Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Personal Holiness from 1 Peter 1:13–2:3
Female: “Therefore, prepare your minds for action. Be self-controlled. Set your hope fully on the grace to be given you when Jesus Christ is revealed. As obedient children, do not conform to the evil desires you had when you lived in ignorance. But just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do; for it is written: ‘Be holy, because I am holy.’
Since you call on a Father who judges each man’s work impartially, live your lives as strangers here in reverent fear. For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your forefathers, but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect.
He was chosen before the creation of the world, but was revealed in these last times for your sake. Through him you believe in God, who raised him from the dead and glorified him, and so your faith and hope are in God. Now that you have purified yourselves by obeying the truth so that you have sincere love for your brothers, love one another deeply, from the heart.
For you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God. For, ‘All men are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of the Lord stands forever.’ And this is the word that was preached to you.
Therefore, rid yourselves of all malice and all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander of every kind. Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation, now that you have tasted that the Lord is good.” Let us pray together.
“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory.” Loving Father, we come to you this morning and we are amazed because you are a holy God. The whole earth is full of your glory. Father, we thank you for that wonderful holiness, that wonderful creation, the wonderful glory that fills it. Yet, you are our Father, and we can come to you as children.
Lord, it boggles our minds that even before you created that world you had planned the Lamb spotless, so we thank you that not only are you holy but you are our Father and we can know you because of the Lamb, because of Jesus, because you have revealed yourself to us through him. We thank you that this morning we may come to a holy God only because he has made it possible for us. We thank you for the love that brought him to us.
Lord, as we come now to your Word this morning, we ask that your Word may live to us and as we live, we may live lives that respond daily to you through your Word. Lord, we ask that you will bless our brother, Don, that you will touch him by your Spirit, that he will take your Word and by your Spirit it will become a living Word to each one of us here. We ask this to your glory in Jesus’ name, amen.
Don Carson: According to 1 Peter 1:16, God himself says, “Be holy, because I am holy.” The theologians call holiness a communicable attribute of God, one that he can share with us and demands of us. There is no text that says, “Be omnipotent, because I am omnipotent,” or “Be omnipresent, because I am omnipresent.”
In other words, omnipotence and omnipresence are incommunicable attributes of God, attributes of God that cannot be shared with us and cannot be demanded of us, but God does say, “Be holy, because I am holy.” What does it mean to be holy? In fact, the word holy and its cognate noun holiness have quite a wide range of meanings. Let us begin with those two remarkable passages that use holy three times, sometimes referred to as the Trisagion, the thrice holy.
In the vision of Isaiah in Isaiah 6, the prophet hears the seraphim crying, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord [God] Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory.” The same words are then picked up in the magnificent vision of the throne room of God in Revelation 4, but what does this mean? Some think the word means separate, but are the angels around the throne saying no more than “Separate, separate, separate is the Lord God Almighty”? It sort of leaves something to be desired, doesn’t it?
Others think it means moral, but are the angels around the throne saying no more than “Moral, moral, moral is the Lord God Almighty”? Then you quickly see there is more at stake than mere separateness or morality, though one hates to use the word mere of either separateness to God or morality.
If you pushed me, I would want to argue in the wide range of meanings associated with this word at its heart holy is almost an adjective for God. It has to do, first and foremost, with the sheer Godness of God. In this ultimate sense, only God is holy, but what God is is holy. He is God, and because there is but one God, he is necessarily separate, different from, all other beings. In that sense, his very holiness is what separates him from all other beings.
In that sense, there is an element of separateness bound up with holiness, but God, because it is his universe, establishes also what is right and wrong. At base, sin is nothing other than doing what God forbids and failing to do what God commands. God in all his being, God as he is, God in his resplendent holiness establishes the lines. Outside of those lines is everything that is wrong. Thus, holiness is bound up with what we call morality.
In the Bible, the term holy can extend a little further to that which is associated with God whether the thing is moral or not. Provided it is associated with God, it might be considered holy. For example, the shovel used to take out the ash from the altar, because it was used only to take out the ash from the altar and not for anything else, was considered holy. It wasn’t moral. It’s just a shovel, but on the other hand, it was restricted for divine use, as it were. Thus, it was holy. It was separate unto God.
The word can extend further to refer to those who have been set aside for a time for a particular function. They have been consecrated, sanctified, made holy for a particular function. The word can actually go off so far as to refer to pagan priests who are a few times in the Old Testament referred to as holy because they deal in the domain of the sacred.
You see, then, the word can stretch out and stretch out and stretch out, but at its heart, it has to do with what God is. Clearly, when he says, “Be holy, for I am holy,” he is not telling us to be God. He is telling us to be so much bound up with God, so much reserved for him, so much connected with all that brings honor and praise to him, so much in line with all that he is in his character and being that we are rightly said to be holy. This passage not only commands that we be holy like God himself but unpacks some of the dimensions of holiness.
1. Hope and holiness.
Verses 13 to 16: “Therefore, prepare your minds for action. Be self-controlled. Set your hope fully on the grace to be given you when Jesus Christ is revealed.” My father used to say, “Whenever you see a wherefore or a therefore, see what it’s there for.” “Therefore, prepare your minds for action.”
Here, the therefore connects the preceding verses with this paragraph. It connects the description of the glorious salvation God has provided with the exhortations to live in the light of that salvation. It connects the indicative with the imperative. In particular, as the gospel has provided the rich and certain hope that we studied yesterday, so now Christians are told, “Set your hope fully on the grace to be given you when Jesus Christ is revealed.”
This certain hope is there. Objectively, it stands before us. The object of our hope, the thing hoped for is as secure, we saw yesterday, as the facticity of the resurrection of Jesus Christ (chapter 1, verse 3) as sure as God’s sovereign promise. That is the certainty of the hope (the thing hoped for) out there.
“Therefore, set your hope …” Your own eager anticipation. “… fully on this hope that will finally be clear to us when Jesus himself returns, when Jesus is revealed.” In other words, the thought is by grace, you who are Christians have already received forgiveness of sin. You have already received the gift of the Spirit. You have already received communion with believers. You have received the promises of God as to what will come in the new heavens and the new earth.
All this you have received by grace, and now that same grace will also give us many more things when Jesus Christ is revealed. By grace, we will receive our resurrection bodies at the end. By grace, we will be ushered into a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness. By grace, we will be utterly transformed into the likeness of Jesus himself. By grace.
The text says as we have received, “… prepare your minds for action. Be self-controlled. Set your hope fully on the grace to be given you when Jesus Christ is revealed.” Peter says, “Set your hope on …” such and such. Clearly, that’s a mental commitment, a volitional stance. He’s not saying, “Go and pick up a brick,” or “Dig a trench.” It is something we have to do with our minds, with our hearts. It’s a volitional stance.
How exactly does a person set his or her hope on something? Perhaps that’s why Peter begins verse 13 as he does. “Therefore, prepare your minds for action. Be self-controlled.” The NIV’s prepare your minds for action is a kind of paraphrase of an expression that is almost meaningless to us today, “Gird up the loins of your mind,” which is not exactly where I normally think of my loins, but of course, this, too, is an extended metaphor.
In the ancient world, many people had long robes, and if they were going to engage in strenuous action, they picked up their robes and tucked them under their belts. They were girding their loins for action. This is extended to the mind. “Gird up the loins of your mind.” The NIV tries to paraphrase, “Prepare your minds for action.” We might say, “Prepare your minds for thought.”
Well, I suppose, but the other is far more colorful. The point is, “Get ready to think hard. Be self-controlled. Here is what you must do.” Then he says, “Set your hope fully on the grace that is to be given you when Jesus Christ is revealed.” It’s vitally important to understand how this is and is not done.
This cannot be done by self-consciously improving our ability to hope as if it were an independent function, by strengthening our hoping function. “I will hope harder. I will hope harder. I will hope harder.” Then, after we’ve hoped hard enough, directing our hoping function to what we want to hope for, and thus, choosing God and his salvation. That’s not the way it works. That’s completely the opposite of how it works.
Christian hope flows in the other direction. Christian hope is improved by fastening attention on the object, by thinking about the object of our hope. This is how we strengthen our eager anticipation. This is how we strengthen our subjective hope, by thinking through again and again and again and again what it is we hunger for. The true object that we anticipate we increase our subjective eager anticipation for it.
Like the kid who starts thinking about the birthday party. “All those presents and friends and pizza.” He thinks about it and thinks about it. He doesn’t say, “I will hope for my party. I eagerly anticipate my party. I will resolve to anticipate my party!” He doesn’t say that. Instead, he just fastens attention on the party and thinks about it and thinks about it and thinks about it.
He might even become obsessive about it to the considerable discountenance of his parents, but meanwhile, in fact, he has greatly increased his longing eager anticipation for the party. He now hopes, in the biblical sense, in the party.
Strictly speaking, to set our hope fully on the grace to be revealed is little different from thoroughly and growingly believing the gospel, believing it thoroughly, the good news in all of its dimensions. Not least, its dimensions in the life to come. This requires, Peter insists, diligence and self-control, to which he returns at the end of this section, as we’ll see in a few minutes.
The chief point in this section as a whole (that’s verse 13), however, in verses 13 to 16 in the flow of the thought connects this hope with holiness. “Set your hope fully on the grace to be given you when Jesus Christ is revealed. As obedient children, do not conform to the evil desires you had when you lived in ignorance. But just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do; for it is written: ‘Be holy, because I am holy.’ ”
Set your hope, then, on the grace to be revealed. This brings with it, according to Peter, the kind of obedient resolution that pursues practical holiness. The verse quoted here, “Be holy, because I am holy,” comes from Leviticus … Leviticus 19:2 and similar thoughts in Leviticus 11. Peter cites an important passage from the old covenant, but it is worth pausing for a moment to recognize what holiness at the street level looked like in the terms of the old covenant.
Almost every dimension of life was constrained: what you wore, what you ate, almost all of the public functions. If you have a baby, then there are certain sacrifices to be offered. There are certain clothes you must not wear, and if you do, there are certain ways of becoming clean. There are certain foods you must not eat, and if you do, you become dirty, and there are certain procedures to go through in order to become clean. All of life was defined by the old covenant in terms of getting dirty or getting clean, becoming polluted or becoming pure.
If you found a mold spot in your house, then you had to go to the priest, and the priest examined. Maybe the house was destroyed. There were other sacrifices to be offered. If the house was not destroyed, then certain steps would be taken and more sacrifices to be offered. An entire system that constrained every aspect of life. You could not go through a day if you were a devout Jew without thinking about whether what you were doing was part of what the Lord forbad and, then, what you needed to do to get clean again. You were getting dirty or you were getting clean.
It was an astonishing system, socially all-embracing. It wasn’t a bit of religion tacked on the Lord’s Day. It was all-embracing. This was part of a symbol-laden way of teaching the covenant community first, that God has the sole right to make the distinctions (I’ll come back to that in a moment); secondly, that God expects his people to be holy, reserved for him, clean; and thirdly, that God establishes the sole means by which people may become clean. It taught those three things very effectively.
The fact that God has the sole right to make the distinctions ultimately has a great bearing on how we think of sin. Consider David, for instance. Though he was a great man, he sinned horribly in the matter of Bathsheba and her husband Uriah. He seduced Bathsheba, and when it turned out she was pregnant, he arranged things militarily to have Uriah killed. As the narrator sums up the account, “But the thing displeased the Lord.”
Eventually, of course, you know as well as I do he was confronted by the prophet Nathan. As far as we can see, it is after David’s repentance that he pens Psalm 51. There he says, addressing God, “Against you only have I sinned and done this evil in your sight.” Of course, at one level that wasn’t true.
He had not only sinned against God, he had sinned against Bathsheba and against Uriah. He had sinned against the baby in Bathsheba’s womb. He had sinned against the nation, sinned against the covenant. It’s hard to imagine anybody connected with the whole thing who he hadn’t sinned against!
Yet, in a profound sense, this was exactly the case. What made this sin, what gave this action its depth of odium was not simply the social dimension of betrayed trust, as gross as that was. What made it heinous was that it was defiance of God. That is what makes sin sin. It is precisely in that sense and precisely because David understands that, that he says, “Against you only have I sinned and done this evil in your sight.”
That was one of the lessons learned, then, from this system of symbol-laden teaching in the old covenant community. God has the sole right to make the distinctions. God expects his people to be holy, reserved for him, and clean. God establishes the sole means by which people may become clean.
But in the fullness of time, many of the specific rules were withdrawn, changed, abrogated, or modified, and above all, fulfilled. Thus, Jesus says some things and does some things according to Matthew 15 which made all foods clean, and if the apostles didn’t get it, then Peter had to go through a visionary experience in Acts 10 and 11 three times in order to get it.
Yet, the three purposes of these Old Testament passages continue. God has the sole right to make the distinctions. To this day, he is the one who establishes by his very being, by his words, what sin is, and he expects his people to be holy, and he alone establishes the sole means by which people may become clean.
Be holy as God is holy. That is the context in which this exhortation from Leviticus is embedded. If, then, we set our hope on the grace to be revealed, we become obedient to the gospel. “As obedient children, do not conform to the evil desires you had when you lived in ignorance.” In fact, the original expression is stronger yet. “As children of obedience …” It’s not a very unambiguous English expression, but it’s rich in its suggestiveness, isn’t it?
“As children characterized by obedience, abandon these evil desires that you had when you lived in ignorance. Rather, just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do.” Do you hear the connections? We have received this grace. Therefore, set your hope on the grace that is coming, the grace of perfection in the new heaven and the new earth. Therefore, be holy as you press toward that fulfillment.
Christians are moving toward the holiness that will be ours in the new heaven and the new earth. To claim we have had our sins forgiven and we are pressing on toward this climactic hope when Jesus is revealed, and yet, deep down to cherish sin is so massively inconsistent, so grotesque, so revolting that, at the end of the day, sooner or later it puts a question mark over all of our pretensions.
Hope (what we eagerly anticipate) and behavior are connected. If what you hope for, if what you fasten your eager anticipation on the most is a really big house on a large lot in your retirement years in the Cotswolds or wherever (choose your own brand of pleasure) … If that is what dominates your thinking, your priorities, and your choices, then other things will be trimmed off so you can press in that sort of direction.
But if you tell everybody that’s what you really want to do but, meanwhile, what you actually do is spend every summer and every holiday and every free moment and every free pound trying to buy a little fishing smack somewhere so you can do a little bit of fishing in your retirement off the coast of Scotland, people are going to say, “How can you say this over here and do this over there? It doesn’t make sense.”
That’s the connection between hope, then, and holiness. We are called to be holy. Objectively, we are moving toward climactic holiness in the new heaven and the new earth, so align your conduct, then, with this ultimate Christian hope and set your hope on the grace to be revealed when Jesus comes.
2. The Father and holiness.
Verse 17: “Since you call on a Father who judges each man’s work impartially, live your lives as strangers here in reverent fear.” It is hard for most of us, I suspect, to hear the power of this verse because in our culture three powerful forces mitigate against it.
A. The democratization of all opinion.
Each opinion is as valuable, as intrinsically worthy as all other opinions are. We don’t think father knows best.
B. The elevation of youth.
This is reflected not only in many symbols in the culture that use youth in advertising or youth connected with what is perceived to be beauty and energy and strength and leadership but also the trivialization of the father in our culture. The father is distant. The father is remote. The father might be, even, a laughingstock. The father is not wise in the family. The father is absent. The father is divorced. The father is a joke.
But in the ancient Jewish world, in the first place, there was more respect for the opinion of the elderly and the informed than of the young. There was no democratization of opinion. Youth were to be disciplined and taught, not lionized, and ideally, the father was a figure to be reverenced, for he was not only the family’s authority but also the family’s arbiter, its judge, if you please.
Yet, because he was the father, he was compassionate. Do you hear these themes coming together in a well-known verse like, “As a father pities his children, so the Lord pities those who fear him”? We wouldn’t speak like that, would we? “As a father pities his children, so the Lord pities his kids.” Huh? The father was to be feared and within that framework also exercised compassion. The father’s role was to command and instruct, to hold all to account.
I’m not denying for a moment that sin could distort this particular cultural structure. Of course, such fathers could be abusive and perverse. I am saying our culture can be abusive and perverse in somewhat different ways. Meanwhile, if we are to understand the kind of cultural connections that are bound up with the figure of God as Father, we need to understand they emerge from the first century and earlier, not from the twentieth.
It was bound up, in part, with the fact that most sons ended up doing what their fathers did. If your father was a baker, you were likely to become a baker. If your father was a farmer, you were likely to become a farmer. In a post-industrial society, in an industrial society, but not in an agrarian or pre-industrial society, children go off and do what they want to do, but in those days, children did what their fathers did.
Thus, the fathers were not only the figures who passed on certain family traditions; they were the ones who took the kids out in the field and taught them how to do things. They were the instructors of the new generation, not simply instructors in some distant moral sense but personally, in a hands-on way, all the time the kids were growing up. They disciplined, they instructed, they held to account. They were compassionate, but they were to be reverenced and even feared. We simply do not think of fathers in that sort of set of categories today.
Listen again to the text. “Since you call on a Father who judges each man’s work impartially, live your lives as strangers here in reverent fear.” In other words, our family connection means we belong elsewhere. We don’t quite belong here. We’ve seen this notion of being aliens and strangers from the earlier verses of the chapter. We belong to this family. We belong to this Father, and in this family this Father judges impartially. He has no favorites.
In this sense, we are extraterrestrials or as Clowney says in that little commentary, we might even say we are “neo-terrestrials” waiting for the new heaven and the new earth. We belong to another family. We have a slightly different citizenship. Our home is elsewhere. Therefore, because he judges each one’s work in this family impartially, he is our Father, a Father on whom we call (verse 17), yet he is also the Father whom we are to treat with reverent fear.
What does this mean to treat the Father with reverent fear? I have a friend, a colleague on the faculty at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He and his wife have been foster parents now to 28 or 29 children. They have now gotten to the point where they’re not taking on any more. They’ve adopted the last one, and they still have one other handicapped child in the home, but they also reared two daughters of their own who are now married and one has a child.
One day, when the older girl, Tracey, was about 18, Perry, who was very gifted with young people, no doubt, turned to Tracey and said in a mildly reflective moment, “Tracey, are you afraid of me?”
“Oh, come on, Dad! For goodness’ sake.”
“No, no, no. Before you engage your mouth, put your brain in gear. Is there any sense in which you are afraid of me?”
“Well, yes, sometimes.”
“Tracey, is that a good thing?” She grinned and said, “Yeah, probably.” He said, “Then go and reflect on the fear of God.”
No doubt, perfect love casts out fear, but in this sinful order, when we are never all that far away from shoving our fists in God’s face and singing with Frank Sinatra, “I did it my way,” it’s a good thing to have a bit of fear. In fact, the word reverent here is a bit of an addition. The text just says fear. It’s not cringing fear. It’s not that we’re crouching down like a beaten puppy waiting for the next blow to fall and crying.
No, this is a compassionate Father on whom we call (verse 17), but we do fear him, and it’s a good thing. What draws us toward holiness? Hope for the future, the direction in which we’re moving (verse 13), but now also the commanding, demanding judgment of the Father which completely fills us in a certain sense with anticipation and in another sense with fear.
God holds us to account and yet provides us with a name we can call upon. We call upon our Father. Fear and reverence for this Father do not drive us from him but toward him in obedience to him, for this Father really does know best.
3. Jesus Christ and holiness.
Verses 18 to 21. Here is a further great incentive to holiness. “For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your forefathers, but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect. He was chosen before the creation of the world, but was revealed in these last times for your sake. Through him you believe in God, who raised him from the dead and glorified him, and so your faith and hope are in God.”
The point of the paragraph as a whole is plain enough. Not to pursue holiness is to despise and insult the inestimable value of Christ’s sacrifice on our behalf. Yet, before we reflect a little further on this central point, doubtless we should pick up some of the details of Peter’s argument. He says we were redeemed by Christ’s death, by Christ’s blood.
The notion of redemption is largely alien to our culture but not to the first century. Redemption of slaves in the Hellenistic world could take place fairly easily. Someone could pay money to the owner, to the master, perhaps through a temple treasury and redeem the slave and, thus, free the slave from slavery.
Old Testament law, likewise, provided for the redemption of slaves, sometimes through a gaal, a near relative, a kinsman-redeemer who could buy back, whether a family member had been sold into slavery or some family possession. The Old Testament law also provided for redemption money so that a person’s life would not be forfeited after this crime or that crime.
In the case of murder, no redemption money was permitted. That’s why capital punishment was insisted upon under the Old Testament law, because no redemption money was considered adequate in that case. Again, every firstborn Israelite boy had to be redeemed, paid for by the paying of a ransom (Numbers 18 and Exodus 30). This was a sign that all Israel was guilty and spared only by the grace of God who allowed the payment and accepted it.
All of this meant the notion of redemption was not alien to Peter or his first-century readers. Moreover, Isaiah had used these sorts of categories to portray God. Again and again and again in Isaiah, God discloses himself as the gaal of his people, the kinsman-redeemer of his people. He is their Creator. He is tied to them in a covenant, but he exercises his right as kinsman-redeemer to buy them from their guilt, to buy them from the slavery, to buy them from the punishment they are about to undertake.
That is the sort of connection Peter picks up here. “We are redeemed,” Peter says. We are redeemed, but the particular way he tweaks this metaphor emphasizes certain elements of redemption. What we are redeemed from (verse 18) is the meaningless of a pagan life, the sheer slavery of it. We are redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to us from our forefathers.
The idea is not that we are redeemed from the odd little sin we may have accidentally committed but that our whole outlook, the whole heritage, the whole anti-God stance the first-century pagans inherited from their tradition was a form of bondage from which they had to be set free. Increasingly, in the West that is the way things are. Is that not the case?
When I do university missions today, increasingly the people to whom I speak do not know the difference between the big numbers and the little numbers in the Bible. They don’t know the Bible has two Testaments. They’ve never heard of Solomon or David or Isaiah, let alone Zedekiah. If they’ve heard of Moses, they confuse him with Charlton Heston or the new little cartoon figure that is circulating.
Increasingly, we live in an age when large swaths of our culture now descend from a tradition without reference to the God who made us, and we have to be set free, redeemed, purchased out of this slavery. What, then, does not redeem us? Verse 18. It’s not money. It’s not like the redemption money used in freeing a slave.
“For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed …” No. What did redeem us, and it was inestimably costly, is “… the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect,” like the prescribed sacrificial lambs in the Old Testament system by which people were made holy.
We were redeemed by his blood. Blood, regularly in the New Testament, refers not simply to the literal fluid in Christ’s veins but to death, violently and sacrificially ended on behalf of another. The very texts that speak of being redeemed by the blood of Christ can speak elsewhere of being redeemed by the death of Christ or by the sacrifice of Christ. That is the idea, and this cost is beyond calculation. The value of this ransom is clarified by reflecting on who Jesus is.
Verse 20: “He was chosen before the creation of the world.” That is why the book of Revelation can speak of Jesus as the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world. Presupposed is his pre-existence. He did not just begin his existence in the womb of Mary, but before the foundation of the world, he already was, and he entered this world in the plan of God and gave up his life, the just for the unjust, to bring us to God.
The theme keeps recurring in this book. Thus, in 2:24, “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed.” Through him, then, we have come to believe in God (verse 21) and have hope in God, the two central themes of chapter 1, verses 1 to 12, as we saw yesterday. The point is merely human traditions, the traditions of a fallen race, are wretched illusions. Our faith is in God. Our hope is in God.
This is the framework, then, in which God speaks to us and says, “Be holy, for I am holy.” I know in a congregation this size and in an assembly this size there are somewhat different views on the significance of Holy Communion, but there are certain elements regarding it with which we would all agree, and one of those most central elements is, in fact, made explicit by the command of Christ. “Do this,” Jesus says, “in remembrance of me.”
We take the elements and we remember Christ’s broken body and his shed blood. Supposing we were to take those elements and say by our participation, “I remember Christ’s death on my behalf,” and then go out and curse somebody on the street, swear at the kids, gossip about the minister, nurture a little bitterness, or cheat on one’s income tax, the very act of publicly remembering would not only be a contradiction in terms, it would be like spitting on Christ all over again.
“I remember Christ died for me to pay for my sin.” Then laughing, “What a joke!” That’s the effect of it. It is grotesque. Thus, one of the functions of the Lord’s Supper is precisely to serve as a public renewal of the covenant by which we remember that by which we are redeemed (Christ’s death), and thus, pursue holiness. “I remember. I remember. I remember.”
As we grow in grace and in our estimation of the worth of Christ, we are increasingly broken by the horror of our sin, by the shame of it and the ugliness of it, that only Christ’s death was sufficient to pay for. The focusing on the death of Christ becomes in itself a God-given means to pursue holiness.
4. The Word of God and holiness.
Verses 22 to chapter 2, verse 3. In these verses it is important to follow, first, the flow of the thought. Verse 22: “Now that you have purified yourselves by obeying the truth so that you have sincere love for your brothers, love one another deeply, from the heart.”
The obedience envisaged, “Now that you have purified yourselves by obeying the truth …” is, as we saw yesterday, the initial obedience that is bound up with becoming a Christian, with being submissive to Christ with repentance, with bowing to the gospel. Instead of “Now that you have purified yourselves by obeying the truth …” we might say, “Now that you have become a Christian,” or “Now that you’ve submitted to the lordship of Christ,” or “Now that you have embraced the gospel,” or “Now that you have obeyed the truth.” “… so that as a result you have sincere love for your brothers, love one another deeply …”
In other words, holiness devoted to God has manifested itself in love for fellow believers. We had faith and hope yesterday, and now we have love. Does that remind you of anything? Faith, hope, and love are often called the Pauline triad, but in fact, it’s not simply Pauline. It’s basic New Testament theology here. It’s bound up with Peter as well. You can’t have one without the other either in biblical theology. They intertwine in a variety of ways.
Here setting our hope on the grace that is to come and trusting and obeying this Word of Truth inevitably manifests itself, also, in love for fellow believers. Paul says, “Now, therefore, press on with love.” “… love one another deeply from the heart.” It is as if Peter recognizes Christians cannot truly be holy before God without loving their brothers and sisters. The two are not identical. They are not equivalent. They are always distinguishable, but they are always inseparable. You cannot have one without the other.
You cannot genuinely pursue holiness and not love brothers and sisters in Christ, and you cannot grow in love of brothers and sisters in Christ without also pursuing holiness before God. How, then, shall such love be augmented? Love one another deeply from the heart. How shall we do this? Shall we simply command people to love and it will be done? “Go ahead. Love each other more. Go on. Do it. Turn it on.”
How shall we effect this change? No, no, no. Such love comes from the heart. It’s even bound up in the form of a commandment. “Love one another deeply from the heart,” the heart, in fact, that has been regenerated. Verse 23: “For you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God.”
In other words, Christian love can be demonstrated in lots of ways but it cannot simply be taught or transmitted in lots of ways. You can demonstrate love by digging up an elderly person’s garden for them, by buying some groceries, by a warm hug, by some sacrificial babysitting, by giving some money to poor people, by devoting retirement years to excellent causes, by a thousand things. All kinds of ways is it possible to demonstrate Christian love.
That doesn’t mean those ways are simply transmissible, because it comes from the heart. The way Christian love is generated is from within the heart, and this is bound up, we’re told, by the gospel, the living and enduring Word of God. That’s how it starts within us. “For you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God.”
In other words, this life-giving Word of God is likened to human procreation. It is the seed of life. It is sown in us to generate love, and this seed is powerful. It is enduring. It is transforming. That’s what the Word of God is like. It is transforming. Thus, the point of the quotation in verses 24 and 25 is to emphasize the sheer eternal, enduring power of the Word of God, unlike human generation.
We generate people, and we all die. This seed is not enduring. The one thing common about every person in this tent, whatever else separates us, is that unless Jesus comes back first, we will all die. That’s not a very cheerful thought on this rainy morning, but it’s the truth. We will all die. It’s a perishable seed, but not this seed.
“All men are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of the Lord stands forever.” We are characterized by change and decay; God’s Word abides. In my first pastorate, I had a woman in the church who, when I first went to the church, was 94. Eventually, I buried her at the age of 100.
When I stopped to think of it, she had been born in the same year Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, and she died after seeing, on TV, Neil Armstrong on the moon, to refer to something.
What an astounding time this has been!
Massive the changes that old eyes have seen.
Change rules a century studded with war;
Empires ascendant then shattered and torn.
Carriages horse-drawn and men on the moon,
Telegraph, telephone, satellites soon
Communications that outstrip mere thought.
Millions of products created and bought.
Nations gestated, enriched, and destroyed;
Fabulous playthings pursued and enjoyed;
Poverty, famine, and bombs from the sky,
Heroes and scoundrels play bit parts and die.
All are like grass.
Their glory no more than the flowers of the field.
Icy winds pass and autumn’s low roar forces flowers to yield
Grasses turn brown; nothing is sure save that change rules the land
But God wears the crown;
Forever the word of the Savior will stand.
God wears the crown. Forever the Word of the Savior will stand. Peter says, “And this is the word that was preached to you. Therefore …” Now here’s the point (chapter 2, verse 1). “Therefore …” Since this Word is enduring, changeless, powerful, effective, likened to seed that generates and regenerates and transforms from within, “Therefore, rid yourselves of all malice and all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander of every kind. Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation.”
In Paul and in Hebrews, you sometimes get a comparison between milk and meat. Milk is for the immature Christian, and both Paul and the epistle to the Hebrews can say, “By this time you ought to be on filet mignon, and instead, you’re still drinking milk.” There is a contrast made, therefore, between this person’s immaturity and that person’s spiritual maturity.
That’s not the point here. There’s no question of maturity along such lines, a move from milk to meat. The idea here is that, for the baby, milk is not an optional extra. It’s that which keeps the baby alive. It’s that which nourishes the baby. That’s the way we Christians are to see the Word of God in our lives. It is not an optional extra. It is what keeps us alive. It is what feeds us. It is what makes us grow.
“Crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation.” One of the motives that will help us in this regard is we discover it tastes good, for when you start pursuing Scripture, when you start pursuing the Word of truth, in due course the delight is not in the rhetoric, the aesthetic appreciation of the Bible’s language, delight in its metaphors or proverbs. We begin to taste the Lord himself. The Lord manifests himself through the Word.
Now that we have become Christians, we have tasted and seen (verse 3) that the Lord is good. Let’s have more goodness. Let’s enjoy him all the more, the text is saying. Crave this spiritual food. If you discover, quite frankly, Bible reading is a bit of a bore and Bible study still worse, I venture to suggest it’s because you’ve done very little of it, and in consequence, you haven’t developed much taste either for Bible study or, God help us, for the Lord himself.
How shall we pursue holiness? Shall we pursue holiness by a single revival meeting? The Lord may, in his great mercy, come down upon us in great strength and suddenly disclose himself to us, but the ordained means of grace here is the Word of God. That’s the truth. Do you want to be holy?
Do you remember what Jesus prays on the night he is betrayed only hours before the cross? “Sanctify them through your truth,” he prays. “Sanctify them. Make them holy through your truth. Your Word is truth.” That’s what he prayed. How does the book of Psalms begin? “Blessed is the man who does not walk according to the counsel of the ungodly or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of mockers …”
Here the righteous person is described negatively, what he is not like. He doesn’t walk according to the counsel of ungodly people, picking up their bad advice. He doesn’t stand in their way. That is, to stand where they stand, to walk in their moccasins, to take up their habits. He certainly doesn’t degenerate to the place where he sits down in his La-Z-Boy chair looking down his long, self-righteous nose at all those stupid right-wing, ignorant, bigoted Christians out there, becoming a mocker. Blessed is the man who does not do any of these things.
In good poetical style, we might have expected verse 2, then, to describe the righteous person positively. “Blessed, rather, is the man who walks in the counsel of the godly, who stands in the way of the just, who sits in the seat of the praising.” It makes excellent theology, but it’s not what the text says. Verse 2, describing a just person, simply and positively says, “His delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night.”
What is Joshua told when he takes over as head of state, as it were, or prime minister, perhaps, of the nation? “This book of the law shall not depart from your mouth. You shall meditate on it day and night. Then you shall make your way prosperous, and then you shall good success.”
Here, then, is a vision of holiness that transcends mere conformity to rules. This is not a vision of holiness that says, “Do this. Don’t do that. Do this. Don’t do that. Eat this. Don’t do that. Don’t go there. Play this. Don’t play that.” It’s not that. We watch our young people go through these stages in life where they sometimes ask, “Are Christians allowed to …?” Then you fill in the blank. The question seems to be, “How far can I shove without being absolutely apostate?”
We know the whole culture has sort of drifted toward the abyss in certain respects, and most of us are a little bit leery about the rule-based forms of evangelicalism that were characteristic 25 years ago, but on the other hand, we just can’t stand this antinomian drift, so what do we do? At the end of the day, we are not going to establish holiness in the church by merely imposing rules. What that will do is stifle grace. On the other hand, if you don’t pursue holiness in the church, sooner or later you don’t have a church.
No. We must set our hope on eternal things. We must enter into this relationship with the Father that calls on him as a child calls and treats him with reverent fear. We must reverence the sacrifice of Christ above all. We must hide God’s Word in our hearts that we may learn not to sin against him.
Let us be frank. In many of our churches, there is all kinds of what Peter describes in verse 2: malice, deceit, hypocrisy, envy and slander of every kind, nurtured bitterness, one-upmanship, arrogance, prayerlessness, resentments, roast preachers, abused parishioners. All kinds of it.
I am ashamed; O Lord forgive.
I am ashamed; O Lord forgive.
I used to nurture bitterness,
To count up every slight.
The world’s a moral wilderness,
And I have felt its blight.
Self-pity ruled, resentment reigned,
And no one understood my pain;
I spiraled down in murky night,
Insisting that I had the right
To hate and hate again.
I am ashamed; O Lord forgive.
I am ashamed; O Lord forgive.
But then the gospel taught me how
To contemplate the cross.
For there Christ died for me, and now
I’ve glimpsed the bitter cost.
He bore abuse and blows and hate,
But he did not retaliate.
Triumphant malice sneered and tossed
Blind rage at him—he never lost
The love that conquers hate.
I am ashamed; O Lord forgive.
I am ashamed; O Lord forgive.
To make no threat, to smile, forgive,
To love despite the cost—
For Jesus showed me how to live
And trust the One who’s just.
To suffer wrong and feel the pain,
While certain that the loss is gain.
Oh God, I want so much to trust,
To follow Jesus on the cross,
To love and love again.
What does it mean to be holy but to love God with heart and soul and mind and strength and our neighbor as ourselves? “Be holy, for I am holy.” Let us pray.
We confess, Lord God, how quickly our confidence and trust in Christ degenerate into forms of self-righteousness and self-confidence, how quickly our passion for holiness dissolves into mere conformity, how quickly our earnest enthusiasm for Jesus and his death on our behalf somehow slinks into mere religion. We are ashamed; O Lord, forgive.
So revitalize us by your Word and Spirit that we will hear the call, “Be holy, as I am holy,” and cry with Christians in every generation, “Merciful Father, make me as holy as a pardoned sinner can be this side of the hope to which we press.” In Jesus’ name, amen.
