Peter begins this section of his letter with “Therefore” because everything he’s said to this point has implications for how we should be living. Because of all God has given us and done for us through Christ, we’re new people with a new identity. Through the death and resurrection of Jesus, we’ve been born again to a living hope with an inheritance that cannot be lost or marred, and we’ve been made children of God the Father. Our relationship with God is not transactional, it’s one of deep love and intimate knowledge. At the same time, it’s also one in which God, in deep love and intimate knowledge, holds full authority over us and our lives.
Because we’re children of the Father, Peter tells us, we need to live differently than we did before—but look where he begins: “Set your hope fully on grace.” The aim isn’t just to change our behavior, it’s to change the roots of our behavior; and while sin does have consequences and Peter is clear-eyed about the reality of divine judgment on the evil we do, fear of judgment shouldn’t be the first or deepest root. Rather, our lives should be different first and foremost because of the living hope we’ve been given in our new birth in Christ. To be clear, we’re not talking about hope as the world uses the word, as a wish for the future. Biblical hope is assurance of the future. It is a settled certainty of what will happen because of what has already happened: the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
The grace on which we’re to set our hope is the grace by which we received that hope, as Peter told us back in verse 3. Setting our hope on grace, then, means grasping two truths. First, it means recognizing where our hope came from. Second, it means understanding that how we received that hope is also how we keep it. There’s no shift from being given hope to having to earn it. God’s grace, and thus also the hope which we have by his grace, is entirely God’s gift from first to last. We didn’t earn it and we aren’t worthy of it, but neither of those things matters. God gives us grace despite ourselves because he loves us despite ourselves.
Note here we’re called to put our hope fully in God’s grace. The world teaches us to put our hope and confidence in worldly things—money, power, education, relationships, career, status, accomplishments, and so on—and so we do. Even when we know our hope is in God’s grace, we still instinctively, reflexively put our hope in these things. Yesterday we accepted a lowball offer on our house because it seemed to be where God had led us—but it was hard, because that will leave us with meaningfully less money to put into the new house where it needs to be fixed up or where we’d like to improve it. God can of course make up the difference if he will, but there’s no reason to expect him to do so. How much money we have or what kind of appliances we’re able to buy when old ones need to be replaced aren’t his primary concerns (or, I presume, anywhere close); and yet, naturally, our capacity for hope is affected by material circumstances like those, even to the point of hope seeming futile when we have no worldly basis for it. To put no hope in any of these things and base nothing on whether we have them or not is challenging; but it’s the challenge Peter sets before us.
Note, too, exactly how he frames this: “Set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ.” He’s not telling us to set our hope on the grace we have experienced; he’s telling us to look forward to when Jesus comes again. Now, we experience God’s grace, but only in part. We receive grace as redeemed sinners in a sinful, death-shrouded world; to us, grace is primarily about sin and forgiveness and salvation. The fulness of God’s grace is far more than that; when our Lord comes again and the Son begins to reign, we will see dimensions upon dimensions of the grace of God which we can’t see here and now. Our full experience of grace and its full realization in our lives will come only when we’re finally and fully delivered from sin and death. The grace we’ve experienced so far is only the beginning; it’s the promise that the rest is coming. This is the basis and the content of our hope.
So then, how exactly do we go about setting our hope fully on God’s grace? Peter answers that question in verse 13 even before he tells us to do it, using a couple participles to put the conditions in place. First, he says, this requres “girding up your minds.” If you were here two weeks ago, you remember we talked about this with regard to the belt of truth as part of the armor of God in Ephesians 6. For those who weren’t, the basic piece of clothing in that day and age for most people was the tunic—think of wearing a floor-length linen potato sack. Whatever its advantages, the tunic made it difficult to move fast or with any agility, and it made it hard to work. That’s where the belt, usually a length of soft rope tied around the waist, came in. It wasn’t for holding up your pants, because you weren’t wearing any; it was for tucking in the hem of your tunic when you pulled it up so you could run, or climb, or do a spot of physical labor. Thus the ESV translates the metaphor as “preparing your minds for action,” which is clear, yes, but also generic. Girding up the loins is a particular sort of preparation: getting everything out of the way that could slow you down or hinder you in the work you need to do.
Second, Peter tells us, we do this by being self-controlled; the ESV has “sober-minded,” but we hear that and think of being realistic and accepting the facts. To the extent that “sober-minded” fits, it’s literal: not having your thinking impaired because you’re drunk. As we talked about in Ephesians 5, the goal is concentration rather than dissipation. This is also about right thinking producing right action. With these two words, Peter is summoning us to commit to put wheels on the hope we’ve been given, to get it moving and put it into practice. He’s inviting us to live into our future hope right in the middle of our present reality, however hopeless that reality might seem. This isn’t something we can make happen in our own strength, as it’s only possible by the power of God—but even as it’s beyond us to make it happen, we need to be striving for it. God works in us, with us, to us—he doesn’t just do things to us.
We can only live differently from the world as long as we have the hope to keep going, and we’re absolutely called to live differently, as obedient children of the Father. The phrase “as obedient children” is a lot more loaded than it seems on the surface. To obey as a child is to obey not out of duty or compulsion but out of relationship. It is to recognize that God rightly has authority over us, and to obey him because we honor that authority and because we honor him, but not to have that as the driving motivation for obedience. It is to obey most of all because God loves us, and we know we are loved, and we love him.
Peter unpacks this in a couple ways. First, he says, “Don’t be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance.” If “don’t be conformed” sounds familiar to you, you’re probably going in the right direction: the only other place this Greek word occurs in the New Testament is Romans 12:2, where Paul declares, “Don’t be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds.” J. B. Phillips famously translated that first part “Don’t let this world squeeze you into its mold.” As you might have noticed, Peter also holds these two pieces together, but he put them in the opposite order—the “renewing of your minds” piece is in the previous verse, as we just talked about. He doesn’t specifically talk about being conformed to this world, as he’s going in a different direction here, but he certainly understood as Paul did that the world demands conformity. That’s just as true in our contemporary age, for all its talk about freedoms and rights, as it was then. The world wants you to be unique just like everybody else.
Peter’s focus here, though, is on not being conformed to yourself—specifically, your past self, before you were made new and given a new identity. The phrase “the passions of your former ignorance” is an interesting one. When you don’t know any better, you follow your impulses. That’s not unreasonable—what else, really, would we expect?—and those impulses aren’t necessarily all bad. Thing is, though, in our natural state, even our best impulses are skewed by our sin to serve ourselves; even what doesn’t need to be killed still needs to be purified. And best to worst, we follow them all at one time or another, and before we’re old enough to understand what happened, our desires are in control.
That’s the negative side of the coin, what not to do: “Don’t be conformed to the desires you once pursued in your ignorance. Second, we have Peter’s positive instructions—and we can’t accuse him of aiming low here, as he commands us to be holy in every aspect of life. We are to be holy because God is holy, and also in the same way God is holy. This means being distinct from the world, separate from its assumptions, priorities, customs, and practices. It means being respectful of those in power, recognizing their authority derives from God, but being detached from them in a way as well. We are to obey them because, and as far as, doing so pleases God; we do not bow down to them.
Peter quotes Leviticus here; it’s an exact quote of Leviticus 19:2, which we read earlier, but the same basic statement also occurs in 11:44 and 20:7-8, 26. 20:7-8 is perhaps the most interesting: “Consecrate yourselves and be holy, because I am the Lord your God. Keep my decrees and follow them. I am the Lord, who makes you holy.” That’s a note we don’t get elsewhere in these passages, God not simply commanding his people to be holy but also declaring himself to be the one who brings about what he commands.
Karen Jobes’ comments on Peter’s use of Leviticus are so good, I want to take a moment to quote her at length here:
In terms of moral transformation, the goal of both the old and the new covenants is the same—to create a people who morally conform to God’s character. . . . [Peter] quotes Lev. 19:2 to establish the principle that, as Christians, his readers must be set apart from their surrounding culture in a way that is consistent with God as revealed in Jesus Christ. Just as ancient Israel observed customs and morals that set them apart from the ancient Mesopotamian cultures, Peter instructs his readers that they, too, must be set apart from the customs, rituals, and values of their culture in which they once so freely participated. It is this principle of holiness unto God—of being set apart in a relationship with God—that truly defines them as foreigners and resident aliens with respect to their society. . . . Peter’s differentiated application of Leviticus is interesting in that it preserves the authority of God’s word to ancient Israel as binding on Christians, but it does not prescribe the specifics of the [Old Testament law] as the way of life to be followed by his Christian readers. . . . Christians are no less God’s people than was ancient Israel, and no less accountable to God than Israel was, but their holiness is expressed in ways that are appropriate to their own historical moment. Peter’s example is instructive . . . as Christians seek to submit to the authority of the OT, yet without seeking a priest to examine mildew in the bathroom [as Leviticus 14:33–57 would seem to require].
Peter also charges us to live in reverent fear before God. God is our Father, but that doesn’t mean we should treat him lightly. People sometimes take this in a squishy, sentimental direction, as if God were a permissive father who just wants us to be happy on whatever terms we may desire. Our Father is also our judge, he utterly loathes sin, and he is totally impartial. He doesn’t play favorites, he doesn’t have different standards for different people, and he abhors and despises our sin as much as anyone else’s. We need to take God’s holiness with reverent seriousness, in the full awareness of his power and greatness.
Now, this can be taken in a deeply wrong direction as well. The fear of the Lord does not mean terror of him, and it doesn’t mean looming dread that he’s just standing there waiting for us to screw up so he can bring the axe down on us. For a loose analogy, think of standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon looking down. She’s not going to try to kill you, but standing on the very edge is perilous all the same; the threat isn’t the canyon, the threat is the law of gravity, but if you attempt to defy the law of gravity, the canyon will inflict the consequences, if you will. Two or three people die every year falling into the canyon from an overlook, and more survive with injuries. And then there’s the Grand Canyon West Skywalk. This isn’t in the national park, it’s on the West Rim, which is in the Hualapai Indian Reservation. The Hualapai built this almost twenty years ago now; it’s a U-shaped cantilevered walkway with glass walls and a glass floor that extends seventy feet from the canyon rim over a 4,000-foot drop. I have to think being out on that thing, being able to see 4,000 feet straight down, would give you a reverent awe of the Grand Canyon. I can tell you my reverent awe just thinking about it gives me no desire to go anywhere near it.
Besides the holiness and majestic greatness of God, we also have reason for holy fear in the cost of our salvation. We were in slavery to sin and death, in bondage to a futile, useless way of life, and as God promised in Isaiah 52, we were set free from that slavery without money. We were redeemed, bought back, from that bondage by the blood of Christ shed on the cross. That means the price of our redemption is nothing we could ever repay. It means when we turn back to our sin, we’re scorning the sacrifice of Jesus. Consider Hebrews 10:28-29: “Anyone who has set aside the law of Moses dies without mercy on the evidence of two or three witnesses. How much worse punishment, do you think, will be deserved by the one who has trampled underfoot the Son of God, and has profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has outraged the Spirit of grace?” Hebrews is describing the total rejection of Jesus and his sacrifice, not stumbling on the way as we try to follow Jesus, but it highlights why we shouldn’t take our sin and God’s forgiveness lightly, as though they’re trivial matters. Our faith and hope are the result of God the Father’s eternal plan to glorify the Son—just as the Father foreknew us before the creation of the world, so he foreknew Jesus’ death and resurrection on our behalf.
We’re different from the world because our loyalties and allegiances are different. We’re exiles here because our true home is somewhere else. I didn’t realize when I first quoted Meister Eckhardt five-plus months ago that his words would become the unofficial theme for the year, but the Spirit keeps leading me back to them: “God is at home. We are in the far country.” We are living under a foreign government—one we can influence, but which isn’t ultimately ours—holding to a different allegiance than the world around us, obeying a different authority. We owe submission to God and to one another; to the powers of this world, we owe only respect. Even our obedience to them is something we owe not to them but to God.
Photo © 2010 Frank Pierson. License: Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic. Image has been cropped to fit.