Thanks again to Tom for kicking off our “Community” series last Sunday, showing us how important community was to Jesus during his earthly ministry. And thanks also to the members of his small group for sharing what real community with other Christians has meant to them. Following Tom’s message and his group’s testimonies we’re going to explore community in 1 Peter.
First Peter is an epistle. By the way, if you don’t know what an epistle is, it’s not an apostle’s wife! When first learning about the epistles of the apostles, that’s what my mom thought. Thankfully she soon learned that epistles are letters.
In most letters one party informs another about this or that. Epistles do more than inform; they teach—they’re instructive and/or corrective in nature. Now men, some of your wives may be instructive or corrective in nature, but don’t introduce her as your ‘epistle’ at your next social event; she’s your wife!
The New Testament epistles may not be wives of the apostles, but there is a wifely connection. The apostles wrote their epistles to Jesus’ wife, His bride, the Church, and to this day they inform, instruct, correct, prepare, and shape us into a beautiful bride, pleasing to her Groom.
On that note, if I had to pick a one-verse summary of 1 Peter it would be 1:13, “Preparing your minds for action, and being sober-minded, set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ.” And if I had to boil that verse down to a single imperative for the church today it would be, “Prepare your minds for action!”
Drill sergeants know how to prepare bodies for combat. But preparing the mind is even more important. If a soldier or sailor can’t follow orders or think clearly in the heat of battle, all the physical training in the world is useless.
As the Church, we face a more vicious enemy and have a more glorious objective than any army ever. The mind is the Church’s battleground! It’s where we form hope or fall into despair; it’s where we grasp grace or wallow in guilt. With the mind we become either reactive or active towards an ever-darkening world of violence, and chaos. Instead of reacting angrily at the fact that all lives seem to matter less and less, imagine a church acting like all lives really do matter: black lives, blue lives, gay lives, old lives, young lives, sick lives, Muslim lives, and yes, unborn lives. What if instead of tweeting “all lives matter,” we told somebody? What if instead of Facebooking it we found someone different than us and said, “Hey, we may be different or disagree on some things, but I want you to know your life matters to me, because your life matters to my God; I’m not shoving my God down your throat but the Bible says He made us in His image, so we matter.” What if instead of blogging about it, we Christ-followers befriended those different from us in order to learn about them and love them toward Jesus? The world is a battleground, but the front line is always the mind!
Not just a worshiping community, the church is a learning and preparing community. So, with the Holy Spirit’s help, we turn to 1 Peter for a clearer more courageous pursuit of Jesus’ disciple-making vision for His community on earth.
Peter an Apostle
In v. 1 the author calls himself, “Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ.” This is of course Simon Peter the fisherman, Jesus’ most prominent, outspoken disciple. But even calling himself an ‘apostle’ has communal significance. Peter almost certainly provides the eyewitness account behind Mark’s gospel (whom he calls “my son” at the end of this epistle). And in Mark 3:14 we learn that from His early disciples (which outnumbered the 12) Jesus “appointed twelve and named them apostles so that they might be with him and he might send them out to preach.”
‘Apostle’ literally means sent out one. Jesus’ sending the apostles as His representative messengers implies the formation—if not the existence—of a community of people who are hearing and receiving the message that those messengers have been sent to deliver. In Jesus’ day the community was forming. Now, decades later, Peter is writing to a community in one sense already formed, but in another sense incompletely formed.
No Christian community, including ours, will be completely formed until the saints go marching in and the roll is called up yonder! Will you be there? Will you be in that number? You will if (and only if) in this life you believe the apostles’ message that Jesus is Lord and died on the cross to forgive your sins and rose again to restore you to His Father. You’ll go marching in with the saints up there if you’re busy marching on with the saints down here! More than showing up on Sunday when it suits you, more than putting money in the basket when you’ve got a little extra, this means taking up your cross daily with other Christians and being the light of Christ in a dark world. Jesus didn’t die to give you an individual ticket to heaven. He died to make you part of a family—a community—apart from which you can have no spiritual life, only spiritual loneliness.
To Those who are Elect Exiles
Peter wasn’t writing to individuals but to a community. He addresses his epistle, “To those who are elect exiles of the Dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia…” Let’s unpack a few of those words, starting with “elect.” Why does Peter call this community the “elect exiles”?
You may or may not like the options, but we will ‘elect’ a president this Fall. To elect someone is to choose them. Peter echoes what the rest of Scripture claims: God is a choosing God! But, unlike our presidential election, God doesn’t choose people for His community because their look like better candidates for salvation than others. Moses reminds the Israelites in Deuteronomy 7:6-7,
“Of all the people on earth, the LORD your God has chosen you to be his own special treasure. It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the LORD set his love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples.”
Nor does God choose for salvation those whose character qualifications make them more appealing than others. Moses says a couple chapters later in Deut. 9:5:
“It’s not because you are so good or have such integrity that you are about to occupy their land. The LORD your God will drive these nations out ahead of you only because of their wickedness, and to fulfill the oath he swore to your ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”
Look, when you’re the all-sovereign God of the universe you don’t just look at the options presented to you and make a choice; you make the options too! And you do it for your own reasons and purposes because, as God, everything (and everyone) is your own—you don’t owe anyone anything! And what is God’s reason and purpose in electing some people to salvation and not others? His purpose in election is … election! Paul says this clearly in Romans 9:11-12. Recalling God’s choosing one of Rebekah’s twin sons over the other, he says,
“though they were not yet born and had done nothing either good or bad—in order that God’s purpose of election might continue, not because of works but because of him who calls (that’s God)—[Rebekah] was told, ‘The older will serve the younger.’ As it is written, ‘Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.’”
Peter is writing to a community that needs to get it through its head that God has elected them to salvation, and that He’s done so not because they’re better than other people but because God is God. We’re not saved because of who we are or what we’ve done or not done; we’re saved because of who God is.
Some twist the Bible’s teaching on election into a doctrine of arrogance and inaction, but it’s the opposite of both! God’s elect are to be the humblest and busiest people on earth—humbled in that we didn’t earn God’s mercy, and busied by the fact that still other elect ones need to hear the gospel of God’s saving grace. How do we know we’re supposed to be the world’s humblest and busiest people? Let’s look closely at Peter’s next few words.
Exiles of the Dispersion
Peter addresses his epistle, “To those who are elect exiles of the Dispersion.” Here we have a large group of exiles of which the elect exiles are only a sub-community. The words ‘dispersion,’ ‘scattered,’ or ‘foreigners’ refer to a series of economic and political events that forced ethnic Jews from their homeland in virtually every direction. The historical term for this is Diaspora.
The elect exiles of the Dispersion may look like other Jewish exiles, but they’re not like them spiritually: the elect worship Jesus of Nazareth; the others don’t. The elect exiles know they aren’t more worthy of God’s grace than their Jewish kinsmen, so they’re to be humble. They also know that their fellow Jewish exiles have a cultural, religious, linguistic and scriptural head start on their Gentile neighbors towards receiving the true Messiah, so they know they’re to be busy sharing the gospel with them in hopes of seeing the Christian community grow.
There was bound to be an interesting dynamic between the elect and non-elect exiles. Both groups saw themselves as uprooted from their place of origin, but their views of that uprootedness would’ve been radically different.
I preached a couple weeks ago from Haggai, who prophesied to another group of exiles about six centuries before Peter. Through Haggai, God warned the Jews returning to their homeland from 70 years of foreign exile to get their minds off their own houses while His house—the Temple—lay in ruins. Forty days after His resurrection Jesus stood on the Mount of Olives across a valley from that very Temple and told His disciples in Acts 1:8, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”
From Abraham right down to our day, God’s people have known a cycle of exile and return. Some of you were alive in 1948 when the British reestablished a home for ethnic Jews exiled from central and eastern Europe after the Holocaust.
But Simon Peter was writing at a unique time—a time when mixed in with ethnic Jewish exiles was a substantial population of elect Jewish exiles. The dynamic at work among non-elect exiles would’ve been a grief dynamic, a yearning to return to their homeland. But, while they also experienced sadness and struggle along the way, the primary dynamic at work among the community of elect exiles wasn’t a grief dynamic but a gospel dynamic, a great commission, Holy Spirit dynamic—a yearning for Christ’s kingdom to spread to all peoples everywhere, and a sense that their exile wasn’t pitiful but purposeful!
Are We in Exile Today?
What are we supposed to take away from Peter’s designation: “elect exiles of the Dispersion”? Are the grief and gospel dynamics still active today? You bet they are; and a lot closer to home than we might realize.
We haven’t been driven from our homes and scattered by economic and political forces but, culturally speaking, Christians are quickly becoming social and cultural and exiles in America.
In Peter’s day, the Gentiles may not have known the difference between elect and non-elect (Christian and non-Christian) Jews who were coming into their cities and countries—they all looked and talked alike; they had a common Jewish culture; some of them talked more about a guy named Jesus than others, but besides that they were pretty much the same.
Likewise, in our day non-Christians probably don’t see a difference between genuine gospel Christian exiles and American cultural Christian exiles. But let me tell you something, there is a difference, a difference that will be revealed by the dynamics that govern our hearts and our local church communities. Cultural Christian exiles will be governed by a grief dynamic—a yearning for the “homeland,” the “good old days” when Christianity dominated American society. They’ll say, “If we could get prayer back in schools, the Ten Commandments back in courthouses, more Bible-believing politicians in office, more conservative judges on the bench… we could stop the moral slide and turn the cultural tide back to our Judeo-Christian roots and return to the “Zion” of American exceptionalism.”
The difference between the grief dynamic of American cultural Christianity and the gospel dynamic of biblical Christianity is a difference not only of desire but of destination. The goal of one is New Jerusalem in eternity where Jesus reigns forever, and the goal for the other is Mayberry in 1960 where Aunt Bee and Andy keep everybody on the straight and narrow.
It’s not that everyone saddened by the decline of Christianity and the degradation of morality in this country isn’t a genuine (elect) disciple of Jesus—I’m saddened by these things too! But if all a person wants is a Christian America then that person (or that religious community) is flirting with a false gospel, and—unless they repent of that grief mentality and get back in sync with the church’s true gospel dynamic and impulse—they may, in the end, prove to have been just religious, moral, culturally-Christian but non-elect exiles.
Mayberry’s not a bad place, but with somewhere so much better to captivate our souls why would we waste time wistfully longing for a bygone era? Our gracious, triune God is preparing His elect for that place by pushing us out of cultural prominence into a place of cultural exile. And all three members of the Trinity have a stake in this process. Notice v. 2. Peter says that those who are elect exiles of the Dispersion are such, “according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, in the sanctification of the Spirit, for obedience to Jesus Christ and for sprinkling with his blood…”
Our heavenly Father is just as aware of the church’s cultural exile today as He was of the early church’s exile; and it’s every bit as purposeful. According to His foreknowledge—that is, according to His fore-planning, fore-purposing design—He will position His people in the most advantageous way for His plans, not ours. The sooner we acknowledge that, the better.
Part of the Father’s plan is that we be sanctified by the Holy Spirit. Not only is the Holy Spirit sanctifying individual Christians through the process of cultural exile, He’s sanctifying the Church as a whole by stripping away those elements that cling too tightly to earthly forms of cultural significance. America isn’t the bride of Christ; the Church is! Exile is essential for the Spirit’s purifying work of sanctification.
And sanctification is essential for the church to be increasingly obedient to Jesus Christ. The strength of our witness in exile isn’t found in how mad we get at our culture but in how much we live like Jesus as cultural exiles.
Are You an Exile?
I’ll close by simply asking: Are you an elect exile? Peter greets these Christians by saying, “May grace and peace be multiplied to you.” That’s an awesome hope for every Christian and every church. But grace and peace can’t be multiplied to you unless they’ve first been added to you. If you haven’t been born again through faith in Jesus, you’re a spiritual zero. You can’t multiply anything by zero and get anything but zero. But you can add to zero! Today if you’re not in Christ please consider adding grace from God and peace with God to your life by believing in His Son! Then His grace and peace can be multiplied to you beyond measure.