A Holy Nation: The Church’s High Calling

Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of the nature of the church from 1 Peter 2:9-10.

It is an enormous privilege for me to be with you. I have had occasional connections with R.C. over the years and with others of Ligonier (far too few, to my loss), and it’s a wonderful joy to be participating with them again. I would like to direct your attention this evening to 1 Peter, chapter 2, especially verses 9 and 10, but I shall read 1 Peter 2:4–10. Hear, then, what Holy Scripture says.

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“As you come to him, the living Stone—rejected by human beings but chosen by God and precious to him—you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. For in Scripture it says: ‘See, I lay a stone in Zion, a chosen and precious cornerstone, and the one who trusts in him will never be put to shame.’

Now to you who believe, this stone is precious. But to those who do not believe, ‘The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone,’ and, ‘A stone that causes people to stumble and a rock that makes them fall.’ They stumble because they disobey the message—which is also what they were destined for.

But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.”

This is the Word of the Lord. Let us pray.

Now may the words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our Redeemer. We ask through Jesus Christ the Lord, amen.

In addition to the individual identity each of us has, we all also have corporate identities. In fact, we have many overlapping corporate identities. For example, I belong this evening with many hundreds of others who are attending the 2009 Ligonier Conference. We form a certain group. I’m sure many here are Americans. They constitute another corporate identity. Some may be medical doctors or plumbers or pastors. Some will be identified by race or some particular ethnicity. Perhaps some belong to the fellowship of motorbike riders.

Of course, these various corporate identities overlap in some sense or another. Thus, it’s quite possible there’s an American here who is also a motorbike rider and a doctor but perhaps not simultaneously a plumber and so forth. At a merely descriptive level, none of these corporate identities can claim any sort of precedence over others.

Some people may actually prefer to think of themselves as bikers first and Americans second or the reverse. Some might prefer to think of themselves as medical doctors first and African-American or European-American second. But our corporate identity as Christians is transcendentally important. It outstrips and relativises and reduces all other corporate identities. This is a truth hugely emphasized in both Testaments and in the New Testament no where more powerfully than here in 1 Peter 2:9 and 10. Let me re-read those two verses.

“But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.” It will be helpful, I think, to follow the flow of Peter’s thought in three steps: our identity, our purpose, and our foundation.

1. Our identity

A) You are a chosen people.

The word, people, is sometimes rendered race when it’s translated from the ancient literature. Peter’s language actually makes a specific Old Testament reference, namely to Isaiah, chapter 43. Let me read Isaiah 43, verses 3 and 4 and then a little farther on in the same chapter.

“For I am the Lord, your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior; I give Egypt for your ransom, Cush and Seba in your stead. Since you are precious and honored in my sight, and because I love you, I will give nations in exchange for you, and peoples in exchange for your life.” A little farther down in verses 19 and following:

“See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland. The wild animals honor me, the jackals and the owls, because I provide water in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland, to give drink to my people, my chosen, the people I formed for myself that they may proclaim my praise.

Yet you have not called upon me, Jacob, you have not wearied yourselves for me, Israel. You have not brought me sheep for burnt offerings, nor honored me with your sacrifices. I have not burdened you with grain offerings nor wearied you with demands for incense. You have not bought any fragrant calamus for me, or lavished on me the fat of your sacrifices. But you have burdened me with your sins and wearied me with your offenses. I, even I, am he who blots out your transgressions, for my own sake, and remembers your sins no more.”

In that context, God is addressing the people who will be rescued from exile in Babylon. They have sinned and fallen into idolatry, but God will blot out their sins. They have not offered appropriate, God-commanded, covenant-stipulated worship, but they still remain his people, his chosen people, and he will blot out their transgressions.

All of this we’re told in verse 21 of Isaiah 43, “… that they may proclaim my praise.” The clause is also picked up here in our verses in Peter, as we shall see in a few moments. This truth that the people of Israel are God’s people, God’s chosen, is grounded in the entire flux of the Old Testament narrative.

At the very beginning, Abraham does not volunteer to start a new race. God chooses him. In the next generation, it’s not everyone who descends from Abraham. It’s through Isaac. Not through Ishmael and not through the packet of progeny from Keturah. In the generation after that, it’s Jacob and not Esau. There is a choice principle built into the thing right from the very beginning.

Of course, the point is made clear at the national level when you come to Deuteronomy 7 and Deuteronomy 10 where God insists he loves Israel not because they are mighty or powerful or wiser or holier than others but simply because he set his affection on them. He loves them because he loves them.

Peter, then, applies this language directly to his Christian readers. They constitute the locus of God’s people, God’s chosen people. People in the Roman Empire in Peter’s day were much interested in what class or race (what group) you belonged to. For example, the Roman historian Suetonius speaking of Christians writes, “Punishment was inflicted on the Christians, a class …”

He’s writing in Latin. He uses the words genus, which is the Latin equivalent of the Greek word used here. A race. A group. “… a [genus] of men given to a new and mischievous superstition.” By which he was referring to the resurrection. Peter says, “Indeed, you are a chosen people, chosen by God from before the foundation of the world, chosen in space-time history, elected in Christ Jesus, and you are set out as different from all others.”

Do you see what immediately precedes this expression at the end of verse 8? “These others stumble because they disobey the message—which is also what they were destined for. But you are a chosen people.” That’s the contrast. It transcends all merely sociological labels, so one remembers the opening lines of 1 Peter, 1 Peter 1:1, establish the diversity of his intended first readers. “Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, To God’s elect, exiles …” There’s that exilic theme, like the exiles returning after Babylon.

“… exiles scattered throughout the provinces of Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynia.” He could have added today, “Believers, elect of God, chosen from Vietnam, Kikuyu speakers from Kenya, those who are gifted in Swahili, some North Americans, the odd Canadian. They’re all there chosen by God from before the foundation of the world.” They constitute a separate genus for all of their diversity. Peter asserts you are a chosen people.

B) You are a royal priesthood.

Now Peter reaches farther back than Babylon. Now he’s reaching all the way back to Exodus, chapter 19, verses 5 and 6. In the chapter that immediately precedes the giving of the Ten Commandments we read, “Now if you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all nations you will be my treasured possession. Although the whole earth is mine, you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. These are the words you are to speak to the Israelites.”

The setting, of course, is the exodus when the Mosaic covenant constituted Israel as God’s chosen people, God’s chosen nation, but why royal priesthood or kingdom and priests? In fact, the original expression could be read both ways. That is, as two things: kingdoms and priests or royal priests (one joint expression). In my judgment, it’s the latter.

Why does he call them this? In the context of the Old Testament, the fact that all the Israelites are constituted royal priests does not mean there is not also a separate and special category of priests drawn from the tribe of Levi and descended from the line of Aaron, but in the New Testament?

In the New Testament, the anti-type of the special Levitical Aaronic priests, the anti-type is one of two things. Either Jesus Christ himself, our sovereign High Priest, the sole mediator.… This is one of the great themes of the epistle to the Hebrews. It shows up again in the Pastoral Epistles where there is one mediator, one go-between between God and human beings. Alternatively, all of us are priests, and now we’re thrown back on the language of Exodus 19 again.

Therefore, we are forced to ask, why does the Old Testament stipulate, on the one hand, there is a special class of priests and you can’t volunteer for it? It has to be an appointment from God by God’s own designation of what family is qualified. You can’t volunteer to be a Levite. You can’t volunteer to come from the line of Aaron. It’s by God’s sovereign choice. Yet, on the other hand, clearly in Exodus 19, he can picture all the people being priests. Why?

When we think of priests, there are two lines of thought we should follow. On the one hand, functionally they are mediators by definition. They are mediators between a deity in the pagan world (any kind of divinity) and human beings. Under God’s self-disclosure, they are mediators who take God’s instruction, God’s covenantal stipulations, God’s ceremonial ablutions, God’s sacrificial system and present the voice of God and his demands and his ceremonies to God’s own covenant people.

Conversely, they take the concerns and the sins of God’s people including their own, for they are fallen men themselves, and they bring these sins before the Lord and discharge them with the blood of the covenant, the blood of bull and goat, for the sins of the priests and for the sins of the people in that Most Holy Place on the ark of the covenant on Yom Kippur, on the Day of Atonement.

They are mediators, and this theme is picked up in the New Testament. When Paul talks about his evangelism in Romans 15, he says he is discharging his priestly service. That’s exactly what the text means. He is discharging his priestly service when he evangelizes. In that sense, we become priests, not because we have a peculiar role in the church of God but altogether with all the church of God we mediate the grace of God to those who are outside.

We become mediators. That is what evangelism, in part, is about. We mediate the grace of God to others. In our prayers and petitions we pray for those who are outside that God might open their eyes, that the Spirit of God might convict them of their sin, that they might repent and turn and trust the living God. This is part of our priestly ministry. Every time you pray for others you are engaging in this priestly ministry. Every time you talk about the gospel with an unconverted neighbor you are exercising a priestly ministry of mediation.

This notion of priesthood has already appeared in 1 Peter. We saw already in chapter 2, verse 4, believers have been built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood. Here, too, we offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. I wish I could tease that one out at length. In Hebrews, it’s particularly the spiritual sacrifice of praise. All of this has to do with the priest’s function.

There is another element. Priests were, in ancient Israel, especially sanctified, particularly set aside for God. I suspect here the focus is not so much on the function of mediation but on the reality that all of God’s people now are to pursue all the sanctification, all the consecration of those as priests who enter into the Most Holy Place, into God’s own presence.

In ancient Israel under the old covenant there was a sense in which you could say, “The priests have special ablutions to go through and special self-examination. Only under certain circumstances can they take on the ephod and so forth. That’s not for me; that’s for them.” God help us when Christians today start saying, “It’s all right for the pastor to be holy, but I don’t really have to be,” because all of us are God’s priests. All of us have been set aside. All of us have access now that the veil has been torn into the very presence of the living God.

To start introducing a double-tiered level standard of holiness or of consecration makes no sense this side of the cross and resurrection of the Lord Jesus. You are a royal priesthood, a priesthood that serves the King of the universe. Here this emphasis on the sheer privilege of being sanctified, set aside as God’s special people, is already introduced to us in the opening verses.

Back to chapter 1, verse 1. “Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, To God’s elect, exiles scattered throughout the provinces of Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynia, who have been chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through the sanctifying work of the Spirit, to be obedient to Jesus Christ and sprinkled with his blood: Grace and peace be yours in abundance.” You are a royal priesthood.

C) You are a holy nation.

Again, the language is drawn from Exodus 19. A holy nation. The contemporary notion of nation, the nation state as we think of it in the Western world today, is really an eighteenth-century creation. The word translated nation here is the word that actually produces in English our word ethnicity.

You might render this, “You are a holy ethnicity,” although to our ears that sounds just a bit too narrowly racial for some of us. I was brought up speaking French. In French Canada, the French Canadians would speak of la nation du Quebec, the nation, but the word nation in French means something a little different from nation in English.

In English, it’s a geographical and political entity, but in the ancient world, although there were geographical and political entities, they tended to be regional empires or the like. Under the regional empires there were tribes or ethnicities with various associations and self-identities. The modern post-eighteenth century notion of a nation state is a relatively recent creation.

In French Canada, however, something of the old flavor is there. Although French Canadians know nationally in the English sense they’re Canadians, nevertheless, nationally in the French sense, they are French Canadians and quite proud of it. I was brought up there. They belonged to la nation, to Quebec.

For English ears, hearing French Canadians say they belong to the nation of Quebec just sounds like a real insult to the rest because somehow they’re distancing themselves from Canada, but that’s not quite what most French Canadians mean. They belong to the ethnicity of francophone Canadians.

What kind of ethnicity do we belong to? What is our nation? Peter says, “You are a holy nation.” What does that mean? Of course, the categories of systematic theology have long distinguished between the communicable attributes of God (that is, the attributes of God he may share with non-God image bearers like you and me) and the non-communicable attributes of God (that is, the attributes of God he cannot share with image bearers like me).

Thus, there is no biblical passage that says, “Be omnipotent, for I am omnipotent,” because … let’s face it … omnipotence is an incommunicable attribute of God. On the other hand, there are many passages that enjoin us to love, and God is love, for love is a communicable attribute of God. That is, it is one that can be shared between God and his non-God image bearers.

Where does holiness fit into this? It is an extraordinary category. On the one hand, it’s a communicable attribute. After all, God says, “Be holy, for I am holy.” That puts it in the communicable attribute side. But as you work through the uses of holy in the Bible, you discover it has, we might say, concentric rings of meaning, and right at the very center holy.… What exactly does it mean?

Some try to deal with the term in etymological categories. That is, trying to break it down into its components as some people perceive them and say, “What it means is separate. God is utterly separate.” But did the voices around the throne in Isaiah 6 really cry, “Separate, separate, separate is the Lord God Almighty”? It does lose something. I mean no disrespect. It is losing something. Others want it to have an overtone of morality, but are the voices around the throne really saying, “Moral, moral, moral is the Lord God Almighty”?

No. At its core, in the tightest concentric circle, holy is almost an adjective for God. God is God. God is holy. Even the highest order of angels cover their faces with their wings as they join in the peons of praise of these angelic hosts and cry, “You are God! You are God! You are God!” “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty!” I cannot get closer to the word than that.

Then, as you stretch out a little farther, that which peculiarly belongs to this God is then said to be holy. It may or not be moral. For example, the shovel that takes the ash from the altar is said to be holy. Not because it’s moral. A shovel is never moral, but it’s reserved peculiarly for God’s service and work. Peculiarly. Exclusively. For nothing else. Anything else is common and, therefore, profane. The shovel is said to be holy, not because the shovel is itself God but because the shovel belongs exclusively to God.

Then, of course, if the belonging refers not to a shovel but to people, then the manner in which we belong to God is going to affect how we think and our behavior and what we say and our relationships, for we have the potential for reflecting something of the character of God in ways shovels don’t have.

Suddenly, there are overtones of what we call morality, living in line with what God’s image bearers can reflect of the Master’s holiness. Both historically in historical theology and theologically (exegetically) this holiness of God’s people in passage after passage runs in one of two directions. It is sometimes (I don’t know what else to call it) definitional, positional.

We are set aside for God. Thus, we are holy de facto. We are holy if we have been set aside by God, and if we are set aside by God and then don’t live like it, then we are besmirching the holiness of God, we are betraying what we are, and we are contradicting the very essence of what God has called us to be. Behaviorally, if we are by definition his and the pleasure and privilege and power of being his now works out in our lives behaviorally, then we become holy at a kind of functional level, too.

To tell all the truth, the word holy can actually extend in a concentric circle even farther out than that. In a handful of passages in the Old Testament, the words holy men are used to refer to even pagan priests, not because they are holy in the narrower, concentric circle sense but at least they are operating in the domain of the sacred. They’re not really secularists. They’re not merely tied to matter.

This shows you something of the range of the word in its particular locations. At its core, then, I am sorely tempted to say holiness is an incommunicable attribute of God. I can’t find words to put it quite like that. I’m not quite happy to say that, but it’s very close. Only God is God, but the entailments of his holiness wash out in concentric waves and we are to belong to him and be his holy nation, peculiarly his, such that God in his infinite mercy dares call us holy, a holy people, a holy ethnicity, a holy nation. Thus, it becomes a communicable attribute of God.

Inevitably, if this really is our self-identity and we understand it as such, this will set up conflicts with the other kinds of corporate identities we naturally do belong to, whether as Americans or females or whites or Chinese or motorbike riders. There will be overlaps of blessing that come from common grace, but there will be conflicts, and how we resolve them will turn very largely on whether or not in God’s grace these categories of our identities as Christians are for us of transcendental importance.

D) You are God’s special possession.

Again, this is grounded in Exodus 19:5 and Isaiah 43, verses 20 and 21. Do you recall how in Exodus 19 God says, “Although all the nations are mine, yet you are my possession”? You never want to think we are God’s possession in some sense that disqualifies God from claiming possession of everyone, everything else, every other nation, every entity, everything in the entire universe.

You have exactly the same kind of range of uses when it comes to the category of kingdom. In one sense, God’s kingdom is God’s dynamic reign. It is virtually coextensive with what we mean when we refer to his sovereignty. We are told by the psalmist, “God’s kingdom reigns over all.” In that sense, you are in the kingdom whether you like it or not. You cannot escape from that kingdom.

No nation, no ethnicity can ever escape from this God. He owns it all. He made it all. He possesses it all. Yet, kingdom can have a variety of other usages including, for example, what Jesus says in John, chapter 3. “Only those who are born anew, born again, born from above, belong to, can see, and can enter the kingdom of God.” In that sense, the kingdom is a subset of all of God’s sovereignty under which there is eternal life, and you may or may not be in the kingdom in that sense.

Thus, there is a sense in which the Iranian ethnicity is owned by God. The Kamba ethnicity in Eastern Africa is owned by God. There is no ethnicity that is not owned by God (no nation, no people, no anything, no planet, and no universe). Now we’re talking about multiple universes. I have enough on my hands trying to understand this one rather than multiplying endless theoretical ones, but however many there are they are all owned by God, and yet, Israel is God’s unique, special possession.

It is a spectacular notion. It should instill in us awe, wonder, and a sense of privilege especially when we perceive this special possession is by his initiative, by his choice, by his doing. All of that language is picked up by the apostle Peter, and he understands what is said of God’s covenant people under the terms of the old covenant is exactly what must be said of God’s covenant people under the terms of the new.

What does Peter say, then, to establish our corporate identity? “You are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy ethnicity (a holy nation), and God’s special possession.” If you’ve listened to this exposition at all, you now see, I think, these categories are not discrete hermetically sealed-off things which are added to one another. They overlap.

In each case there is an emphasis on God’s initiative, on supreme God-centeredness, on the built-in implication of incalculable privilege. Over against every other form of self-identity, we are God’s people, sanctified by God, chosen by God, loved by God, his priesthood, his nation, his people, his possession. This is our identity.

2. Our purpose

Come back to verse 9. “But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.” Again, as we have already seen the language is drawn from Isaiah, chapter 43, verses 20 and 21.

There you recall God says, “I provide water in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland to give drink to my people, my chosen, the people I have formed for myself that they may proclaim my praise.” Peter follows the exact language of the Septuagint, the Greek translation. There it is recorded the reason believers enjoy this corporate identity is to show …

The expression can either mean the praises of him who called you out of darkness or the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness. It’s either the ground for our praise or the praise itself. It makes very little difference in terms of the outcome. The point is we have received all of these privileges in order that we may declare the praises (the excellencies) of him who called us out of darkness into his wonderful light.

In other words, all of our special status, all of our corporate identity as the people of God, the church of the living God according to the apostle, is not to promote pride or a sense of intrinsic superiority or still less (God help us) one-upmanship with respect to other religions or other races, but rather that we might declare the excellencies of him who called us out of darkness into his wonderful light. Two details in this line are crucial.

A) The sheer God-centeredness of this purpose

I have been doing university missions now off and on for about 35 years, and about a dozen years ago I started stumbling across a question from university undergraduates I never had when I was a young man. It’s a relatively recent one.

It’s put variously, but the question runs something like, “Amongst human beings, anyone who wants to have all of the attention and all of the praise, anyone who wants to be the focus of everybody’s constant admiration with everybody stroking that person and fawning all over that person, would be thought massively egocentric. The God you’re trying to push on us looks to me to be pretty egocentric. He keeps demanding we praise him all of the time. For goodness’ sake. Is he insecure? It’s a bit much. You get tired of it after a while.”

What do you say to that? I never had that sort of question raised in the past, I think, because until fairly recently most of the unconverted people I met in university missions had been brought up in the Judeo-Christian heritage that really believed there is a sovereign, transcendent, monotheistic God and he is special and deserves special attention, but nowadays things have changed.

Thirty years ago, if I were dealing with an atheist, at least he or she was a decent Christian atheist. That is, the God he or she disbelieved in was the Christian God, which is another way of saying the categories were on my turf. But I can’t even assume that nowadays. How do you respond to that?

Of course, it’s true to say something like, “Yes, but he is more than we are. He’s not just sort of another human being slightly more souped-up. He is God. He is the Creator. He is to be cherished and revered. He is our maker and our sovereign and providential King, and he is our judge.”

All of that is true, but there’s more yet. There’s more yet. It’s one of the themes John Piper likes to preach about. It is because we have been made by this God and for this God, because our very self-identity when we are right with God is to love him supremely, to adore him and to worship him. It is a supreme act of love on his part to keep demanding it because it is for our good.

What conceivable good is it going to do us if this God says, “Don’t give me too much worship. I mean, I’m just one of you guys, slightly ratcheted up maybe, but you don’t need to focus on me too much”? That might satisfy some idolater’s notion of humility, but the humility I see in this King of Kings is on Golgotha.

Meanwhile, it is an act of supreme love that he keeps directing attention to himself and attention to himself and attention to himself, not only because he is God but precisely because it is for our good. There is no insecurity in this God. He is, after all, the God of aseity. He has no needs. In eternity past, the Father loved the Son, the Son loved the Father, and they were perfectly content.

God is not demanding we love him so we can meet the needs of his psychological profile this week. His focus on himself is not only because he is God but because, out of love, that is what we need. That is what we must see. That is what we must understand. That is the point to which our adoration must come or we are wallowing in idolatry again and again and again. There is a second detail in this purpose clause. Not only the sheer God-centeredness of our purpose to sing his excellencies but …

B) The sense of sheer privilege of our purpose when we see what he has done

“We are his chosen people, his royal priesthood, that we may declare the praises of him who called us out of darkness into his wonderful light.”

Now we are tied in to the Bible’s entire storyline. We are the people who shook our puny fists in God’s face in Eden. We are the people who rightly stand under the curse. We are alienated from God without hope. To use Paul’s language writing to the Ephesians, “… by nature, children of wrath in darkness without revelation, in darkness without purity.” Cut off and calling it freedom when it spells death, and God has rescued us from this darkness and brought us into wonderful light. Here is our identity and our purpose.

3. Our foundation

Verse 10: “Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.” The language is again tied to the Old Testament, this time to the prophet Hosea. I invite you to turn to two or three verses in chapter 1, and then in chapter 2.

These are very important if we are to understand both Romans 9 and 1 Peter 2 correctly. You’ll recall the burden of the prophet Hosea. He is commanded to marry Gomer who really is a betrayer from the beginning, an adulteress, and Hosea learns something of what God feels like in himself as the almighty cuckold, the betrayed husband. In consequence of this, in Hosea 1:6, we read:

“Gomer conceived again and gave birth to a daughter. Then the Lord said to Hosea, ‘Call her Lo-Ruhamah …’ ” Which means not loved. “ ‘… for I will no longer show love to the house of Israel, that I should at all forgive them. Yet I will show love to the house of Judah; and I will save them—not by bow, sword or battle, or by horses and horsemen, but by the Lord their God.’ After she had weaned Lo-Ruhamah, Gomer had another son. Then the Lord said, ‘Call him Lo-Ammi …’ ” Which means not my people. “ ‘… for you are not my people, and I am not your God.’ ”

At the end of chapter 2, this same God who has rejected them talks about how he will take this people back to the land, and he says (verse 23), “I will plant her for myself in the land; I will show my love to the one I called ‘Not my loved one.’ I will say to those called ‘Not my people, ‘You are my people’; and they will say, ‘You are my God.’ ”

In the context of Hosea, you cannot help but see those who are declared by God not to be loved and not to be his people are all Israelites. Then, to those Israelites who have thus been, in effect, excommunicated, God in his mercy reaches out and says, “You are my people and I am your God,” but it’s still within the framework of the Israelite community.

Now you come to the way these verses are quoted both by Paul and by Peter, by Paul in Romans 9:25 and here in 1 Peter. In both passages, Peter and Paul alike extend what Hosea said, clearly referring to Israelites who were declared not to be God’s people but are now declared to be God’s people again, to Gentiles who are not God’s people and are now declared to be God’s people.

This, it has to be said, has managed to get a whole lot of commentators very upset because, perhaps, what this indicates is that Paul or Peter are ripping texts out of context or the like, but in fact, Paul’s point, and also Peter’s point, is much more profound than that. The point is once Israel has been judicially declared by God, “Not my people,” they are indistinguishable from the pagans. They really are not his people. It’s a judicial sentence.

That is exactly Paul’s argument in Romans 1:18 to 3:20. Romans 3:21 opens up one of the greatest atonement passages in all of Holy Writ, but in two and a half chapters before that (1:18 to 3:20) Paul’s whole point is Jew and Gentile alike are closed up under sin. We’re all a damned breed. We’re all lost. There is no hope for any of us. It doesn’t matter whether we were under the Mosaic covenant or not. We are all sinners.

That is the point, and because Israel itself has become “Not my people,” if God reaches down in his sovereign grace and says to those who are not his people, “You are my people,” whether he does it to those who are ethnically Israelites or those who are ethnically anything else, it doesn’t really matter, they’re all damned. They’re all lost. They’re all not his people, and it is by God’s sovereign, gracious reaching out that he takes and saves and transforms and makes those who are not his people his people all over again.

That’s what is going on here as well. “Once you were not a people …” He does not distinguish, “Once you Gentiles I’m writing to (that is, half of the church that is actually Gentilic here) were not his people.” He’s not saying that. The whole lot, the whole church, a mixed race church (Jew and Gentile).… It doesn’t matter. They were all not God’s people. How can he say anything else? The apostle Paul, likewise, says, “We are all by nature children of wrath.” All lost. All justly condemned. All not his people.

“But now you are the people of God. Once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.” At this juncture you are called back to remember the opening lines of the first chapter again. “To God’s elect, exiles scattered throughout the provinces of Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynia, who have been chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through the sanctifying work of the Spirit, to be obedient to Jesus Christ and sprinkled with his blood …”

In 1 Peter, chapter 2, before he closes the chapter, he will write (verses 24 and 25), “He himself bore our sins in his own body on the cross, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed. For you were like sheep going astray, but now you have returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls.”

Everything we enjoy as God’s chosen possession, as God’s royal priesthood, as God’s holy ethnicity, has been secured by the cross, by the sprinkled blood. The Holy Spirit who was poured out upon us to bring us conviction of sin and sanctifying power? Secured by the cross. The forgiveness that gives us reconciliation to this living God? Secured by the death on the cross because he bore our sins in his own body on the tree.

“Once you were not a people …” Don’t you see? It is the cross that has made you a people. “Once you had not received mercy …” Don’t you see? It is the cross that has poured out the mercy of God upon you. Our identity, our purpose, our foundation all are tied to the cross, and once our self-identity is established corporately in these terms …

Once we think of ourselves as the church of the living God in these terms, there … let me tell you … is an end to racism. There is an end to nationalism. It’s not that there’s no place for being thankful for a certain heritage, but everything is relativised under this belonging to be people of the eternal God, blood-bought with an anchoring in God’s sovereign purposes from eternity past and a prospect before us into eternity future, resurrection existence in a new heaven and a new earth, from darkness to light, from no mercy to mercy, from not God’s people now to God’s people.

Such self-identity is not established by banging a drum and declaring we are Christians preaching unity as an end in itself and singing, “Kumbaya.” It is grounded in what God has done in Christ Jesus, and as a result, we become, so help us God.… We become so God obsessed, so Christ obsessed, so cross obsessed, so truth-of-the-gospel obsessed that all of our diversities, all of our other corporate identities, however pleasurable or ephemeral or attractive or ugly they may be …

In any other framework they may actually serve to push us apart, but now they become part of the spectrum that brings glory to our Creator and Redeemer, this holy diversity in the church of the living God. Hear the Word of the Lord. “But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.” Let us pray.

With enormous embarrassment and not a little consciousness of guilt, heavenly Father, we confess how frequently we have not cherished our corporate identity as sons and daughters of the living God, as blood-bought people, redeemed, constituting a holy ethnicity, sanctified as royal priests, your own possession.

In the glory of these immeasurable privileges, Lord God, grant that we may serve here with thankfulness, adoration, a deepening consciousness of the love that bought all of these things for us on Golgotha and a deepening consciousness of the glories yet to be revealed. For Jesus’ sake, amen.