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A Rock and a People (Part 3)

1 Peter 2:4–12

Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks from 1 Peter 2:4–12 in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library


Male: “As you come to him, the living Stone—rejected by men 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 capstone,’ 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, a people belonging to God, 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.

Dear friends, I urge you, as aliens and strangers in this world, to abstain from sinful desires, which war against your soul. Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.”

Let’s bow our heads in prayer, shall we?

Almighty God and loving Father, we thank you so much for the power and the authority of your Word. Thank you for those times you’ve thrilled us with its contents, teaching us its truths and applying those truths to our own lives. We thank you so much for your servant, Don. Thank you for all he has given to us this week. We wait with that sense of anticipation as we look forward to reveling in your Word once again this morning.

Lord, we pray as we give ourselves to study, so you would deliver us from distractions, you would help us to focus our minds that we may get down to the business of real study of your Word, but we pray we may not be hearers only but doers of your Word. We pray you would find in us an obedient people. Dear Lord, warm our hearts, sharpen our minds, and sanctify our wills to the glory of Jesus’ name. Amen.

Don Carson: Have you ever played that game, not much more than an icebreaker at a house party, where someone says a word and everyone in the group is supposed to own up to the first thing that word evokes in their minds? The person saying words might choose something simple like car. Then you go around the room, and if everybody is being honest, the owners of cars tend to think immediately of their own car. Those who don’t have a car may remember a car in their family or something they have been secretly lusting after.

They might say, “A new Jaguar,” or “An Aston Martin.” On the other hand, they might be bound up with nostalgia in another form and think, “A yellow Mini.” It’s sort of amusing to watch what comes to mind when a fairly neutral and colorless word such as car is first spit out there. Occasionally, you’ll get a chair who varies the procedure a bit and throws in some sort of expression like quis somnambulus. Then you’re supposed to say what first comes to mind, and it might be, “Shoot the chairman.”

You face this sort of thing in translation, of course, all the time. Philip Hacking was saying he was speaking in Africa some time ago and people were translating for him, and somewhere along the line he had mentioned storm clouds, but the translator went on for about three sentences over that one word. You could tell just from the length. Everybody sort of laughed, and it went on from there.

After the message was over, he inquired of the translator what was going on, and the translator said, “Well, for you, a storm cloud is a bad thing (it’s a threatening thing), but here we get so little rain, a storm cloud is a wonderful thing, so I had to explain.” All the associations connected with storm cloud were very different, and fortunately, the translator had enough schmaltz to figure out what needed to be done and did it.

If I were to say the following word to you, what would come to your mind? Be of good cheer. I’m not going to ask each of you separately. Temple. A large Baptist church somewhere, perhaps. First Baptist Temple of Sarnia, Ontario. A magnificent Oriental structure, the Mosque of Omar, perhaps. A cathedral, whether the older style with a long nave like Salisbury or the relatively new one at Liverpool.

Or because I’m speaking in a Bible conference, if you are biblically literate, you might think of Solomon’s temple with its peculiar structure: the Holy Place followed by the Most Holy Place behind the curtain, or its replacement, the rather minor affair built after the exile and then refurbished rather lavishly at the command of Herod the Great.

The passage before us speaks of Christians collectively as a temple, but I doubt if many of us, when we heard the word temple, thought immediately, “Church, and I’m part of this temple,” but here, that is how Peter wants us to think. If we are to understand what Peter is getting at, there are two things we must grasp first, things both he and his readers took for granted.

First, the pattern of the temple on which he bases his exposition, the Old Testament tabernacle and temple from the time of Solomon on. Some of the things associated with this temple are of paramount importance if we are to understand this passage. The temple was God’s institution. The tabernacle before it was God’s institution.

Repeatedly, we find in the book of Exodus … repeatedly … Moses was to build the tabernacle exactly according to the pattern he saw on the mount. The phrase is repeated in one form or another again and again and again and again, and the writer to the Hebrews picks that up and says the reason is because the exact pattern was symbol-laden and it finally pointed in various ways to the ultimate sacrifice offered by the ultimate priest before the ultimate Holy of Holies to deal, finally, with our sin, so God wanted the pattern to be exact.

The temple and the tabernacle before it was God’s institution, not only because of where it was leading in the sweep of redemptive history, but it was his institution to define the people of God. This was for the covenant community. It was for the Israelites, and to it they were to gather on their high days. It was, moreover, the center of God’s self-disclosure. This is the center from which the Word of the Lord was to spring.

It was the center where God manifested himself in glory, especially on the high day of Yom Kippur where the priest would enter into the Most Holy Place just once a year with the blood of a bull and the blood of a goat to atone both for his sins and for the sins of the people, and God would manifest himself in glory before the priest, with the priest serving as a kind of mediating officer as God displayed himself between the wings of the carved cherubim over the ark of the covenant.

Moreover, it was the center of the entire sacrificial system which dealt with sin. It was the center of corporate praise, of corporate worship and adoration, not only because to it the people were to gather on the high feast days, but from the time of David with the tabernacle and Solomon with the temple, from those days on, increasingly there were sophisticated music and choir systems. It was the center of priestly activity. All of these things both Peter and his readers would presuppose and bear in mind when Peter starts talking about the church as the temple of God.

Secondly, the substance and context of the Old Testament passages Peter quotes in these verses. We shall look at them in due course, at least two of them in some detail, but it is important to recall first-century Bible readers often understood the Old Testament context and would bring it to bear when a text was cited.

If I suddenly said to you, “There is, therefore, now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus,” many of you would say, “Romans, chapter 8, the transition after Romans, chapter 7, and going on, then, toward the great golden chain toward the end of chapter 8.” You know the context of Paul’s thought there, and you would bring it with you if I referred to the verse.

If I said, “He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement of our peace was upon him, and with his stripes we are healed,” you would not only say, “Isaiah 53, one of the four servant songs,” but “The man has actually quoted it from the Authorized Version.” I was brought up in it, so that still comes to mind that way. If I were to say, “God so loved the world that he gave his Son,” you would remember right away the entire context of John, chapter 3.

So also when these verses are quoted here about the Stone … the stone the builders rejected, the stone that is chosen and precious … the most informed readers, and certainly Peter’s mind as well, would immediately reflect back on the context of these passages, and we must bear them in mind as well if we are to catch the flow of Peter’s thought aright. We may usefully follow his argument in four points.

1. The construction of the temple.

Verses 4 and 5: “As you come to him …” That is, Jesus. “… the living Stone—rejected by men 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.”

At one level, these two verses are clear enough. Peter is thinking of a spiritual temple, not a granite or marble edifice. In this spiritual temple, we are told, Jesus is the massive cornerstone. In the construction of the day, this cornerstone would not only be the first stone put in place, but it would constrain the rest of the building. It would have to be firmly based, absolutely level, and exactly positioned so as to determine the angle of the walls. It was a defining stone. This massive stone would have to be straight and true.

Yet, Peter does not want to think of Jesus as an inert hunk of marble no matter how magnificent, so he calls him a living Stone, which not only means he is a person and not a hunk of granite or marble but that he is risen from the dead and alive and shapes this temple by exactly who he is. He constrains the entire construction.

Peter goes on to say in verse 5, we Christians, then, are also living stones, so the whole temple is built up into what Peter calls a spiritual house, but Peter is prepared to mix his metaphors in order to draw into the picture some things associated with the temple. We are not only here the living stones of the temple, but we are the temple’s priesthood. We offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ, which is not what the stones did; that’s what the priests did. You begin to mix the metaphor to draw in things that are associated with the temple.

More importantly, Peter tells us the cornerstone itself, Jesus, was rejected by the builders, but somehow this rejected Stone became the cornerstone anyway because this Stone was, we read, “chosen by God and precious to him.” God simply overruled the builders. This lays out the shape of the extended metaphor, the construction of the temple. What authorizes this extended metaphor in Peter’s mind? To put it another way, apart from his bold say so, why should we Christians think of ourselves in these terms?

2. The foundation of this temple according to Scripture.

Verses 6 to 8. Here we are treated to three Old Testament quotations that we must examine in turn. The first is Isaiah 28:16 quoted in 1 Peter 2:6. “For …” Here’s the grounding in Peter’s mind. “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.’ ”

In the context of Isaiah 28, the Old Testament prophet speaks against the princes and leaders of Jerusalem who thought their city could never be overthrown. “The northern tribes could go off into captivity (that’s conceivable), and no doubt God could come upon us in temporal judgments, but to imagine Jerusalem could be overthrown with the temple, that’s just outside the realm of plausibility, for this is the place where God has chosen to disclose himself. This is Zion, God’s holy hill! This is the place of the temple. This is where God manifests himself in his glory!”

To think this city could be overthrown is simply unbelief from their perspective. They think they are secure, so in due course somewhat later on, they reject the preaching of Jeremiah who warns the city will be destroyed if they continue to rebel against God. Likewise, the exiles can’t really believe the messages of Ezekiel to the effect the city would be overthrown. They just don’t have categories for it because they think they are secure in the shadow of the temple.

Isaiah, a century and a half earlier than the destruction of the temple, nevertheless, begins to mock the kind of overweening confidence of the leaders. Isaiah 28:14: “Therefore hear the word of the Lord, you scoffers who rule this people in Jerusalem. You boast, ‘We have entered into a covenant with death, with the grave we have made an agreement. When an overwhelming scourge sweeps by, it cannot touch us, for we have made a lie our refuge and falsehood our hiding place.’ ”

What they mean by this first part is what’s critical here. “We have entered into a covenant with death.” It is as if they are so sure they are safe that they have entered into a contract, a deal with death and hell, as it were, so that even when scourges sweep through the entire region, they will be safe.

“So this is what the Sovereign Lord says: ‘See, I lay a stone in Zion, a tested stone, a precious cornerstone for a sure foundation; the one who trusts will never be dismayed. I will make justice the measuring line and righteousness the plumb line; hail will sweep away your refuge, the lie, and water will overflow your hiding place. Your covenant with death will be annulled.’ ” In other words, “Your so-called deal so that you’ll escape, in fact, will be abrogated. It will be annulled. You’ll be wiped out.”

“Your agreement with the grave will not stand. When the overwhelming scourge sweeps by, you will be beaten down by it.” In God’s answer, what he’s really saying is, “Your presumed security isn’t secure. I am the one who lays in Zion the secure cornerstone, and only those who are solidly grounded on this cornerstone are secure.”

As far as I can see, that is part of the background to Jesus’ words in Matthew 16 and parallels. Do you recall what he says? “I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not overcome it.” That is to say, “This is the secure cornerstone; that is the people who will not be overthrown.” Moreover, already in Jesus’ day in the first century, there were some Jews who understood this cornerstone in Isaiah 28:16 to refer to the coming Messiah. Peter is in no doubt at all. He insists Jesus Christ is this cornerstone, and he is built right into this temple which is here the church.

That means the kind of temple that withstands the torrents of death and hell is not the kind that was built in his day on Mount Zion. More, this stone, Isaiah says and Peter quotes the words, is chosen and precious. The word rendered precious in English is used sometimes in the ancient world for what we would call precious stones, precious gems, but it was also used for building stones of great value such as a first-class, giant cornerstone. We might render, “Chosen of God and of enormous value.”

At the level of the metaphor, the picture is clear enough. Jesus is this massive, constraining cornerstone, and the whole church is being built up. That is the way it works out at the level of the metaphor itself. A flood of truths and passages come to mind, do they not, that echo the notion that Jesus is the chosen and valued one. Even at Jesus’ baptism, the voice from heaven says, “You are my Son whom I love. With you I am well pleased.”

Isaiah 42 has God saying, “Here is my servant whom I uphold, my chosen one in whom I delight. I will put my Spirit on him.” Twice in John’s gospel, we are told, “The Father loves the Son.” God is totally satisfied with this servant, with his Son, and vindicates him in the resurrection and ascension.

To some, then, Christ is indeed precious. To some he is precious, to those who believe (verse 7), and we are built up as living stones, but this does not mean everyone thinks so highly of him, so we are introduced to the second quotation, this time from Psalm 118, verse 22, cited in verse 7. “Now to you who believe, this stone is precious. But to those who do not believe, ‘The stone the builders rejected has become the capstone.’ ”

Jesus himself quotes this verse. Undoubtedly, Peter heard him do it. On this point, Peter learned his hermeneutics, his way of interpreting the Old Testament, from Jesus. The clearest account is in Matthew 21, verses 33 to 42, the parable of the wicked tenants where the master sent his various messengers to collect some of the produce and the profit from the field and they were simply beaten up. Eventually, the master sends his own son (“They will reverence my son”), but they killed him.

Thus, Jesus speaks of the leaders of Israel killing the Son of God sent to them, sent to them to receive what is but his due. Then he quotes this passage. “The stone the builders rejected has become the capstone.” Then Jesus adds in Matthew 21, “Therefore I tell you that the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people who will produce its fruit.”

But as for the builders who rejected God’s cornerstone, Jesus goes on so far as to say (Matthew 21:44), “He who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; but he on whom it falls will be crushed.” Do you hear the note of exclusiveness in this? Jesus insists unambiguously that men and women are redeemed by him.

He is the one who constrains and defines what the locus of the people of God really is. He does not see himself as one optional leader in an entire history; he sees himself as the fulfillment of the Old Testament expectations, the one on whom all of these predictions are now focused, and apart from him, there is no salvation.

To defy him or to confront him, to disown him, to dismiss him is, in fact, to be crushed by him. Peter understood that message well, too, so that in his sermon in Acts, chapter 4, he says to readers in his own day, “Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved.”

Do not be confused by the word capstone here. It’s probably not a very good translation. The word simply means principle stone. When we think of capstone, we might think of a stone at the cap of a peak, and then you start wondering if you have two stones: a cornerstone down here and a capstone at the top. It simply means the principle stone. It’s still referring to the cornerstone. The Stone the builders rejected has become the principle stone, the cornerstone.

The whole point, then, is further elucidated by the next Scripture citation, this time from Isaiah, chapter 8, verse 14. It is important once again to note something of the context. Begin in Isaiah 8, verse 11. Here the nation is threatened once again with a preliminary judgment. The people are fearful. According to Isaiah, “This is what the Lord says to me with his strong hand upon me, warning me not to follow the way of the people …” The current faddish opinions as to what the solution should be.

This is what God said. “Do not call conspiracy everything these people call a conspiracy; do not fear what they fear, and do not dread it. The Lord Almighty is the one you are to regard as holy, he is the one you are to fear, he is the one you are to dread. He will be a sanctuary; but for both houses of Israel he will be a stone that causes men to stumble and a rock that causes them fall.

And for the people of Jerusalem he will be a trap and a snare. Many of them will stumble; they will fall and be broken, they will be snared and captured.” That is what this passage says. Peter drives the lesson home in 2:8. “They stumble because they disobey the message—which is also what they were destined for.”

Recently, a friend of mine, a missionary in Central America, after having been away from Central America and from his home country, the United States, being away, in fact, here in England where he was pursuing doctoral studies, stopped in America on the way back to Costa Rica. He was in his home church doing a bit of deputation work for a few months before he went back to the seminary where he is teaching in Costa Rica.

He sent me a long email of his impressions. He said, “The dominant feeling I get increasingly in Western churches is of fear. People are afraid. They are afraid of what is going on in the culture. They are afraid of what is going on in the society. They are afraid of the meaningless bound up with their young people. They are afraid of their own futures. Out of fear, they lash out, they score points, and they build empires. We are a frightened people, a frightened culture.”

Of course, that’s not the only possible analysis. There are other strands in any complicated culture, whether in Great Britain or in the US, but it was insightful. In times of rapid transition it’s not uncommon to find hearts of people failing them for fear. Then eventually, because we’re afraid of what’s going on, we start lashing out. We start trying to erect instant defenses. We think we are speaking prophetically when we may simply be expressing our anger, venting our spleen.

Then we may need to hear again what God said to Isaiah in another time of massive change and threat. “Do not call conspiracy what the current population views as conspiracy. Do not fear what they dread. The Lord shall be your fear, and he himself will be the stone that will crush the people where they reject him.” Yahweh will be that stone, God himself. Fear him.

Now Peter picks up these words and applies them to Jesus. “ ‘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.” It’s important to keep both parts of the latter half of verse 8 in view.

If you simply take the last clause and absolutize it, then you can’t believe the first part. “If they disbelieve, if they stumble … It’s what they were destined for, so you can scarcely blame them, can you?” If you absolutize the first part, then it almost sounds as if God is asleep at the switch and sort of let that one get by him. “They stumble because they disobey the message. Oops. I hadn’t thought of that.”

In fact, in Scripture, the people of God are compatibilists. Compatibalism is a convenient word for describing a certain kind of theological position. Compatibalism is the view that, on the one hand, that God’s sovereignty and, on the other, human accountability are mutually compatible. They’re not mutually incoherent.

If I could summarize two statements that are both biblically defensible and both true, I would put it this way: On the one hand, in Scripture, God is absolutely sovereign, but his sovereignty never mitigates human accountability. On the other hand, in Scripture, human beings are morally accountable. We believe, we disbelieve, we choose, we disobey, we obey, but our moral accountability never renders God utterly contingent. It never makes him entirely secondary, a mere reactor.

How those things are mutually compatible is a very complex issue. I think it is easier to show there are excellent biblical reasons for believing they are not incompatible, and they are certainly both taught in Scripture, which, for me, makes them entirely compatible, so I believe in compatibalism, but if you push me hard enough, I can’t prove them, because they ultimately involve some things about how God rules and operates in time and eternity that stretches my mind to the farthest horizons of my poor limits, and I see some things I just don’t know and I can’t explain.

I think I can get far enough to show you can hold both of these statements to be true without necessary logical contradiction. In fact, I think you can go farther and show how both are taught repeatedly in Scripture, but to try to go so far as to tie them all up into a neat package that is logically explained, it’s beyond me. If one of you has it figured out, please come and tell me afterwards, because I don’t know.

I do see, however, in Scripture these things are utterly crucial for the Christian. They recur in many forms. Perhaps the most dramatic place is in Acts, chapter 4. Here there is a whiff of persecution first beginning to break out in the church. Peter and John, then, return to their own people, the text says, to Christians who have gathered together in prayer.

The Christians in their prayer cite Psalm 2, which talks about the heathen gathering, the nations gathering against the Lord and against his anointed. They say in Acts, chapter 4, verse 27, “Indeed Herod and Pontius Pilate and the rulers of the Jews conspired against your holy servant Jesus.” In other words, they saw all of the events that led up to Calvary as a massive and evil conspiracy. Then they add, “They did what your hand had decided beforehand should be done.”

The fact of the matter is if you don’t believe both of those verses, it’s very difficult to be a Christian. If you only believe the first part, that the cross was nothing more than the product of a human conspiracy, then from God’s perspective it was a bit of an accident. It’s now the case that you cannot picture the cross as something planned in the mind of God from eternity past.

It happened simply because Pontius Pilate was a corrupt and fearful governor. It happened because the Jewish leaders of the time were afraid of political anarchism. It happened because Herod was a weak and petty king up in the north and came from a bad line. It happened for all the wrong reasons, but it wasn’t something God designed, in which case you can’t make sense of the entire history of the Bible that has all of those pictures of a lamb being sacrificed and a priestly system and a temple system, which the Bible insists find their ultimate fulfillment in Jesus Christ.

On the other hand, if you just believe the second verse (verse 28) and forget the first part … “Well, you know, the cross happened because God ordained it, and because God ordained it, therefore, you can’t very well blame Herod. I mean, it was going to happen because it was going to happen. God ordained it. God knew Pilate was going to wash his hands, and God knew and planned in advance that the leaders were going to act this way, so you can’t blame them, can you? God did it.”

But if you can’t blame any human beings for the death of Jesus because God is sovereign, I don’t see how you can blame any human beings for anything because God is sovereign. If nobody is responsible, you don’t need a Christ on the cross. If you accept the first verse, you’ve destroyed the cross because God didn’t plan it (it was an accident), and if you accept only the second verse, you don’t need the cross because nobody is guilty. Instead of being compatibilists, we’re now determinists. “What will be, will be. Que sera sera” That’s it.

But that’s not the way the Christian thinks. The Christian reads the Bible, and in passage after passage after passage, learns that human beings are responsible. I am responsible for God. At the end of the day, I end up doing what, for all kinds of corrupt and misguided reasons, I want to do, and I am responsible for that. I’m responsible for what I say, what I do, and what I think.

On the other hand, God is so sovereign that even in my most obtuse wickedness I never escape the outermost bounds of his sovereignty, and in his wise purposes, he brings good even out of evil. He brings good even out of the evil that drove Jesus to the cross so the human beings who drove him there, not only Herod and Pontius Pilate and Jewish leaders but you and me in our sin, are still responsible for all we do even though God in his perfect wisdom was so shaping the events that even in the context of our massive rebellion and evil he was bringing triumph out of sheer grace.

That’s compatibalism. Peter simply presupposes it. “They stumble because they disobey the message—which is also what they were destined for.” Even when this happens, you must not think God was asleep at the switch. God still remains sovereign even in these matters, even in pronouncing judgment.

Now the temple is being built. Here is the foundation of the temple, Jesus Christ himself as grounded in Scripture authority. The temple is being built into an entire edifice with Christ as the chief cornerstone and ourselves as stones.

3. The significance of the temple.

Verses 9 and 10: “But you are a chosen people …” The but at the beginning of the verse is over against those who have disobeyed the message. Over against them, “You are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, 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.”

Here the primary Old Testament allusion rather than a quotation is Exodus, chapter 19, especially verse 6, but it is worth reading verses 4 to 6. Moses, speaking for God, addresses the Israelites as they have emerged from slavery in Egypt and are about to receive the Law. God says to them, “You yourselves have seen what I did to Egypt, and how I carried you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. 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 …’ ”

God is never a tribal God. “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.” Now Peter, certainly aware of these words, speaks to the church which, in this case, has a great number of Gentiles in it and says, “But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood …”

Note the pattern in the Old Testament in Exodus 19, verses 4 to 6. God redeemed the people. He claimed them as his people, distinct from all other nations, so they would be his people. He commissions them, then, as a kingdom, a body of priests. That is, the domain of his particular rule, a king dominion you might almost say, the domain of his particular and immediate rule even though he’s sovereign over everything, and of priests who offer up worship and praise to him and in some ways mediate the glory of God to others.

He dwells among them. He tells them to be holy as he is holy and commissions them as a kingdom of priests. Yet, we know what happened. Eventually, the declension is so bad that in the days of Hosea, which is still only eighth century BC, they had become Lo-Ammi, not my people, no longer the people of God, but God in his mercy looks forward to the time when he will restore them as his people.

Thus, Isaiah says, “You will be called priests of the Lord. You will be named ministers of our God.” Indeed, some Old Testament prophets foresee an extension even to the enemy nations so that they, too, become part of God’s people. In Isaiah 19, we read, “In that day Israel will be the third, along with Egypt and Assyria …” Proverbial enemies of God and enemies of the covenant community. “… a blessing on the earth. The Lord Almighty will bless them, saying, ‘Blessed be Egypt my people, Assyria my handiwork, and Israel my inheritance.’ ”

It is almost as if they are saying, in effect, “If God’s grace can extend so far as to reach rebellious Israel, it can certainly extend so far as to reach pagan idolaters.” This is the sort of fulfillment, then, Peter here proclaims. Here there is a new covenant temple, a spiritual temple. The grace of God that could restore a disobedient and rebellious Israel could extend to wicked pagans like you and me.

Of course, many of the elements bound up with the temple come across, do they not? A spiritual house, we are told. What is the temple? It’s the place that defines the people of God. What is the temple? It’s the place where God manifests himself. That is what the church is. The church as a whole defines us, and not only so, it is the place where God manifests himself in his glory, in his beauty.

There are obvious changes, of course. We’re not made of granite. This is a spiritual house. Now there is one people made up of Jew and Gentile, a theme greatly celebrated in Ephesians 2. Moreover, this temple is not built and this unity is not achieved on the basis of the Old Testament covenant but by the coming of Jesus Christ and his cross work, so he is the cornerstone on which the entire new temple is built.

This is the people of God, God’s chosen people, a kingdom, a priesthood, the particular domain of God’s saving reign, a people given over to praising God and to mediating God’s glory to the world. We are, thus, the people of God, and this symbolism is taken up in various ways throughout the New Testament.

In the last two chapters of the Bible, we’re told there is a new heaven and a new earth. Then the metaphor changes. Instead, the seer, John, sees the city, the New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven. On the one hand, he says, “This city was built like a perfect cube.” That’s not the way you build a city. You don’t have to think of this as a literal city. What is the only perfect cube in all of Scripture? It’s the Most Holy Place.

The whole New Jerusalem is the Most Holy Place, which is why in chapter 22, John says, “I saw no temple in that city for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple.” You’re mixing your metaphors so as to say the whole city is the Most Holy Place where God is, in all of his glory.

To change it again, God himself is the temple. He is the defining thing in the temple, and we are in his presence all the time. No more mediators. No more priests. No more sacrificial system. No more veil between. There is no mediation necessary. We are forever in the presence of the King, and already we, the church, are the temple of God, the locus where God shows forth his glory, God’s mediating agents in this wicked world. That is how we are to view the church.

Moreover, this passage tells us not only what we are but what we are to do. “But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.” It’s a bit like Hebrews 13:15, isn’t it? “Through Jesus, therefore, let us continually offer to God a sacrifice of praise—the fruit of lips that confess his name.”

We do not offer sacrifices of lambs and bulls and goats. No. Absolutely not, for the final sacrifice has come. We offer the sacrifice of praise. Praise in Scripture is always secondary. Always. It is secondary as a response to God’s primary activity. God acts and we offer praise. It’s not as if we sort of praise him enough so he can be coerced into doing something. Christians praise because of what God has done and of who he is. We offer praise. We offer worship.

Have you noticed how the worship language works in the New Testament? In the Old Testament, besides the private worship language of some psalms, most of the worship language of priests offering sacrifice and that sort of thing is bound up, once the tabernacle is constructed, with the tabernacle, and once the temple is constructed with the temple.

The people were to go up to the temple. The people were to offer praises and sacrifices at the temple. That’s where they were to offer their animals. Of course, sometimes it was done elsewhere, but that was the structure of things. There were set times and set feasts. There were sets songs and set praises. There were set priests and set sacrifices. It was constrained by ritual and structure and time and orderliness.

Now you come to the New Testament and you read a passage like this: “I beseech you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies as living sacrifices which is your spiritual worship.” We don’t offer bulls and goats anymore. We offer ourselves in gratitude to God for what he is and who he is.

It’s not, then, as if we have to go up to Jerusalem or up to Rome or even up to Canterbury. It’s not that at all. Rather, what does Jesus say in John, chapter 4? “Neither in Jerusalem nor on Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal, following the particular traditions of the Jews and the Samaritans, but an hour is coming and now is when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth.” We’re not constrained by place.

I know we like to think of our local churches or our cathedrals or whatever as peculiarly sanctified in some way. The fact of the matter is they are not! They may be sanctified in the sense they’ve been devoted to God for a particular purpose, but they don’t function in the Christian church the way the tabernacle or the temple functioned under the terms of the old covenant. Basically, they are simply hunks of concrete. That’s it. However devoted to God for a particular thing, it’s not as if they have some particular covenantal tie to them.

We are the temple of God. That’s what the New Testament says. Thus, similarly, I worry just a wee bit in our churches when we think of worship as something that is done between 10:00 and 11:00 on a Sunday morning or still worse between and 10:00 and 10:30 on a Sunday morning before the preacher starts. You have a worship leader. That’s when you have worship. Then the worship leader sits down and, presumably, you don’t have worship because you don’t have a worship leader. Now you have a preacher.

You don’t have any worship when you have a preacher, do you? But that’s not the way the new covenant works at all. There is a sense in which all of our life under the new covenant is worship offered up to God, so much so that some Christian leaders (here I think they’ve gone too far) have actually said the church does not gather for worship; the church gathers for instruction or the church gathers for edification. That’s not quite right either.

The idea, rather, is, when Christians all through the week offer themselves up to God, they offer themselves up to God in worship in their homes, in their work, in their private lives, on their knees in their devotions, in their families and elsewhere. They offer themselves up to God constantly in worship, and when they come together on the Lord’s Day, they continue in worship.

Now it’s corporate worship, which includes the singing of praise and prayer and listening to the Word of God and edifying one another as we die to ourselves and open up ourselves to God and offer ourselves to him in the sacrifice of praise. If I could wield a sort of evangelical papal wand, I would immediately ban the expression worship leader.

Here I thought I was going to get tarred and feathered. It’s not that we don’t need excellent musicians like these people here. I don’t want to call them worship leaders, though, because that suddenly means the rest of the service is not worship or what we’re doing all week is not worship, and that’s too constraining, it’s too narrow, and it’s too limiting. We are not to return to some notion of worship that is merely cultic.

Here we are always, constantly the people of God declaring the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. Thus, Paul can go so far in Romans 15, verse 16, as to see his evangelism as a priestly worshiping activity because that, too, involves self-sacrifice. It involves mediation. Thus, in our evangelism we are worshiping God.

There is a sense, thus, that our evangelism is doxological. It is worshipful. Otherwise, our worship might well become evangelistic, too, as we proclaim God to the people. All of this is the fruit of sheer gratitude, for we declare the praises of him who called us out of darkness into his marvelous light. Even this last metaphor is wonderful, isn’t it? Out of darkness into light …

We probably don’t appreciate it quite as much as they did in the first century because it is difficult for us to find a place where we really are in the dark. We have so much artificial light all around that we don’t really appreciate how dark darkness can be, but if you’re used to camping in the wilds of Scotland miles and miles from any city on a dark night when your batteries go out and you don’t have any sort of torch, then you begin to get a notion of what darkness can be.

In our family, we sometimes take holidays in the north woods of Wisconsin or up in the UP, the Upper Peninsula, of Michigan. You can be 50 miles from the nearest village. Then, when you step outside, you see what it’s like to be dark if there are no clouds. Then, when you look up on a bright night, you can see 3,000 stars. It’s fantastic. You never see them in London, ever. We know, then, something of the difference between darkness and light, and our salvation has taken us out of darkness and into his most marvelous light. We celebrate it in our songs.

Long my imprisoned spirit lay,

Fast bound in sin and nature’s night;

Thine eye diffused a quickening ray—

I woke, the dungeon flamed with light;

My chains fell off, my heart was free,

I rose, went forth, and followed Thee.

That is the kind of view of redemption that Peter presupposes here.

4. The holiness of the temple.

Verses 11 and 12: “Dear friends, I urge you, as aliens and strangers in this world, to abstain from sinful desires, which war against your soul. Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.”

Probably, there is still some echo of the temple metaphor dragged along this far in the chapter. It’s not quite certain. There is certainly an ongoing contrast between the people of God and the surrounding world and the people of God mediating God’s truth and God’s glory and presence to the world, which is a priestly function, but now the practical entailments of what it means to be the people of God are briefly spelled out.

There is a sense, you see, in which Christians will be alien in a broken, rebellious world that pits things against God. In some sense, the church is to see itself in that sort of way. Peter stresses the following parameters.

A. Here, we are strangers and aliens, so remember your heavenly citizenship.

Note here the massive antithesis between the church, on the one hand, and the world, on the other. It’s hard sometimes for us to know exactly what it means to be an alien if we’ve never traveled abroad, but if we’ve traveled abroad, we know a bit of what it means to be an alien. If I am on the tube in London and I see some African come in with a wonderfully colorful robe, inevitably my eye is drawn to him. I don’t mean to be rude and stare in some gawkish, barbarian way; nevertheless, I’m not used to seeing it, so my eye is taken that way.

Of course, I’m the comfortable one. He’s the one who is supposed to be uncomfortable because I’m, more or less, on Western turf at least, even if I’m not exactly English. My mother was born in London. That’s close enough. He doesn’t belong. Then I go off to Korea or to Mainland China or to Japan or I go off into some central African state, and I see everybody is looking at me. “What’s the matter? I’m not all that strange, am I?”

Then I look around in the tube in Japan or I’m on the fast train to Hiroshima and I notice everybody is about a half foot shorter than I am and they’re looking at me as this great big barbarian Western round-eye long-nose. I’m an alien. That’s what I am, and I have to learn to fit into another kind of culture.

B. Here, we are warriors, so remember the nature of your warfare.

He says, “As aliens and strangers in the world, abstain from sinful desires which war against your soul.” Here, the world is right within us. It’s not that we’re the church (the goody-goodies) and out there are the baddies, and we’re strangers and aliens and they may belong, but boy, are they in trouble!

There is an element of that, but the other element is the warfare in which we are involved is a warfare against sin within us. If we don’t take this warfare seriously, we won’t fight sin seriously in our own minds, in our own hearts, in our own churches.

C. Here, we are to live good lives, so remember your calling.

In the first century, it wasn’t long before Christians were suspected of all kinds of horrible things: treason against the empire because they wouldn’t offer a little bit of incense to the emperor, which from Caligula on insisted he was God even within his own lifetime. Christians were suspected of treason. They were suspected of cannibalism in the second century.

How are Christians going to refute that? They couldn’t take full-page ads out in the Times. They refute it by the quality of their living, so that while the libels and the criticisms run through the empire, those who come to know Christians know them to be not like that. They are people of integrity, people of honor, people of service, and people of self-sacrifice.

The most important thing we can do in the whole world when the whole world seems to be against us is to be people of integrity and godliness and self-sacrifice and love, so eventually, just by the quality of our living in addition to all of our proclaiming, people see something of the glory of God in us. Here, we are to be exemplary. Remember your ultimate vindication.

Here is the Stone—the living Stone

God’s chosen, precious cornerstone.

The builders tossed the Stone away,

But Christ, the capstone, still holds sway.

Christ, the capstone, still holds sway.

 

And all who trust him find the same

For never are they put to shame.

To those who disobey his call

He is the rock that makes them fall.

He is the rock that makes them fall.

 

We are the stones, the living stones

For Jesus Christ whose death atones

For all our sin has made us light

Transforming our immoral night.

Transforming our immoral night.

 

A holy nation, royal priests

Alike the greatest and the least.

We sing his praise; his grace applaud.

We are the temple of our God.

We are the temple of our God.

Let me conclude with a couple of observations. Not very long ago in another country, I was asked to speak from this chapter. They gave me the passage, and they gave me the title. The title was, A Peculiar People: The Identity of the Church in a Neo-Pagan World. Well, they got the word peculiar, of course, from the Authorized Version, which uses it in verse 9 (“We are a peculiar people”), but some of us have thought Christians have been pretty peculiar, all right. Very peculiar.

There are huge ways in which Christians must not be peculiar. Odd. Weird. Bizarre. Yet, and yet, when all is said and done, there are some ways in which we ought to be peculiar, at least two domains from this passage: the domain of faith and gratitude. We are the temple of God, chosen in Christ, bought, constrained, and shaped by the cornerstone, called of God to be God’s kingdom and priests to utter his praises to the nations.

In the domain of conduct, of lifestyle priorities, here too, we must be peculiar to those who are outside. That is something, then, that is going to be spelled out in the following verses, as we shall see tomorrow, but already we are to abstain from sinful desires, we are told. We are to watch our thoughts. We are to think differently about our vocation. We are to think differently about our families. We are to think differently about sexuality. We are to think differently about our pocketbooks. In all of those ways, we belong to God.

We are the people of God, over against a new magazine called Self. I don’t know if it circulates in this country. It’s circulating widely in North America. It’s just called Self. The latest issue, May ‘99 (I haven’t seen June) … It’s not that I subscribe, in case you’re worried, but sometimes in moments of perversity I flip through these things in shops.

In May of ‘99, there is an essay on food, “When Healthy Eating Isn’t Healthy,” on sex, “Women Who Won’t Take No For An Answer,” on the body, “Don’t Waste Your Workout: Ten Fitness Do’s and Don’ts,” on money and romance, “How to Manage Money and Love.” Self. Self. Self. Self. Self.

It’s merely making explicit what is the dominant god of this age anyway, but God in his mercy calls us to die to self, for he knows full well if you serve self you find nothing but the grave. You are crushed by the cornerstone. Jesus himself insisted the one who dies to self lives, the one who loses himself finds himself, and the one who gives receives. We think differently. We are called to be a holy people. We are the temple of our God. Amen.