey to others is limited to just one verse, and the bulk of the letter is to do with the way we live and then to a lesser extent what we believe. In other words, thinking back to the signpost analogy, most of what Peter wants to talk about here is the structure, followed by the foundation and finally the words. Now I don’t think this is because Peter underestimates the significance of our verbal witness to a non-believing world, but perhaps because he suspects that we underestimate the value of authentic Christian living, and so run the risk of undermining our own witness to Jesus.

 

Foundation

So, for the rest of this session we’re looking at the foundation. And while I’m aware that you are all fully aware of the essentials of the Gospel, peter undoubtedly thought the key truths were worth reiterating, and I hope you’ll think they’re worth listening to.

So our text this morning 1 Peter 1:1-9.
I want to break this passage into two sections: first the assurance of the church - verses 1-2; and second, the assurance of salvation verses 3-9.

The Assurance of the People of God
The letter we see in verse 1 is written not to one individual nor to one church congregation, but to a whole collection of churches covering the entire area we call Turkey today. Because of this very generalised nature of the letter, we have to take care to read it as a corporate document – addressing the whole body of Christ, before appropriating the teaching to ourselves as individuals. It is really important that we get this because the natural human way to think is of ourselves first and the church second. Peter here is thinking of the church first and only of individuals as members or subsets of that bigger entity. Not only does this challenge our reading of the letter, but also it should start to challenge our attitude towards church.

To God’s elect, strangers (in this world – the NIV adds) – right from the start there are two themes apparent in Peter’s mind which resonate throughout the letter – these are the chosen nature of the church, and also the differentness of the church and its members to the world within which we live.

Of course if we read this letter it is easy for us to become side-tracked or distracted by the word elect – we get drawn into diversionary conversations about divine sovereignty and human responsibility and in doing so completely miss the point. The German theologian Karl Barth helpfully said about the doctrine of election is that we have to get the order right – election in the Bible is predominantly a plural denotation speaking mostly of the church rather than individuals, so when we speak of the doctrine of election we need to speak of the people of God in the plural before we speak of the work of grace in the lives of individuals. But more than that, when we speak of election, we have to remember that even before calling a people to Himself the Father has to elect the Son as the means of reconciliation and atonement necessary for such a thing as God’s people even to exist. So when we read of election, I find it is helpful to remember the choice within the Trinity that Christ should die that the church might exist, and then that the people of God is the major concern of scripture in regards to this doctrine, not the person of God.

This address is followed by one of the most famous Trinitarian statements in the Bible, and it is a statement which further reinforces the assurance and identity of the church that Peter has already hinted at. This list: chosen through the foreknowledge of the Father, sanctified through the Son, for obedience to Jesus Christ and to be sprinkled with his blood is intriguing for three reasons:

• First, as I said it is one of the clearest explanations of the complete work of the trinity in bringing the church into being.
• Second it contains a very strong linguistic link back to the book of Exodus and the initial calling by God of His people from Egypt to Himself at Sinai. This link is played out more explicitly in chapter 2 where Peter quotes directly from Exodus 19 as he refers to the church as the Holy Nation and Royal Priesthood, but it is helpful for us to understand that this is an intentional link in Peter’s mind from the start of his letter. The two words here ‘obedience’ and ‘sprinkled’ are also drawn form the vocabulary of Israel’s calling to Sinai.
• But third, this verse is a bit confusing. I don’t know about you but when I read this carefully I’m surprised by the order of the words – first the order of the Trinity at work – Father, Spirit, Son; and second the order of activities – chosen, sanctified, obedient and sprinkled. Taken at face value we would probably have to say that Peter got the order wrong... but put back into the context of parallelism with Exodus it is actually easier to understand why Peter has this order, and from that to see more clearly what he wants to say about the identity of the church.
• In the Exodus narrative the order in which God’s people were established as His people went like this: first they were chosen by God as far back as Genesis 12 to be God’s people, when the Lord made His covenant promise to Abraham that he would be the father of a great nation, which would have it’s own land and would be a blessing to all nations. Second they were brought out of Egypt into the desert through the Lord’s miraculous work in bringing plagues on Egypt, leading the people through the wilderness by fire and cloud, destroying their pursuers in the waters of the Red Sea etc, and through this they were set apart as God’s people. Third they were called to obedience – Exodus 19: “if you will obey my commands I will be your God and you will be my people, you will be a Holy Nation and a Royal Priesthood belonging to God” – which comes directly between their amazing Exodus from Egypt and the giving of the law of God which they are to obey. Then in chapter 24 after Moses has read the law to the people for the first time they are then sprinkled with the blood of a lamb as a sign of the covenant they and the Lord are making with one another. They covenant to obey, and He covenants to be their God.

Do you see the order here is the same, but in being the same changes our preconceptions about the meaning of the words.

Let’s look one by one at the things Peter says about the work of the Trinity in our salvation, then we’ll look at our response: Chosen by the foreknowledge of the Father – so, we don’t become the people of God by accident and the church isn’t just a latent sociological concept – instead just as God chose Israel to be His people 400 years before they existed, so He also chose the church to be His people way back before even sending His son to die for us. So the creation of the church and even the grafting on of a multi-ethnic church to the historic heritage of Israel is neither accidental nor a rash second choice, no it is the Lord’s predetermined and premeditated will.

Sanctified through the Spirit – this is part of the confusion... normally we take sanctification to mean the process of making holy, or making more morally righteous. It does indeed have that meaning, but here that is not what is meant. Again following the Exodus parallel, the work of the Holy Spirit referred to here is the separation out of God’s people from the world around them. It is the designation and identification of a people group who by virtue of their separateness effected through the work of God will from now on be called God’s people. In other words the sanctification referred to here is a past action brought about by God to make the people His own.

To be Sprinkled with Jesus’ blood – again our Exodus minds help us to understand this more clearly. Because from the Exodus parallel we can see that the act of sprinkling is not primarily concerned here with atonement or ritual cleansing, but with confirmation and the creation of a binding covenant. The difference between here and Exodus is that here the lamb whose blood is spilt on us is none other than the lamb of God, Jesus the Messiah. So in exodus it was an animal that was used to give assurance and binding in the covenant but here it is the blood of God Himself that is sacrificed in order to make this covenant relationship possible.

So the church is the Father’s idea – not yours or mine or anybody else’s. It is the Spirit’s creation, not a sociological phenomenon. And it is ratified and sealed with the unalterable fact and act of Christ's death.

Do you see the point – the weight of even pre-history surrounds who you are.

How do you think about church? A building? A bunch of people you hang out with? A place where you go to get some Bible teaching? An established institution? An irrelevant institution? A vanishing and threatened entity? An obligation? A good place to take the kids? Boring?

That’s my list of how I think of the church. But if you’re like me then you like me need to repent of this attitude and be shaken by the strength of Peter’s conviction. Because the church is your identity – the church is the people of God as much as you and I are each a person of God. It is our ethnicity. An English rugby loving Christian has more in common today with a Scottish Christian than they do with a non-believing English rugby lover.

This is important because if we fail to get it right then we run the very real prospect of seeing the end of the church in our countries.

The church is our identity. We are the people of God chosen in Christ before the beginning of time. We will spend eternity together, but the hard part is knowing how to spend this life with each other!

Chosen for Obedience - So finally in this section let us look at the teleological nature of the church – or the purpose for which the church is chosen, and that is ‘for obedience to Jesus Christ’.

When Peter speaks of the church being chosen for obedience He is not talking of it collecting star points for good work. He is not talking of an up tight over moralising community where we judge each others actions and words but not each others thoughts. No he is talking about a radically re-engineered part of society for whom obedience is neither weighty obligation nor sour choice, but rather where it is the desire of our hearts and the song of our mouths.

You see, just as it was for Israel at Sinai, the call to obedience comes after the act by which God rescues His people and establishes them as His own. Not a single act of duty or obligation or even genuine goodness can bring you one step closer to salvation, that miracle has been accomplished by God through God for you and for the church. It is live history.

The fitting response to all the joy of our salvation should be an obedience that recognises and rejoices in the complete sovereignty of the Lord God – Father Son and Spirit.

Sin, the displacing of God from His rightful place at the Centre of the Universe is always epitomised by disobedience, as it was in Eve’s case in Eden, or in Israel’s case in the desert after Sinai. Conversely proper love of God for who He is – the glorious Creator and Redeemer is always evidenced by obedience, as it was in Jesus’ life.

So for both the individual and for the collective people of God obedience is a proof to the world of the power for salvation that has been affected by the Father the Spirit and the Son.

You only have to think of the scorn that is poured upon hypocritical church leaders, or seemingly irrelevant church congregations – this is because every act of disobedience by the church and by you and I denies the saving power of God (because it is instead indicative of our sinful nature), and in so doing appears to ratify the godlessness of non-believers.

As we get further into the letter and look at all that Peter has to say about right living, it is really vital that we comprehend both the grace nature of our salvation, but also the utter importance of obedience as a visible sign to the world of the undoing of sin’s influence in our lives. It is vital also that we appreciate that provision is made through the blood of the lamb, after the call to obedience, by a gracious God who knows too well our inability in this current time to live lives of complete obedience. So the sprinkling of the blood, which comes after the call to obedience not only confirms the covenant, but in Jesus Christ atones for our continued pattern of sin.

Peter’s assurance of the church as the people of God is founded on the premeditation of the Father, the action of the Holy Spirit, and the confirmation given for all time through the blood of Jesus. In other words it is founded on Grace, Grace and Grace. For so long as there is humanity on earth there will be a Christian presence, because that is the will of the Father. That is the first level of assurance Peter wants his readers to take to their hearts.

In verses 3-9 Assurance of the Person of God
These verses change in their emphasis away from the corporate identity of the church to the assurance of individual salvation. You see the emphasis, starting from His own joy and experience Peter builds up the picture of what God in Jesus has done, is doing and will do in the lives of believers.

At first this passage looks a little jumbled with talks of salvation and faith at the beginning and end and talk of suffering in the middle. I think there is some merit in reading the passage as being like an onion chopped in half. What we find on one side of the circumference is the same as what we find on the other side, and as we work towards the centre we do so through a series of concentric rings.
• The theme in which the passage is packaged then is ‘new birth into a living hope’ verse 3 which ultimately works out in ‘the salvation of your souls’ verse 9.
• The basis of the hope in verse 3 is Jesus – who Peter saw raised from death; while the substance of our faith in verse 8 is also Jesus, who we love and believe in even though we’ve never seen him.
• The response of both the hope and the faith is praise (verse 3) and inexpressible and glorious joy (verse 8).
• We are shielded by God in response to our faith (verse 5) until the salvation that will be revealed in the last times; yet at the same time our faith is being refined and strengthened so that Jesus may be glorified when He is revealed in the last times.
• Do you see how the layers unfold... and then right at the middle we find the crux of Peter’s address, which is the real suffering faced by the people of God at the hands of the Roman Empire and other detractors.
What Peter longs for is that the church in Turkey should not only survive the Roman persecution, but that it should flourish and achieve it’s goal of making God’s good news known – but he knows that the church goes beyond the corporate to the individuals within it, and he knows that real people throughout the world are facing real persecution and possibly death for their belief in Jesus.

So the target he’s aiming for is the suffering of the church, but the point he’s making is about the hope we have in Jesus.

Look at the absolute dominance of Jesus in this passage: Remember for Peter Jesus was not an abstract figure of religious interest, but instead Jesus was the real character of history who had burst into Peter’s life, changed his heart, transformed his vision, and above all given him hope because Peter met Jesus and spoke with Jesus after Jesus had been murdered by the Romans and raised from death by the Father. Peter wants to connect the Turkish church directly to his own first-hand life experience of Jesus, and he wants them to share in the life-changing hope that Jesus’ resurrection has brought to him. In Peter’s words Jesus is the Son of the God who has brought about our salvation; then He is the proof of God’s power to effect salvation; He is the future evidence of the culmination of God’s plan for salvation; and so He is the object of our love and faith.

Peter knows that there is one foundation alone which is secure enough for both the corporate church and individual believers, and that is our trust in Jesus.

The other theme which comes through this passage is that of hope and faith. Individual salvation, just like the calling of the church, is not a matter of human decision, planning or effort. It is God’s work, effected by Him through Jesus and for Jesus glory. There is a human part in this though, and that is belief – not blind faith, but real belief in the real person of Jesus, whom Peter saw and knew and loved and ate with and laughed with and cried with. Through faith we are shielded by God, and through faith we believe and trust in Jesus even though we haven’t seen Him. The goal of our faith is the salvation of our souls, and the proof of our faith is our perseverance in faith despite the circumstances we face in our lives. And by God’s grace even the hard times we face can be turned to gain if we allow the Lord to build and strengthen our faith through them.

Conclusion
As we’ve said before, if there is one aim and hope in this letter it is that the church might have the ability, vision, and determination to withstand the forces set against it, and that more than survive it might flourish. And likewise that individual Christians in their different circumstances might flourish as Jesus’ witnesses to this world.

Peter knows that for any of this to happen, it is vital that the church has sufficient maturity and strong enough foundations. That it is not side-tracked into heresy or irrelevance nor driven by fear into the margins of society. And for this to happen we need to keep hold of the pure simplicity of our salvation at the intervention of a loving God and instrumented through His Son by His Spirit.

The church in Ephesus – part of Peter’s original readership – vanished. And in Revelation 2 we’re given an insight into their demise. They lost their first love. They lost their love of Jesus and the trinity and all that they had done to bring about the creation of the people of God. If the church vanishes in this country or in our continent it will not be because of secularism or liberalism, or materialism, or Islam. It will be because we too lose our first love and lose sight of all that our Lord intends for us to be as His people.

So if we want to see the church flourish in Britain, rather than vanish as it did so spectacularly in Turkey, we need to build and maintain (which means repeatedly rebuilding over time) our foundation in Christ.

In a book I read some time ago, there was a helpful piece of advice. The author said he had taught himself to preach the Gospel to himself every day. Not a 1 hour sermon, but a simple reminder that God so loved the world that if we believe in Him we will not be overcome by death but instead will have a certain hope of eternal glory with Jesus. Just a reminder of the grace of God which underpinned all that he was... and a reminder which lead naturally to two other important truths: first that the grace of God should be responded to by our obedience; and second that the grace of God is necessary for those around us if they too are to avoid the fires of hell and avoid living their lives of futile irrelevance.

This Gospel is the foundation of all that we are as the body corporate and as the body of individuals – as God’s people.

 

Tim Vickers