Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the Christian life from 1 Peter 2:13–3:12
Male: “Submit yourselves for the Lord’s sake to every authority instituted among men: whether to the king, as the supreme authority, or to governors, who are sent by him to punish those who do wrong and to commend those who do right. For it is God’s will that by doing good you should silence the talk of foolish men.
Live as free men, but do not use your freedom as a cover-up for evil; live as servants of God. Show proper respect to everyone: Love the brotherhood of believers, fear God, honor the king. Slaves, submit yourselves to your masters with all respect, not only to those who are good and considerate, but also to those who are harsh.
For it is commendable if a man bears up under the pain of unjust suffering because he is conscious of God. But how is it to your credit if you receive a beating for doing wrong and endure it? But if you suffer for doing good and you endure it, this is commendable before God. To this you were called, because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps. ‘He committed no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth.’
When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly. 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. For you were like sheep going astray, but now you have returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls.
Wives, in the same way be submissive to your husbands so that, if any of them do not believe the word, they may be won over without words by the behavior of their wives, when they see the purity and reverence of your lives. Your beauty should not come from outward adornment, such as braided hair and the wearing of gold jewelry and fine clothes.
Instead, it should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God’s sight. For this is the way the holy women of the past who put their hope in God used to make themselves beautiful. They were submissive to their own husbands, like Sarah, who obeyed Abraham and called him her master. You are her daughters if you do what is right and do not give way to fear.
Husbands, in the same way be considerate as you live with your wives, and treat them with respect as the weaker partner and as heirs with you of the gracious gift of life, so that nothing will hinder your prayers. Finally, all of you, live in harmony with one another; be sympathetic, love as brothers, be compassionate and humble.
Do not repay evil with evil or insult with insult, but with blessing, because to this you were called so that you may inherit a blessing. For, ‘Whoever would love life and see good days must keep his tongue from evil and his lips from deceitful speech. He must turn from evil and do good; he must seek peace and pursue it. For the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous and his ears are attentive to their prayer, but the face of the Lord is against those who do evil.’ ”
This is the Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Let’s bow together again in prayer.
Our gracious Father and our God, we are so grateful to you that by your mercy, Lord, we can come to you this morning. Lord, we thank you for the comfort of these words, that your eyes are on the righteous. Your ears are attentive to their prayer. Lord, we bless you for that one who wounded for our transgressions, who committed no sin, on whose back our sins were visited, that in him we rebels have become the righteousness of God through faith.
We bless you that we bear the title righteous because of that saving work of Jesus and that transforming work of your Spirit in our hearts so that we, once the sons and daughters of ignorance and night, may now dwell in your eternal light because of your eternal love. We therefore come to you, our Father, not on the basis of our own righteousness but again on the basis of Jesus crucified and risen for us.
Lord, it’s a comfort to us to know that you, the God of all the earth, do set your face against evil. We thank you, Lord, that evil as we see it and as we know it has a terminus, has an end. You, the Lord God Almighty, have in your sovereign grace and purposes determined to bring your kingdom in and to bring evil to an end.
We pray in our troubled world this morning for those areas where evil seems to know no bounds, where evil seems to have almost become incarnate, that you, O God, would have mercy and you, the Lord of all the earth, would be gracious. We again think of places like Kosovo and Sudan and the interminable situations, Lord, on our own doorstep, with the fragile peace process threatening to break down finally. O God, be merciful we pray.
You’ve told us, Lord, in this portion of your Word to honor the king. We want to pray for our own land, for those who have the rule over us, for our royal family, for our parliament, for our government, for our prime minister, and ask, O God, that they may rule in the fear of you, the Lord. We want to pray, our Father, for ourselves that we, as again we’ve been instructed, may love each other, we may love the brotherhood, we may know what it is each other’s burdens to bear in the communities of your people in which you’ve set us in our home situations.
We ask you, Lord, for those churches from which we’ve come where there is bitterness and sadness and gossip and intrigue, that, O God, you would visit those local churches with your life-giving Spirit, bringing true repentance and true harmony so that we may live in harmony with one another, being sympathetic, loving as brothers, and being compassionate and humble we pray.
O God, we don’t want bigger churches. We just simply pray for better churches than what we know. Lord, we don’t want churches that are just full of activity, but Lord, we want churches that are full of health and life and spiritual vitality. O God, be merciful to our churches we pray. Lord, we pray for our homes.
Again, we feel the pain of these instructions of wives and husbands, where that has gone wrong. Some of us come from very broken and dysfunctional homes. Some of us have been through the trauma of a broken marriage, of feeling cheated, Lord, or whatever. We bring that to you, our God, and pray for our homes and our marriages, that they may reflect the grace of you, our Father.
We think, Lord, too, in our context, not so much of the slavery that some of your servants worked under, but some of us, Lord, feel we’re slaving away in the occupations you’ve placed us in, where we feel we’re unjustly treated, and again we ask that, Lord, in the workplace, in the marketplaces in which you have placed us, we may serve you wholeheartedly and not just with eye service as men pleasers but doing the will of God from our hearts.
O God, we thank you for your grace that reaches not merely into the private sector of our hearts but into all the public spaces of the whole totality of our lives, and we ask you, our Father and our God, that in the totality of our living, in all things, Jesus Christ, your Son, our Lord, may be glorified.
Now Lord, as your servant comes to open up this particular passage from your Word, we pray that you would anoint him afresh, that you’d give him great liberty, and that as he seeks to explain and apply this truth to us it may come, Lord, in the power of the Spirit so that, Lord, we’re not merely informed and not only instructed but, Lord, we’re not only even inspired but by your Spirit we are challenged and transformed.
We are changed to be better men and women, more into the image of Christ than we’ve ever been before. To that end, Lord, open our eyes. Open our hearts. Open our ears, Lord, to hear your truth, and in your mercy bend and incline our wills afresh to your obedience. We ask all these things in the name of him who loved us and gave himself for us, Jesus, your Son, our Redeemer, amen.
Don Carson: Have you ever done any checking to see just how accurate are those films that claim to preserve at least the main thrust of some historical event? A couple of years ago, they released The Ghost and the Darkness. I don’t know if you saw it. It was about two killer lions in Africa almost a century ago who developed a taste for human flesh.
They kept attacking crews of railroad workers, so severely in fact, despite the best efforts to fight them off, that the railroad construction was shut down, and they brought in two hunters, according to this film. Inevitably, there were various disasters and action scenes and so forth. The most successful of the two hunters inevitably sounded a bit like 1990s Hollywood, but apart from such anachronisms, many people said it was fairly accurate.
Except that a couple of Christian friends did some research and discovered that it was based on an eyewitness account written by a Christian, in fact. There was a missionary in the film presentation. Inevitably, he was portrayed as a bit of a twit. In what actually happened, however, the missionary had taken one of the lead roles.
The reason these two lions had developed a taste for human flesh was because that particular ethnic group in Africa had the habit of putting out their elderly, their insane, and their infirm on the bank of a river where the lions came, so as a result, that is the way they got rid of the useless members of their society, and the lions had developed a habit of enjoying human flesh. The missionary begged them to change this habit, and they would not.
Eventually, he was the one who called in the big gun, and in due course the lions were killed, and so forth. Well, you can’t have missionaries heroes. You can’t criticize anybody’s ethnic roots today, and in any case, your hero has to sound like 1990s Hollywood, so everything got distorted at the values level, even though the bare bones of the narrative were more or less accurate. This goes on in a lot of films.
I confess I have not yet seen the film Titanic, partly because in North America everybody else did go, and out of sheer cussedness on my part I didn’t want to. But I note the shrewd observation of the New York Times Book Review for April 1998, page 17. In the film, as the ship is sinking (so the reviewer says; I can’t vouch for this myself), and all of the first-class passengers turn out to be third-class human beings, it turns out that all of the first-class passenger men scramble to get into the limited number of lifeboats, and it is only the hardy sailors, equipped with guns, who keep them out.
According to the actual eyewitness accounts, that is not what happened. The “women and children first” convention of the day was very strong. The male first-class passengers, without any recorded exception, who constituted virtually the Forbes 400 list of the richest men, without exception stood back. True, John Jacob Astor, reputedly then the richest man in the world, fought his way to a boat, but it was in order to put his wife into it, and then he stepped back and waved her goodbye.
Benjamin Guggenheim actually refused a seat. He couldn’t get to his wife, but he refused a seat, saying, “Tell my wife I played the game out straight to the end. No woman shall be left aboard this ship because Ben Guggenheim was a coward.” The New York Times reviewer concludes by saying, “The movie makers altered the story for good reason: no one would believe it today.” For this is the day of the self.
A friend of mine has written, “Me-first-ism has come to feel so normal that we may have difficulty believing that real people could live any other way. Having thrown off the yoke of duty and virtue through self-mastery, the modern world has swung into an orgy of pandering to the appetites of the masterful self. Advertisers promote self-ism, psychotherapists and educators reinforce it, and religion legitimates it. Self is the great idol standing at the center of our conceptual world, to which all bow down. We even have a duty-to-self ethic, as if self-denial were harmful, immoral, and deviant.”
Add to this the amazing focus on the now in our culture, without any reference to eternity; the pressures of secularization by which religious things are squeezed to the periphery of life. You can be ever so religious so long as it doesn’t affect your business or your family or how you think or what you spend your money on. It’s just something you do occasionally on Sunday, like a nice, decent, middle-class citizen should.
Grant also postmodern sensibilities in which there can be no absolute truth, no truth that is binding, no truth that is transcultural. Add to this rising biblical illiteracy so that there are very few cultural moorings left, and we begin to see why Christians, sincere Christ followers, in many Western countries may begin to feel, in the words of that old Negro spiritual, “This world is not my home; I’m just a-passin’ through.”
But that, in one sense, is how Christians felt in the first century too. At one level, Caesar was their king, their caesar, their ruler. At another level, only Jesus was their Lord, and if push came to shove, you know which Lord was superior. At the one level, there was so much pluralism in the day. In fact, the government actually fostered religious pluralism in the day. It was national policy.
When the Romans went into some new turf, they insisted that there be a god swap. The Romans would take on some of the local gods, and the locals had to take on some of the Roman gods, so that if any party were tempted to rebel, it wouldn’t be anywhere near clear which side the gods were on, which thus defused the dangerous political and nationalistic elements. In other words, in the name of empire peace, there was a push for religious pluralism.
Today, in our global village, in our multiculturalism, there are massive pushes also for many kinds of pluralism. Not only the pluralism that recognizes all kinds of distinctions and treats one another with respect, but the kind of pluralism that insists that all values and all religions and all perspectives are precisely equivalent in value and worth, in moral sensibility.
I don’t know how many learned books I’ve read that insist that child sacrifice is a good thing to those societies that practice it, because in those societies it’s very meaningful. I doubt it’s all that meaningful to the child, but perhaps I’m a little ignorant or naÔve. There are many dangers to these sorts of situations, where the church feels out of sorts with the surrounding culture.
On the one hand, there is the danger of assimilation. We know a fair bit about that in this country. On the other hand, there is the danger of embattled holy huddle thinking. We retreat into a little castle, lob out the odd grenade now and then, and call it witness. We know a fair bit about that in this country too.
We don’t engage with the world and live truly Christianly in the world. We don’t think of ourselves as living in the world but living as pilgrims and strangers with integrity in a world, which in some respects is our own and in other respects is not our home. Our citizenship is elsewhere.
Peter will not allow us to fall off on either side of those extremes. He just won’t allow it. He begins in this text with some reflections on submission and authority in verses 13–17. We begin with verse 13. I had better admit right away that in recent years there have been two interpretations of verse 13 that affect how you read the entire section before us.
The first interpretation reads verse 13 like this: “Submit yourselves for the Lord’s sake to every human creature,” to every human being. Then the notion of submission recurs in verse 18 with respect to slaves. It recurs in chapter 3, verse 1, with respect to wives, and although the word is not used in chapter 3, verse 7, with respect to husbands, it must then be assumed, because you still have that little phrase in the same way, and this governing verse in verse 13, if we take it this way, “Submit yourselves for the Lord’s sake to every human creature.”
What is valuable in this way of reading, it seems to me, is that there is a great deal of reciprocity in these matters, and there is a kind of universal appeal along various lines of self-denial in chapter 3, verses 8 and following. “Finally, all of you, live in harmony with one another; be sympathetic, love as brothers, be compassionate and humble.” I’ll come to those points in a few moments.
There have been some very fine scholars who have taken this viewpoint, including Ed Clowney in the little commentary that was pushed from this pulpit. I like Ed Clowney’s commentary a great deal, partly because it is steeped in links to the Old Testament. It gives you a whole biblical theology as well as expounding this particular epistle, but with due respect to my dear friend Ed, on this one I think he’s up the creek.
The alternative is to read this more or less as the NIV does. “Submit yourselves …” It’s literally in Greek “to every human creation.” The question is … What does that mean? “Submit yourselves to every human creation.” There’s no expression quite like that anywhere in the Bible. If “every human creation” means every human creature, then the first view is right, but that’s a strange way of talking about human beings.
Submit yourself to every human creation? Why don’t they just say submit yourself to every human or to every person? It does seem a strange way of saying things. I think it means, “Submit yourself to every creaturely structure,” or something like that. The NIV tries to paraphrase it. “Submit yourselves for the Lord’s sake to every authority instituted among men.”
The reasons for this I will list briefly. If you are intellectually tired toward the end of the week and you need a five-minute snooze, now is the time to take it. I’ll come back in and start preaching again in about five minutes, but for those of you who are interested in such details and why I take these perverse stands, even against the wisdom of an 80-year-old friend who is steeped in biblical theology, then these are my reasons, as faulty as they may be.
First, the verb to submit, both in the New Testament and in all of its occurrences I have traced so far in the first century and surrounding centuries (and I’ve traced a lot of them), in every case means submission to an authority in some sort of structure, in some sort of hierarchy, in some sort of recognition. It never, ever is used in the sense of mutual reciprocity.
“Ah,” someone says. “Yes, but what about Ephesians 5:21 where we are to submit to one another? Doesn’t that disallow everything you say?” No, it does not, because the pronoun one another sometimes suggests full reciprocity and sometimes not. It depends on the context. For example, in the Apocalypse you sometimes get people killing one another off.
Thus, we read in one chapter they killed one another. It doesn’t mean they all shot at exactly the precise instant with a scattergun so that each one managed to kill each of the others in a perfectly reciprocal way. It means there was general mayhem and slaughter. There are a lot of instances of one another that are not perfectly reciprocal. In the context of Ephesians 5:21 it is “Submit to one another.” Then it turns out to be slaves to masters, wives to husbands, children to parents.
So if you want to make this perfectly reciprocal, you have to make all of those perfectly reciprocal too, including children to parents. You have to do it. Don’t any of the male chauvinists who may be present among us run away with this. There’s more to be said. Nevertheless, lexical facts are lexical facts, and the verb to submit, both in the New Testament and in the surrounding Greek world, without exception, means to submit in some sort of ordered array.
Moreover, whether we like it or not, the verb to submit here is used in verses 13; 18, and 3:1 with respect to slaves, the submission to all authorities, specifically under governmental authority, and also wives. It is not used, whether we like it or not, with respect to masters (they’re not mentioned), with respect to kings (they’re not mentioned), or with respect to husbands. On the other hand, some of this discussion in current years, in my view, has gotten way out of hand with massive agendas.
Lest you feel put upon, it is important to remember that the apostle Paul says to husbands, “Love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her.” That is not sentimental twaddle. To love your wife as Christ loved the church cannot mean less than loving your wife self-sacrificially and for her good. So the question immediately becomes precisely what do you sacrifice for your wife for her good?
Don’t talk to me about your authority until you talk to me about your self-sacrifice for her good. There are further implications in this domain that we’ll see in due course. If you think I have already condemned myself as a miserable chauvinist, at least give me the benefit of doubt for about 40 more minutes. In short, it seems to me that Peter lays out in 2:13–17, first of all, the importance of showing proper respect to duly constituted authorities.
“Submit yourselves for the Lord’s sake to every authority instituted among men: whether to the king, as the supreme authority, or to governors, who are sent by him to punish those who do wrong and to commend those who do right. For it is God’s will that by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish men. Live as free men, but do not use your freedom as a cover-up for evil; live as [slaves] of God.”
There are several different words that could be rendered by servant or slave in the New Testament. This word must be rendered by slave, and the NIV has it wrong. Now follow this important passage. Although Peter does not try to lay out a comprehensive pattern of relationships … He is less comprehensive in this sort of house table of duties than some of the Pauline letters that talk about both slaves and masters or with respect to husbands put more emphasis on what the husbands ought to do than what the wives ought to do, as in Ephesians 5.
Here it’s not comprehensive like that. It is picking up just two or three elements. The reason, I think, he lays particular stress on how Christians are to act and react is because he is interested on how Christians should act and react when they are being unjustly exploited, when they are feeling the pressure, whether in the home, in the culture, or in the king dominion, in the society of a culture that is attacking them, that is leaning in on them, that is trying to abuse them in some way.
We are to respond in a particular way, we are told in verse 13, for the Lord’s sake. We serve and honor the Lord with such submission. Verse 14. One of the primary purposes of government is to punish those who do wrong, and Paul recognizes that that is a legitimate function of government, even of the first-century Roman government, which was often corrupt, which often had bribery in the courts. Nevertheless, in principle, Peter can appeal to this as a principle, even in a state as corrupt as that of ancient Rome.
It is important to reflect on this a little more. In some ways, this may seem to be a commonplace for us. Christians should be good citizens and that sort of thing. But when Peter wrote this, the issues were of burning importance. After all, the Old Testament saints had lived in a theocracy, a form of government in which ultimately God was the King, mediated through a human king or, earlier, through judges.
Thus, the religious dimension and the political/social dimensions were all bound up together, just as in a militant Muslim state today. Moreover, this was widely perceived to be the right way of ordering cultures in the ancient world generally. Thus, every culture had its associated gods, and if that particular culture went to war and won, then the gods were winning. If it went to war and lost, then those gods were losing, and you had to offer sacrifices to those gods to try to please them.
The social fabric, the religious fabric, loyalty to the government … It was all bound up with the same sort of fabric. There was one belt around the whole thing. But Jesus came along and established his kingdom in which the locus was not tied to a nation. The locus of the covenant community in the Old Testament was tied to a nation, the Israelites. Along comes Jesus and establishes a locus that is not tied to a particular nation.
That is one of the reasons his words, recorded in the Synoptic Gospels, are so important. “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s.” Shall we pay this to Caesar or not? After all, it has his impression on it. But if you have an impression of Caesar on it and the words over the top “Our lord and our god” in Latin, this is an exceedingly blasphemous piece. How can you touch it, let alone pay taxes with it?
According to the Old Testament theocracy, surely what we should do is rebel against this usurper. Only God is King. But if Jesus says, “Amen,” then he’s inciting the people not to pay taxes, and they’ve got him. He will be arrested. Jesus ducks all of their pressures by simply saying, “Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s …” It has his face on it. Let him have it. “… and to God the things that are God’s.”
It wasn’t just a duck. It wasn’t just a smart-mouth response to get out of a tricky situation. It was an implicit recognition of the fact that the kingdom of God then dawning was not a theocracy in the sense that the old covenant community was a theocracy. It was a God-ruled realm, but it was not a God-ruled realm whose locus was a nation. It was a transnational thing, which came to be the church.
Christians have not always recognized this point. It inevitably generates tensions, because sometimes the demands of God and the demands of the state in which we also live may be at cross purposes, and then you hear the Christians thinking their way through that sort of thing in the opening chapters of Acts. “We must obey God rather than men.” That is precisely what leads to martyrdom, bearing witness all the way to death.
We read in verse 15, “For it is God’s will that by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish men.” There are even pragmatic concerns to this perspective on things. If we live godly lives, we will silence a lot of stupid and ignorant accusations. I’ll come back to that a little more later. Verse 16: “Live as free men, but do not use your freedom as a cover-up for evil.”
In other words, we are not to see such submission as a sign of our enslavement to human authorities but as a mark of our freedom. We choose to do this. We choose to be obedient. We choose to deny ourselves precisely in order that we may serve God by submitting to the authorities that are there in the world in which we live.
This is a mark of our freedom and of our enslavement to God. Our freedom from those authorities precisely in that we choose to serve them but our enslavement to God. After all, that’s what Peter says. “It is God’s will that by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish men. Live as free men, but do not use your freedom as a cover-up for evil.” Do not let your freedom slip over into license. Live as slaves of God. This is his will; you do this because you are his slave and you are aiming to please him.
So then the summary of this in practical form is spelled out in verse 17. “Show proper respect to everyone: Love the brotherhood of believers, fear God, honor the king.” These, then, are the apostle’s preliminary reflections on submission and authority. Now we come to the hard cases. Chapter 2, verse 18, to chapter 3, verse 12.
First, he deals with slaves and likens them, finally, to Jesus. Slaves like Jesus. The word for slave in verse 18 is a different one. This one means a household servant, but almost all first-century household servants were, in fact, also slaves. I think probably the best rendering here would be something like household slaves.
Here perhaps I should introduce a small excursus on slavery in the world and in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries in particular. I do think we should think about these things. I suspect that one of the reasons why the King James Version, the Authorized Version, translated so many instances of the Greek word doulos, which really does mean slave, by servant is precisely because slave had overtones and notions connected with it that we are not quite comfortable with.
This side of the slavery that was nicely put in place under the British Empire, which reached its fruition in America, we have a heritage of things about which we’re slightly embarrassed, and we should probably think about these things. A book that has helped me a great deal in this respect is one of the thick volumes of research by Thomas Sowell, an African-American scholar, who, so far as I know, makes no pretense of being a Christian.
He remarks rightly and gives endless pages of detailed footnotes to prove the point that virtually every culture until the nineteenth century had slaves. Every major culture. The Indians had slaves. The Chinese had slaves. The Africans had slaves within Africa. Europeans often had slaves in the hinterland. The Assyrians had slaves. The Babylonians had slaves. The Israelites had slaves. Everybody had slaves. Having slaves was not extraordinary.
Thus, it was not, in one sense, on the historical scale of things, all that extraordinary that we should have slaves in the Western world as well. On the other hand, slavery in most of the ancient regimes had a variety of causes and inputs. Sometimes it was the product of military victory, but sometimes it was part of an economic system that didn’t have any bankruptcy laws.
If you went bankrupt, what do you do then? Well, then you sell yourself into servitude. You sell yourself and become a slave. That’s how you pay off your debt. If your business goes bad, you can’t claim certain redress in the courts. That’s it. You sell yourself as a slave, you and your wife and your children. If somehow your ship comes in a little later, then you can buy yourself back too, or maybe your family can buy you back.
In that sort of world, it’s part of an economic system, and if you had a good master, it might mean the difference between starving and not starving too. Moreover, not only was slavery endemic and tied in some cases to a different financial system, but it was cross-class and cross-race. In the Roman Empire, there were African slaves, African middle-class people, and African nobility.
There were British slaves and British ordinary workers and peat cutters and whatever else. There were Italian slaves. They weren’t called Italians then, but there were Roman people living in what later became Italy around Rome who were slaves, born and bred there and slaves there, and there were also Roman free citizens. So slavery was not connected to a particular race.
Now contrast slavery in the West. It was not really because of war. It was because of colonialism. We wanted workers, in the first place, for growing numbers of sugar cane fields and the like. They were only Africans, and as far as the white experience was largely concerned, all Africans were slaves. Initially, all blacks in the West were slaves. It was connected with a race, and it was impossible to think of slaves buying themselves out.
But, Thomas Sowell goes on to say, what freed slaves in the West? You must understand Sowell is a historian. He’s an African-American historian. He’s not a Christian. He very carefully tracks out the influence of Whitefield and Wesley in the Evangelical Awakening, the rise of Wilberforce ramming things through Parliament that suddenly released not only the slaves in the West Indies, but the British navy, at a time when Britannia ruled the waves, stopped the trade across the Atlantic.
Moreover, at a time when about 11 million Africans were transported to America, about 13 million were transported up into the Arabic world, and there the women usually became concubines, and the men were not allowed to marry. They were treated far more brutally, and it has to be said there is very little literature of shame in the Arabic world about that trade, unlike the literature of shame in our world, partly because of the rise of Christian conscience this side of the Evangelical Awakening.
What largely stopped that trade for a long time was, again (this is mere history), British gun boats going into the Arabian Gulf, sensitized by teaching that insisted human beings, regardless of their color, are made in the image of God and you don’t treat people like that. Now what about the New Testament? Clearly, on the one hand, the New Testament does not advocate the bloody overthrow of the Roman government. It doesn’t insist on the instant abolition of slavery.
On the other hand, slave traders in the Pastoral Epistles are condemned along with murderers, adulterers, and other public sinners. If you get rid of all slave traders because they’re sinners, sooner or later you don’t have much slavery. Moreover, when there are instructions to masters, you get increasing emphasis on treating slaves not only justly but as brothers until you come to Philemon, which is a spectacular epistle in this respect.
There is Onesimus. He has run away. Legally, Philemon could have him bumped off, executed. He could certainly be flogged as much as Philemon liked. That was all legal. There Paul writes, “But he has become a brother, so receive him as a brother. Indeed, receive him as you would receive me. If he has robbed you of anything, then put it to my account. I will repay you. Though, of course, I wouldn’t want to mention that you owe me your very soul. Nevertheless, put it to my account. I will repay you. Receive him, in fact, as Jesus Christ.”
You don’t abolish slavery that is that deeply endemic in a culture simply by passing a bunch of laws. You just don’t do it. We had the American Civil War, which finally terminated in 1865, and we’re still having bloody riots in Mississippi in 1965. No, it takes finally changes of heart. It takes the gospel. Here Peter does not venture a complete list of household duties for all sides, including Christian masters and Christian rulers.
This is less because he is not interested in such things than because he is here focusing on providing strong support for this utterly crucial truth for all Christians, that true freedom is bound up with self-denial for the sake of others. Now follow the flow in verses 18–20. The issue here is not social stability or the perpetuation of slavery, as some have charged Peter with. Rather, his focus is on the fact that any unjust suffering slaves undergo provides an opportunity to show what is intrinsically Christian.
He says, “Slaves, submit yourselves to your masters with all respect, not only to those who are good and considerate …” In which case in the ancient world they’re not much more than employers, except that you can’t go to another job. “… but also to those who are harsh. For it is commendable if a man bears up under the pain of unjust suffering because he is conscious of God. But how is it to your credit if you receive a beating for doing wrong and endure it? But if you suffer for doing good and you endure it, this is commendable before God.”
Isn’t that astonishing? Let me tell you quite frankly, as we become a more and more litigious society and a more and more secular society, we will witness in our jobs and in our homes and in our cultures more and more and more unjust things, and we will often be the victims of them, sometimes directed against us because we’re Christians but sometimes just because this is an evil world.
If, then, we get some sort of beating, whether literal or metaphorical or legal, because we have been corrupt, if we get thrown into jail because we have cheated the Inland Revenue, there’s nothing particularly honorable about that. We’re just getting what we jolly well deserve. If, on the other hand, we suffer unjustly and we handle it as Christians, there is something distinctively noble, godly, right, clean, and testifying about that. It stamps us out as Christians. That’s what Peter is saying.
It is finally tied to Jesus. Do you read verse 21? “To this you were called,” to this kind of suffering, “because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps.” This is a common New Testament theme. Philippians 1:29: “For it has been granted to you …” The idea is this is a gracious gift from God. “It has been granted to you on behalf of Christ not only to believe on him, but also to suffer for him.”
Do you know what God has graciously given to you? Faith and the privilege to get beaten up. That’s what the text says. It has been granted to you on behalf of Christ, graciously given to you. The privilege of faith, the privilege of suffering with Jesus. That’s what the text says. Now is that how you think of your role as a Christian? If not, why not? It is a constant New Testament theme.
We sing it sometimes in our choruses. “Yes, I want to know the power of the resurrection and the fellowship of his sufferings,” Philippians 3:10 puts it. The fellowship of his sufferings. This is not to show servility, despite the charges of Friedrich Nietzsche. Rather it is to demonstrate freedom to serve.
Let me tell you about Ruby. Ruby was a little black girl in Mississippi in the mid-60s. This is when the civil rights movement blew up in the United States. The Supreme Court ruled that segregated schools were unconstitutional, and overnight in the Deep South the schools had to integrate. In this particular school, when Ruby, a little black girl of about 7 or 8, first showed up, there were riots.
What the white parents did was pull out all of their kids from the school, and every day they showed up at the gates with placards and processions. They refused to let their kids go in, and they shouted hate epithets at little Ruby. She was the only black girl who showed up. It took a squadron of federal marshals to protect her as she went into school day after day. Protected by federal marshals while she was surrounded by enraged, swearing, angry, bitter, cursing white adults.
This little black girl of 8 years old, day after day, for a whole school year. She was taught by one Christian teacher in the school who braved those shouts. The thing was so interesting in the press that eventually a psychiatrist at Harvard University wanted to know more about what this was doing to that little girl. So he went South, watched her go in day after day, and got to know the parents, who were menial workers, semiliterate, godly Christians.
One day he noticed that as she was escorted in by the marshals she stopped, and then she seemed to say something for a couple of minutes, and then she walked on. Afterward, the psychiatrist asked her, “Ruby, what were you saying to those people?” She said, “I wasn’t saying anything to them.”
“But I saw you stop and talk to them. What were you saying?”
“Oh, I wasn’t talking to them. I was talking to God.”
“Were you? What were you saying?”
“Ah,” she said. “My parents have always taught me to pray for my enemies, and this morning I left so quickly I forgot, so when I heard them screaming at me, I stopped and I said, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ ” Let me tell you about Becky Atallah. Becky went to university with me at McGill. She married Ramez Atallah, another friend from McGill, who is now head of the Bible Society in Egypt.
Becky is an American, but she has learned a fair bit of Arabic, and she works with the garbage people in Cairo. One day, a 14-year-old, a garbage kid, stole their car, and when the kid was arrested and brought to court, Becky stood up and defended the kid in Arabic, describing the garbage scenes, the life, the background, the poverty, and insisted that she forgave the kid and didn’t want this case to go any farther. The case was thrown out.
Let me tell you of Pastor Yang-Won Sohn in the town of Sunchon in 1948 on the 38th parallel of Korea. A communist party came south and took over the town and killed his two boys, Matthew and John. Then the southern forces took over again, and one of the murderers from the north was caught. The people were about to execute him. The pastor stood in and insisted that he wanted to adopt him. His 13-year-old daughter insisted that she wanted him as a brother.
How different from pagan ethicists, even the best of them. Here is Seneca, roughly the same vintage as Peter. He writes, “What will the wise man do when he is buffeted? He will do as Cato did. He did not burst into a passion, did not avenge himself, did not even forgive it, but he denied its having been done.” There’s Stoicism, but it’s not Christian faith.
Then it is as if Peter simply must say more about the Lord Jesus. Verses 22–25: “He committed no sin, no deceit was found in his mouth. When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly. 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. For you were like sheep going astray, but now you have returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls.”
Now the application bursts the boundaries of Peter’s treatment of household slaves and their conduct and now applies to all Christians. This paragraph is rich in allusions to Isaiah 53. I wish I had time to unpack them. The point to recognize is that here there is an immensely deep connection between salvation and ethics. It is bound up with the cross. It’s not just that we are saved by the cross, but this salvation by the cross shapes the foundation of Christian ethics.
If you try to get Jesus as an example without seeing why Jesus went to the cross, you end up with a kind of empty sentimentalism. There is no reason for doing it. It is not bound up with anything other than a sentimental pull. If, on the other hand, you have Jesus dying for our sins and it doesn’t affect the way we live, then you have a kind of abstract theological truth and no self-denial in us. The two are massively linked.
It affects not only shepherds and overseers, who are mentioned in verse 25 … Jesus the supreme Shepherd and Overseer, whose model then becomes important for the shepherds (pastors) and overseers (bishops) in our churches in chapter 5. You can see how it applies not only to them and how they are to rule and administer, but it also applies to all Christians.
Then more quickly, women then are likened to matriarchs. Chapter 3, verses 1–6. In the same way, this little phrase, grounds what is said in Christ’s self-denial. Be submissive, yes, but the particular focus here is on Christian wives with non-Christian husbands. The assumption is of submission more broadly, but the focus here is on husbands who do not believe the Word. That’s the peculiar application of 2:12.
In 2:12 we are told, “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.” So also here. “Wives, in the same way be submissive to your husbands so that, if any of them do not believe the word, they may be won over without words by the behavior of their wives, when they see the purity and reverence of your lives.”
Indeed, what they ought to pursue is beauty of inner character (verses 3–4). When I was a child, I was told what worldliness was. World in Greek is kosmos. Kosmos is cognate with kosmeo, to adorn. Kosmeo is the word from which we get cosmetics. Thus, worldliness means cosmetics. Doesn’t Peter say so here? Well, that’s not quite the point.
Worldliness is more than “Never drink, smoke, swear, or chew, and never go out with girls that do.” What they ought to pursue, we are told, is the beauty of inner character. There is always a danger of legalism. “Don’t do this, don’t do this, don’t do this, don’t do this, don’t do this.” If you word righteousness that way, then it sounds as if provided you don’t do enough things you’re good, and that doesn’t really get to the heart.
Rather, instead of focusing on the external things … That’s the point here. Instead of trying above all to be faddish, to be beautiful in the same way the pagans want to be beautiful, you want with all your heart, first and foremost, to be beautiful from within, to display a certain kind of character, what is here called in verse 4 an “unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit,” presenting itself as an adornment, as it is, in fact, the fruit of the Spirit.
Now this does not mean, let me insist, that women shall be quiet and godly while men shall be noisy and raucous. Gentleness is a Christian Spirit-given fruit in all, and 1 Thessalonians 4:11 urges a certain quietness on all Christians as a Christian virtue, but this virtue is worked out in this Christian wife in this context in this way as a particular quiet submission to her husband so as to extol the beauties of Christian character and gain him, if at all possible.
Sarah is called forth as an example in verses 5–6, not because she and Abraham were righteous in every respect. He could tell half-truths and lie and repeat it, and she could give her husband false counsel and suggest a concubine so she could get a child through the side door, as it were, she was so desperate, and then desire to get rid of Hagar. She wasn’t always a paragon of virtue. Then she could actually laugh when an angel of the Lord predicted that she would bear a child at her advanced years.
But she is picked up on this particular point. She did address her husband as “master.” Obviously, it’s possible to address your husband as “master” and be a righteous battle-ax. I know one particular woman, who shall remain nameless, who wouldn’t be caught dead in a church without a hat, but I know who wears the pants in her family. The issue is more than symbolism. It has to do with a whole stance of life. Here Sarah serves as a model, which is commended by the apostle.
But then the husbands. In verse 7 we read, “Husbands, in the same way be considerate …” In the same way takes you back to Jesus. Our ultimate model is Jesus. In the same way as Jesus absorbed things that were unjust and unfair in his pursuit of the good of others. “In the same way be considerate as you live with your wives.” Be considerate means live according to knowledge, to a knowledge of the truth, to a knowledge of Christian witness, to a knowledge of your wife and her needs and her character.
“… and treat them with respect as the weaker partner.” This does not mean that every wife has an inferior IQ or is morally weaker or intellectually a bit of a dullard or can’t play tennis as well as you do or whatever. What it does mean is that, by and large, men are physically stronger and, therefore, it is more common for men to abuse their wives and beat up on them physically than the reverse, and you mustn’t do that. You mustn’t be abusive.
Ultimately, I think this goes back to the fall itself. As far as I can see, the fall in Genesis 3 is sometimes misinterpreted today. We read in the curse pronounced against the woman in Genesis 3, verse 16, “Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.” I know the meaning of that verse is disputed. I won’t go through all of the options. I’ll just tell you what it means.
Actually, those two verbs are found together in only one other passage in the Pentateuch. In chapter 4, verse 7, the very next chapter, Cain, with the first instance of fratricide, is being confronted by God. Genesis 4:6: “Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast?” God says to him. “If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door …” Now the two verbs. “… it [sin] desires to have you, but you must master it.”
What happens this side of the fall in the marriage is that the woman desires to have her husband in exactly the same way. She wants to control things, and he, for his part, brutally controls her. Isn’t that a description of what goes wrong in marriage? In other words, it’s not all his fault, and it’s not all her fault. There’s plenty of fault to go around, people. One tries to control things by a form of manipulation, and the other tries to control things simply because he’s stronger.
In the Christian way, we walk instead with submission, with integrity, treating one another with respect and never, ever a trace of brutality. Never, never. Why not? So that nothing will hinder your prayers. Not only your prayers individually but your prayers with your spouse. I was speaking at a missionary convention not long ago, and a Christian woman I’ve known for many years came up to me and said, “I want you to tell me why my husband won’t pray with me.”
This is a couple who had been working on the mission field for about 15 years. There can be many reasons for that. I am saying that before we talk too much about revival and ethics in the public sphere, many of us have some reformation to do at home with humility of mind, repentance, nurture, upbuilding, submission, and love for Jesus’ sake.
Last, believers are to treat one another like brothers. Verses 8–12: “Finally, all of you, live …” Then there are five characteristics of getting along with brothers. Like-mindedness. “Live in harmony with one another.” It does not simply mean that you agree to disagree, although there’s an overtone of that. It means ultimately you learn to think the same thing under the revelation of God, which takes time and communication, bowing your mind to the authority of what God has revealed.
Sympathy. Learning to rejoice with those who rejoice, to weep with those who weep. Have you ever noticed that an awful lot of churches have a very high percentage of social misfits? Do you know why? Because by and large the church, for all her faults, is still the most sympathetic society in the Western culture. We should wear the misfits as a badge of honor. Then we are to love as brothers. We are to show compassion. We are to walk with humility, with this wonderful conclusion in Psalm 34.
Do you see, then, how all of these ethical stances are tied to the cross? It is not an accident that chapter 2, verses 22–25, lies at the heart of this extended section. All of our ethics in the home, in the society, our culture, our approach to work, to one another, to our spouses, our conduct in the church … All of it finally comes from the cross.
If you live in a particularly scrappy church, I want to know whether you and the other members of that church have learned anything about what it means to live in such a way as to absorb insult, pain, and suffering. If you think only in terms of your rights, you will always find yourself on the end of bitterness. Always.
Isn’t that what Jesus himself overcame? Isn’t that what Paul says, agreeing perfectly here with Peter? “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus, who precisely because he was in the form of God …” That’s a causal participle. “Because he was in the form of God, he didn’t think of equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, made himself a nobody, took on human flesh, and then died the ignominious and odious death of the cross. Wherefore God has highly exalted him.”
Astounding grace, that God the Son should choose
To leave the Father’s glory and refuse
To clutch his dignity, exploit his right
And make himself a no one in our sight.
The Word made flesh, the Son of God a man,
The timeless God clothed in a mortal span
Now born a baby in a cattle shed
Transcendent God who suffered and who bled.
Astounding grace, that Christ should suffer death
And know first-hand the grave’s cold clammy breath,
That he the Prince of life, creation’s Lord
Should take the curse which we could not afford.
He died our death, buried all our sin
He tore the veil; we boldly enter in
He saw our bitter hate, our dreadful lust
He bore our guilt and then declared us just.
Astounding grace, that I who could not hear
God’s warning judgments now should come to fear
Impending death, the certainty of hell
Yet find in Christ my fears completely quelled.
Once I was blind; in shoreless wastes I drowned
But now I see; the lost sheep has been found
My guilt’s forgiven; I gaze upon his face
Exalting Christ and his astounding grace.
That’s what redeems us. It is also what tells us how to live. This is a message that all of us need to hear perennially, but I am persuaded that there are some of us in a crowd this size who need to hear it acutely, because it is exactly what we are contravening, and there is no way forward for us but repentance now and tears and contrition, returning to that same cross to ask for forgiveness and to learn how to live. Pray with me in your mind the prayer of Saint Francis Assisi.
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Through Jesus Christ our Lord, amen.
