There is not one of us who is saved yet. We are trusting God for our salvation; we are committed to Christ in mind and heart and life ... yes indeed. But we are not saved. Not yet. We are being saved; but the job is not done yet, not by any means. There is a long way to go; and not until we have passed through the grave and gate of death shall we finally arrive.
So Peter would have us understand. Here in this life, he says, we who trust in Christ are kept by the power of God operating through our faith ... but kept for what?
For a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.
The salvation God has fashioned for us has not had the wraps taken off it yet. Like a statue still unveiled we can only guess at its perfection from the general shape. We see only its outline. As Paul said to the Corinthians, "Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man to conceive those good things that God has prepared for those who love Him ..."; as yet, "we see as in a mirror, dimly."
Great as our joy may be, says Peter, in our present possession of Christ Jesus and all the blessings He has lavished upon us, we do not know the half of it yet. God is preparing us for a life so glorious that if He were to launch us into it prematurely we should not be able to stand it. Our capacity has to be enlarged.
And the best way to achieve that is to give us a crash course in trouble! Nothing else can develop faith in us to the point where we can cope with the life God has planned for us. As yet we are but children in the Father's house, babes even, and we just cannot imagine what our Father has planned for us when we come of age and enter upon our full inheritance. And if He seems to be a bit rough on us just at present, so we think we are being denied a carefree childhood, God knows what He is about; at the end of the day we will be glad He put us through it. Out of the goodness of His heart God has planned a better future for us than we have ever dreamed, even in our most exalted hours of joy and vision. Indeed, says Peter, when you come to think about it, it has always been like this. All down the line it has been true that no matter what good things God has given His people He has always kept more up His sleeve than they ever guessed.
Take the prophets for example. The intimacy they enjoyed with God was marvellous, and the good things He shared with them so wonderful that time and again they were simply overwhelmed. But what gave them such happiness was not to be compared with what He has given us who have come after them. They only saw Christ under wraps, as it were; before our gaze the veil has been lifted (or one veil has!) and we behold a glory greater than they discerned. Even so, there is more yet that we have not seen. There is a wealth of love, and of gifts of love, yet to be given us so great that if they were all given us now we would not know what to do with them. At present we rejoice in Christ with unutterable and exalted joy, yes - but this has happened only after we have seen Him in the guise of our earthly humanity, having had but the barest glimpse of Him in His resurrection glory. What will it be when our eyes behold Him fully unveiled in His native splendour in the Father's house?
It is always going to be like this with us and God. No matter how far we travel we shall never come to an end of God's goodness. Though we live on into eternity itself our progress will be ever bringing us to wonder upon wonder, and every wonder true! Even the angels, for whom Heaven is home, are eager for more. The imagination of God by which He is ever surprising us with some new joy is simply inexhaustible.
So gird up your minds, be sensible, Peter exhorts us: set your hope fully upon the yet greater grace that is coming with God's next great move - the full unveiling of Christ Jesus in His glory.
For the Christian there is always a future, radiant with promise. Now this, it seems to me, is the gist of the opening paragraphs in Peter's first epistle down to verse 13 of chapter 1.
Having filled in this broad outline, we need to go back over a few details.
For the enjoyment of all this which Peter describes by the word salvation, we are being guarded through faith, he says.
We look at the word 'salvation' first, then the word 'guarded', then the word 'faith'.
For Peter the word 'salvation' means a great deal more than mere rescue. Its use in the Bible covers not one, but two fields of experience. It does speak, in the first place, of rescue from danger. Peter himself uses it in this sense in 3:20 when he speaks of Noah being "saved" from the flood. Salvation, in one sense, is God's response when we simply shout "Help!" He rescues us from the jaws of death. He "restores our life"; He holds us in "being" when we are threatened by a full end.
But the word is used also to describe healing. The woman who crept through to Jesus when He was on the way to the house of Jairus used it in this sense when she said to herself, "If I only touch the hem of His garment I shall be made well." She used the word "be saved." Jesus used the same word to blind Bartimaeus when He said to him, "Your faith has saved you" - meaning, "made you whole, restored you to full health and the exercise of all your powers."
This use of the word conveys the idea that not only "being" is given us, but "well-being" also - in Bible language, life and peace.
The Bible word 'salvation' should make us think of a story Churchill once told. A schoolboy who could not swim had fallen off the pier into the waters of Portsmouth harbour. A passing sailor dived in and saved him. The moment the lad was safe, though dripping, on the pier, the sailor disappeared. Some hours afterwards he was confronted by the boy again, this time with his mother to whom the boy was shyly pointing him out. "Are you the sailor who pulled my boy out of the water?" she asked. Expecting to be thanked more profusely than he cared to be, the sailor admitted only hesitatingly that, "Well ... yes he was." "Then," said the woman, "where's his cap?"
Not just rescue, but restoration. God saves us cap and all! The salvation God provides guarantees us more than mere survival. It guarantees our total well-being. As Peter went on to express it in his second letter, "there will be richly provided for you an entry into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. "Salvation," as C. E. B. Cranfield comments, "denotes the whole sum of what God has in store for us, the enjoyment of our full inheritance." (C. E. B. Cranfield, "I & II Peter and Jude" [S.C.M. Press] 1960 p. 40)
Peter's use of the word 'inheritance' expands this.
It was a word to stir the very deepest emotions in the heart of any Jew, for it was the word used of the promised land. We mistake its meaning when we think of it as a property passed on from father to son at the father's death. In the Old Testament it meant "a possession which is yours by gift," something you receive in a shareout. The land of Canaan, "when the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when He fixed the bounds of the peoples" as Moses put it, "God called Israel to share with Him." (Deut. 32:8) Israel's possession of Canaan rested on God's gift, not on any title to it of her own she had. Her tenure of it therefore was precious beyond words.
But being an earthly inheritance it was, like all things earthly, only for a time. The Christian's inheritance - the believer's "promised land" - is something altogether different. Because it belongs, not to the realm of earth where Jesus died but to the realm of heaven where Christ is risen, it lies beyond the reach of change and decay. It cannot, like Canaan, be ravaged by invading armies; it cannot, like Canaan, be defiled by its peoples' sin or the worship in it of false gods; its beauty cannot, like Canaan's, fade because of drought or pestilence or plague. He Who sits upon its throne says, "Behold, I make all things new." "There shall no more be anything accursed, but the Throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it, and His servants shall worship Him: they shall see His face. And the leaves of its trees shall be for the healing of its peoples." It is "incorruptible, undefiled and fadeth not away."
Now that, says Peter, speaking for His Lord and with His Lord's authority, is in safe keeping, laid up and waiting for you. Not only so indeed, but you are being kept safe for it - "guarded by the power of God through faith unto a salvation ready to be revealed."
The New Testament sometimes speaks of our salvation as a thing already secured for us in the past by all that Christ has done for us, sometimes as a present possession; but it never deceives us into thinking that in its completeness it awaits us anywhere but in the future - and that future belongs, not in this world, but in the world to come. To quote C. E. B. Cranfield again, "To identify our present experience as Christians with what the New Testament calls salvation is a disastrous illusion." (C. E. B. Cranfield, "I & II Peter and Jude [S.C.M. Press] 1960 p. 40) It is not possible in this life to enjoy to the full what God has planned for us. Remember that.
The second word to note is the word 'guarded' - "you are being guarded for this salvation." It is a military word meaning "garrisoned." There are two aspects of this guarding - two sides to it - God's and ours ... His protection and our trust in it. His protection is over us. God is round about us like an invisible wall of steel and iron. Let us be sure of that. At the beginning of his letter Peter has addressed us as those who were "chosen, according to the foreknowledge of God the Father." To you who believe in Christ, God is saying through His servant Peter, "I knew you would. From the beginning I knew you would receive my Son."
Do we think, knowing that, that God would let us slip through His fingers - would forget to bring us through, right through to the end of the journey that begins thus in faith? I tell you "No."
Say it to yourself: "I am guarded - guarded by the power of God."
Say it when temptation mounts a blitz on you, "I am guarded."
Say it when things go wrong, "I am guarded."
Say it when you are in danger, when you are at ease - say it when you are at work, when you are in your car, when you are at home, when you are away, "I am guarded - kept by the power of God."
And let us remember what we are being guarded for - for that full salvation which we will inherit with all our brothers and sisters in Christ. Remember that, and our faith will grow. It will grow by reason of the trouble we endure. Our faith is something precious. It is a thing God has brought to birth in our soul - and He wants to perfect it. For it is by the faith He has kindled in us that He can shape our spirit to His desire. God will permit the garrisoned city of our life to be beleaguered. He will even permit the massed ranks of the enemy to attack.
Only under such attack will we prove how adequate is God's defence of our soul until it is Him we trust, His defences we really rely on. God means we to grow - to grow in faith. Whatever trouble there is in our life just now, therefore, is there because God has permitted it. Our trouble is no accident. God has sieved out those threats that would destroy us, but He has allowed through those that can serve His purpose to toughen us in faith. The faith He has nurtured in our hearts has to be refined - has to be cleansed of impurities. We have to be smelted. We surely do not imagine that God is satisfied with us yet! We are to be fitted for heaven. We are being "made to measure." We should not be surprised if in the process we have to be trimmed, hacked about a bit.
This world is but a bridge. God will make very sure that we do not build a house on it and settle down. Bridges are for getting across, and God has seen to it that this world will always be too uncomfortable for us ever to mistake it for home. Indeed the bridge is due for demolition. This world is under sentence of death and is hastening to its end. Everything that belongs in it lies under that sentence. That is why suffering is so characteristic of life in this world.
For whilst death as an event is in the future - the world's or our own - suffering is its power already at work in the present. "Death is at work in us," as Paul said. And the reason God allows it to be is that we may learn to rely absolutely, not on ourselves and our own power to endure, but on God who raises the dead. That is what faith means. That - nothing less - is the faith God has set Himself to perfect in us. Suffering therefore is a spur to faith. It is the goad, the prick which in God's hands prevents us from being bound, either by desire or by care, to this world. This world, the whole scheme and structure of it, is passing away. We must be trained therefore to set our affection on things above, not on things on the earth.
Things seen are transient; death ends them all.
Only things unseen are eternal; life is in them all for God is in them all.
Suffering is not the problem, death is - for death is the power at work in all suffering. And because the problem of death is solved for the Christian, the problem of suffering is solved with it. It is through suffering and death that the believer goes in fellowship with Christ to resurrection and eternal life. Through His fellowship in all our suffering we are released from the loneliness of it and are raised to overcome it, for He comes to us in it to take our hand and raise us finally out of it. In the New Testament the whole problem of suffering is finally solved. There are only two types of suffering: that which is borne of natural calamity, and that which is born of illwill in others - and this letter has the answer to both.
So ... "gird up your loins, be sensible men, set your hope fully upon the grace that is coming to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ."
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|