If you’re familiar with the King James Version, you probably see I took the title for this message from its translation of verse 9. If you’re not, here’s the first part of this verse from the KJV: “But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people.” The ESV translates that “a people for his own possession,” which makes it typical of modern English translations; I don’t fault modern translators for that because the meaning of “peculiar” has shifted across four centuries. It’s too bad, though; “for his own possession” lacks the connotations “peculiar” had. I can say this is a shirt I possess, and while I obviously don’t own Sara, there’s a sense in which I possess her as my wife, but I can’t say that this shirt is peculiar to me—I’m not emotionally invested in it, and a lot of other people have one just like it. As for Sara, I don’t make a habit of calling her peculiar, but in this sense, she’s peculiar to me alone. Peculiar meant unique and remarkable and something only one person had. There’s a sense of special and particular value here that we don’t want to lose.
That said, it’s not the whole reason I chose this title for the sermon. Peter doesn’t explicitly say this, but we are indeed peculiar as contemporary Americans understand the word. We are odd; we are atypical; we are outside our world’s idea of “normal.” This is in part because we’re treasured by God. You may remember we talked about this while we were going through Ephesians 1, that we are God’s glorious inheritance and his treasured possession. That means we don’t need to look to the world to find that affirmation.
That would make us strange enough, but it’s not the half of it. The bigger reason we’re peculiar is we no longer belong to the world; we’re God’s exclusively, not just for the life to come but for this one here and now. We’re set apart from the priorities and values of this present age; we’ve turned away from it to turn toward God. If we actually live that way, we’re going to look (and feel) weird to the world, which won’t find it appealing—we’ll seem ill-fitting and out of place, like fish riding bicycles. The more we live as a people peculiar to God, the more we’ll be thought peculiar by the world.
This is, of course, just one of four terms Peter uses in verse 9 to describe and define the church, all of them rooted in Old Testament language for Israel. First he calls us a chosen race. This is loaded language in our culture in which the word “race” looms so large: the church should transcend that. We aren’t just modified versions of everyone else; in Jesus, by his Spirit, we’re being remade as a new humanity. Our spiritual lineage should trump all else, and our allegiance to Jesus and to one another should supersede all other claims. Racial politics should be dissolved by unity in Christ.
If Christians really lived this way, it wouldn’t just mark us as peculiar, it would make us a threat to the political order—it would nullify some of the biggest levers politicians across the spectrum pull to get re-elected. As bizarre as it might sound to you, the church would find itself opposed by both major parties. That’s how it was in ancient Rome. As New Testament scholar Karen Jobes put it, “The understanding of Christians that they formed a new race among humanity was precisely one of the points for which they were criticized and persecuted by first-century pagan society.” She illustrates this with a quote from the Roman historian Suetonius’s biography of Nero: “Punishment was inflicted on the Christians, a class of men given to a new and mischievous superstition”; the word translated “class” there is the Latin genus, which is the root of English words like “generation” and basically meant “family” or “race.”
With the other two terms, Peter splits up “holy priesthood” from 2:5, drawing on the language of Exodus 19. He calls us a royal priesthood, which is an interesting term; it’s sometimes taken as two nouns and translated “a kingdom and priesthood.” We’re designated and dedicated to serve God. We serve as priests to one another, as we saw last week, interceding for each other with God. We also—and maybe the alternate translation helps us see this—are called to serve as priests to the world, access points through whom the nations can come to God and witnesses by whom they might be led to him. And as a royal priesthood, a kingdom priesthood, we’re priests of the King. We recognize God as our highest authority; all our allegiance is to him, and all our service is to him and for him. That leaves us cross-grained with the world and all its authorities.
Peter also calls us a holy nation. We’re set apart from all the nations of this world, including the one in which we live. We aren’t pursuing the same goals as the nations; we don’t play by the world’s rules because we aren’t playing its game. Note well: this is not an assertion of moral superiority. It’s a call to be morally different from the world around us because we follow a higher authority than any in this world. This difference is why Rome labeled the Christian “superstition”—the Roman term for any religion not recognized and authorized by the government—as “new and mischievous,” and why it came quickly to regard Christians as disloyal subjects and traitors. This is, incidentally, a point of interest if you find yourself interacting with someone insisting Jesus never claimed to be God. If Jesus hadn’t claimed to be God, and hadn’t meant by that the Creator of all that is, the one God who rules rightly over all, his followers could have dutifully affirmed Caesar as Lord and Rome would have been fine with them.
Biblically, our standards for life should be disjointed from our culture and society. How we do business, why we do business, how we talk to one another, how we use money, our attitudes toward material possessions, our view of sex, our ideas of what we deserve and don’t deserve—in all these things and everything else, we should be fundamentally different from those around us. The purpose of everything we do is to proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. That’s why we exist. You want a mission statement? In the big picture, that’s it. Anything else you come up with has to point to that and end there.
What are his excellencies? They are his mighty acts, manifestations of the power of God, especially in deliverance of his people. The purpose of our peculiarness is to bear witness to what God has done, and particularly what he’s done for us. Our holiness, our set-apart-ness, is not to be a boost to our ego or our status, nor is it to be a justification for judging others who don’t meet our supposedly exalted standard. Our holiness, especially in our over-credentialized society, is to be our credential, our evidence corroborating what we say about God.
This mission is also the primary cause of our peculiarness. The world worships itself, in various ways. That worship defines the world, makes it what it is, and makes it do what it does. We are a people created by the entirely different worship of an entirely different God—a God who is neither ourselves nor defined by and for ourselves. Everything we do is to be worship, and to flow out of our worship together. God has redeemed all of our life in Jesus Christ, all of it belongs to him, and so all of it is for him. That means we understand everything differently: the world, the meaning and purpose of life, the nature of and reasons for hope, everything.
I should say briefly our mission is not about arguing with people. That’s not to say we should never argue with anyone; we have things to tell the world, and we can’t stop others from trying to argue with us. The point is argument is not the point. The point is declaring what God has done, proclaiming the mighty deeds of the one who called us out of darkness into his marvelous light, and we need to keep resetting ourselves back to that, again and again and again.
Finally, Peter summarizes his four statements and doubles down on them. We are a peculiar people, a chosen race, a kingdom priesthood, a new humanity, created out of the disparate peoples of the world. We were not a people, but God has made us a people—his people; we had not known mercy, but now we have received his mercy. With no other context, that statement would be a straightforward and unremarkable summary of Peter’s argument to this point. What makes it anything but is the context. As you saw this morning, these words aren’t Peter’s: he took them from Hosea 2.
I’m going to speedrun Hosea’s story here to help us understand how extraordinary this is. God tells his prophet—who’s unmarried, so he’s likely only fourteen or fifteen—“My people are unfaithful to me, so go marry an unfaithful woman.” There are so many things we don’t know about this. The language suggests prostitution, but is that literal or metaphorical? If it’s literal, did Hosea go find a prostitute and marry her? Literal or not, was Gomer a woman whose behavior already made it clear she would not be faithful to him, or did her promiscuity only begin after he married her?
We don’t know any of this because the text isn’t concerned to tell us. It gives us God’s command to Hosea and tells us Hosea obeyed it. It gives us none of the details of his obedience. However he did it, that he did it—without argument, question, or hesitation—is the key point. Then we’re told Gomer had three children. We’re told this quite abruptly, without any of the usual language that would tell us Hosea participated in the process; I’m not sure we’re even supposed to assume they’re biologically his.
First, the text says she bore him a son whom God told him to name Jezreel, which is significant in a couple different ways. The name is linked to a prophecy of judgment against the dynasty ruling the northern kingdom of Israel. Jehu, the founder of that dynasty, had seized the throne of Israel after murdering King Azariah in the Jezreel Valley, which is in northern Israel near the Valley of Megiddo, Har-Magedon. Now, Jehu does this after the prophet Elisha basically tells him to, with God’s blessing; but while Jehu and his successors were better than the kings who came before him, they didn’t honor God, and so Hosea prophesies their fall. The king of Israel at the time was Jeroboam II, who reigned forty years with great worldly success; but when he died, his son and successor Zechariah was almost immediately murdered—in the Jezreel Valley.
The sound and meaning of the name are also significant. In Hebrew, it’s Yizre’ēl, which sounds very close to Yisra’ēl, or Israel. The wordplay suggests that Jezreel represents the whole nation, and that the judgment his name indicates is not merely on the king but on Israel as a whole. The name means “God will scatter,” which is ambiguous; it can mean scattering chaff to be blown away by the wind, thus destruction and judgment, or it can mean scattering seeds for planting, and thus restoration and rebirth.
With Jezreel, the text at least says Gomer bore him, Hosea, a son; when she gives birth to a daughter, we don’t even have that. God tells Hosea to name her Lo-Ruhamah, which means “not pitied.” God’s relationship to his people has always been defined by his compassion and tender care and willingness to forgive their sins; now, toward the northern kingdom of Israel, he firmly renounces all of it.
Gomer’s third child is another son whom God directs Hosea to name Lo-Ammi, which means “not my people.” He comes after his sister has been weaned, so most likely two or three years later. His name is, on the one hand, a description of how Israel had acted—they had consistently turned their back on God to worship the gods and goddesses of the surrounding nations. On the other hand, the name also bears God’s response of total negation: his people have rejected his covenant with them so thoroughly, he declares it dead. This is God divorcing the nation of Israel. Old Testament scholar David Allan Hubbard captures the intensity of God’s statement:
it negates God’s great pledge to Moses not only to rescue Israel from Egyptian bondage, but to take them for his people and to be their God (Exod. 6:6–7); and . . . it withdraws from them all the providential care carried in the name by which God first revealed himself to Moses (Exod. 3:14), since a literal translation of the last clause of verse 9 reads ‘and I (am) not I am . . . to you’—the Hebrew ’ehyeh is the same in both Exodus and Hosea. The sting of this passage is sharpened by the recognition that one meaning of the divine name assures the continuity of covenant; Moses’ Ehyeh is none other than the God both of the patriarchs and of Israel’s national future, both Northern and Southern Kingdoms. What greater threat than for that name to be unknown?
But then the reversal begins. First Jezreel is invoked: where God scattered his people in judgment, now he will scatter seed in restoration. Then Lo-Ruhamah and Lo-Ammi are addressed: “Lo” in Hebrew, which means “not,” is a one-letter prefix—God deletes it, changing their names to “Mercy” and “My People.” Then God directs Hosea to buy back his unfaithful wife whom he has divorced. God doesn’t wait for her to want to go back, he tells Hosea to go after her . . . and he does. She’s settled down now, she’s living with just one man who’s said to love her, at least in worldly terms. Hosea goes to the guy and offers to buy her. He’s willing to pay market price for a female slave—and to that, the guy says, “Sold!” and signs her over. One does wonder what Gomer thinks of this. Redemption comes when she didn’t ask for it; but then, the guy who “loved” her would rather sell her as long as the price was right. Was it a happy ending for her? Was it a happy ending for Hosea? We’ll never know in this life. What do you do with this?
And even more, what do you do with the fact that Peter takes this promise—the redemption of an unfaithful people who didn’t really want it, but who had a long history of relationship with God—and applies it to Gentiles who’ve never known God? Clearly it’s one reason Peter addresses them as Jews, but that’s not enough to make sense of this. I believe he does this because he’s thinking on a cosmic scale. Hosea was looking at the failure of Israel to be faithful to God, laying out the judgment that was coming and prophesying restoration and redemption. Peter takes the slider on that and moves it all the way over, from the failure of Israel to keep the covenant God made at Sinai to the failure of Adam and Eve to keep the covenant of Eden; God’s plan of redemption didn’t begin when Israel sinned, it began when humanity sinned in Genesis 3. If God didn’t wait for Gomer to ask to be saved, well, Jesus didn’t wait for us to ask, either.
This is the greatness of his power, and the contrast between that light and the darkness from which he called us. We can descend into the deepest, darkest disaster of our souls and see Jesus already there, holding out his hands and giving us his mercy. The key, the one thing that really matters, is simple: are we willing to admit that disaster exists? If we are, everything else is open . . . but that’s the hardest part of all. That’s why the most positive response to Jesus didn’t come from the religious folk, the “good” people, who were theoretically closest to him, but from prostitutes and others of that ilk. Before you’re willing to receive Jesus, you have to accept you need Jesus. You have to look at the tiger prowling in your living room and humble yourself enough to admit, one, that’s a tiger, and two, you’re utterly powerless against it—you need someone to deal with it for you. The prostitutes and tax collectors already knew they had a tiger in the living room—they heard about it from the religious folk all—the—time. The religious folk, on the other hand, would have had to admit they had the same problem as the scum of the earth whom they despised. Is it any wonder prostitutes were more willing to choose peculiarity over pretence?
“Adoration of the Magi,” Hubert van Eyck, from the Ghent Altarpiece, 1420-26. Public domain.