In 1984, a Nigerian man named Umaru Dikko got himself in a spot of trouble. He had been his country’s Minister for Transportation from 1979-83, but then a coup took down his government and he fled to exile in London. Once there, understandably enough, he took every opportunity to attack the new government back in Lagos. He also became a vocal critic of Israel, perhaps because Israel bought a lot of Nigerian oil and sold the Nigerian government a lot of weapons. That may have been understandable too, but it wasn’t wise, because Israel has the Mossad and you never want to get on their bad side.
In July of 1984, a joint Nigerian-Israeli operation kidnapped Dikko, drugged him, and stuck him in a wooden crate (together with the Israeli anaesthesiologist whose job it was to keep him unconscious). Crazy? Not exactly. Legally, any sort of bag, box, or other container which is properly labeled as a diplomatic bag is protected under the Vienna Convention and completely untouchable by local law enforcement. It wouldn’t have mattered if Dikko had woken up and started yelling—there would have been nothing anyone could do about it.
Except for one thing: that bit about “properly labeled.” As it happened, someone in the Nigerian embassy forgot to do the paperwork. Customs officials at Heathrow received word of the kidnapping while the crate was being processed; understandably, they thought it might be a good idea to check out that crate that was headed for a Nigerian airliner. Since the crate lacked the necessary documentation, there was no label to keep them from searching it. Dikko was freed, and four of his kidnappers ended up in a British prison.
Now, as abuses of diplomatic immunity go, that one’s pretty extreme; we tend to associate it more with such things as the $15.6 million in unpaid New York City parking tickets racked by members of the various UN delegations before a 2002 crackdown. Still, the extreme case makes the point well: if you tell a group of people they aren’t bound by the government of the nation in which they live, some of them will take advantage of that. It doesn’t take many bad actors before the group as a whole develops a reputation for antisocial behavior.
Now, when you’re talking about recognized diplomats under international law, that reputation might not cause any real problems. Being unpopular won’t hurt them, and they’re protected by treaty from anything worse. The early church, however, was a small minority with no legal recognition or protection, and their mission was to be a witness for the gospel to the communities in which they lived. A bad reputation could cripple their efforts, and if the government decided to go after them, they were defenseless. Peter’s been very clear that Christians need to see ourselves as citizens of the kingdom of God who live among the nations of this world; but that doesn’t give us the right to misbehave, much less any protection if we do. It means we’re held to a higher standard than the laws of this world, not a lower one.
This is the issue Peter begins to lay out in our passage this morning. The crux of his argument, and the key point for this whole section of the book that extends through 3:7, is found in verse 16: “As those who are free . . . yet as God’s slaves.” This should sound familiar, because Peter’s central idea in this section is the same as Paul’s in the similar section in Ephesians: the world can tell you who you must obey, but it cannot dictate why you do it, so choose to do it to and for the Lord. Instead of obeying under coercion, under duress, obey freely, because you choose to do so, as your service to God and the work of his kingdom on earth. You can’t change the fact of your obedience, but you can change the nature of it.
We should also note, as we did with Ephesians, that Scripture doesn’t say to obey human rulers and institutions as if they were the Lord. There’s no command to unquestioning, unilateral, universal obedience. It doesn’t say obeying human authorities is your obedience to the Lord. Scripture says, as Peter phrases the matter here, “Be subject for the Lord’s sake to every human institution.” The difference is crucial in two ways. One, submission and obedience to earthly authorities is secondary to our obedience to God. We obey other humans within the scope of our obedience to God because it suits and serves God’s purpose. Two, related to this, being obedient to other people isn’t really the point—even of obeying other people. Peter doesn’t say, and Paul doesn’t say, obedience to people is good in and of itself. What Peter says here is, “God establishes human authorities because they’re a necessary evil, because there has to be someone to punish evildoers and reward those who do good, so in general, you should be subject to them.” But if we put these two points together, we see that subjection goes exactly as far as what we can do with integrity for the Lord’s sake, and there it ends. The explicit command to bow to human authorities carries with it an implicit limit on that command to which we should pay careful attention—so we don’t abuse it, but likewise so we don’t neglect it.
When we read this part of 1 Peter, or the analogous part of Ephesians, as establishing and dictating hierarchy, we’re reading them inside out and backwards. The world establishes and dictates hierarchies, in various ways and forms. The Word teaches us how to meet their requirements and operate within them without actually being subject to the world so we can function as agents of the gospel. As the gospel is inherently subversive of the world, that means God’s word is often (though not always) teaching us to think and act in ways which subvert the world’s hierarchies; Paul’s summons to mutual submission within the body of Christ is but the most obvious way that manifests. We must always remember to read Scripture as gospel pointing us to Jesus. Even the imperatives, commands though they are, are gospel, not law.
To say that about biblical imperatives is critically important, but there’s an equally important flip side to that: biblical language about freedom is also gospel, not law. Let me explain what I mean by that. The world defines freedom in terms of law, in terms of requirements and restrictions or their absence. It promotes a vision of freedom for this world to do what the world teaches us to want to do. Freedom means we can do whatever we want without anyone telling us “no”—and if we don’t listen carefully and thoughtfully, we miss the sting in that tail. Doing “whatever we want” means doing whatever we desire; it means our desires tell us what to do and we obey. That’s not freedom, it’s subjection: we submit to our desires and they rule our lives. What Peter’s talking about, what God offers us, is freedom from this world. It’s the freedom to step outside our desires and outside the roles and expectations the world lays on us in order to choose to do and be something and someone else altogether.
The contrast here is stark: the world thinks freedom is being able to do what we want with nobody stopping us; the freedom of God is the freedom to stop ourselves. His freedom is the ability to pull free of our desires and fears and think clearly rather than just reacting to them. It’s the liberty to choose not to do what we want because we understand what we want to do isn’t what we ought to do or what’s best for us. It’s freedom from the world, from ourselves, for God.
What the world markets and advertises as freedom is slavery. Peter invites us to act as free people by turning away from that slavery. He beckons us to freely choose to live as what we already are in Christ, as slaves to God instead of sin. Now, that might not sound like freedom to you either; if it doesn’t, I hear you, but consider this: the way of the world is the way of anxiety. No matter what, there’s always that crawling uncertainty, doubt, and fear at the heart of life. The most you can ever do is bury it. If you’re really good, you may be able to keep it buried long enough to forget it’s there—but it still won’t stay buried indefinitely in our world of earthquakes and floods. You can’t change the reality that much of what’s good in your life and your world is utterly dependent on things you can’t even understand, much less control. That’s true for even the most powerful people on this planet. Eventually, things will go wrong, you won’t see the crash coming until it happens, and you won’t be able to do a single solitary thing about it—but it will all be on your head anyway.
Not so for the people of God. We don’t have control either, but we know the one who does. We know the one on whom we depend, and we love him, and we know he loves us and takes care of us. That’s why the word of God tells us over and over again not to worry and not to fear, and why Jesus promised us a peace that passes all human understanding—it’s the peace of not having to fear those things which pass all human understanding. Being slaves to God means freedom from the anxiety that comes with being slaves to ourselves, and thus being free to live as people who are whole and well.
Of course, as we’ve already noted, Peter isn’t trying to give his readers a theological education, he’s trying to change how they live. The practical concern behind his directive in verses 13-14 to be subject to human authorities is spelled out in verse 15: that by doing good you should silence the ignorance of fools. In case you think the ignorance of fools was just a first-century problem, I’m sorry to have to tell you, but it’s a very real problem these days as well. Indeed, it’s practically a genre on social media these days, and it’s the genre the algorithm unfailingly prioritizes. I believe it’s still possible to force social-media sites to show you nothing but cat videos, but it’s a lot harder than it was back when cat videos were half the Internet.
Thing is, social media prioritizes rage bait because, amazingly, rage sells better than delight if your currency is clicks; it’s incredibly easy to get sucked into the vortex. One thing that troubles me deeply is what theologian and apologist Gavin Ortlund dubbed “theological trench warfare” including—and social media keeps trying to flood me with this—people who claim the name of Christ presenting vile, slanderous, dehumanizing caricatures of Calvinism as the real thing. Unfortunately, as one of my mentors once pointed out, I have a distinct naïve streak in me, and one aspect of that is I still believe rational argument and persuasion has power in and of itself. I hate to admit it, but that’s not true. If you’re talking with someone who has enough intellectual humility to be willing to learn from people who disagree with them, then rational argument and persuasion has power because that person is open to it, because that’s someone who cares more about knowing the truth than about being right. Fools flip that—they care about being right, and about being seen to be right, and about “winning” the argument, and they won’t learn from anyone who disagrees with them because that would require them to accept being wrong. They won’t do that, which is their folly, and the cause of their ignorance.
It’s still hard for me to remember and accept that you can’t correct the ignorance of fools because their folly is the armor of their ignorance. No matter how good your argument is, they’ll always have one they think is better, whether it makes any real sense or not. As the saying goes, never try to teach a pig to sing—it can’t be done, and it annoys the pig. The only hope is to silence their ignorance; the only way to do that, as Peter says, is by doing good. Doing good requires the appropriate submission to human authorities we talked about a few minutes ago.
There are a few dimensions to this which we should note. One, our allegiance to God and freedom in Christ are not a justification for asserting our independence from the powers of this world and doing as we please. We are not to use our faith as an excuse to cause trouble and unhelpful disruption. That’s not what it’s for, and not what we’re for. Two, as we said earlier, Christian freedom isn’t about “doing as we please,” it’s about doing what pleases God. Given the command in verse 17 to “honor everyone”—which we’ll come back to in a moment—this is about more than just a change in behavior, it’s about a change in our focus. As Paul says in Philippians 2, “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility put others first, ahead of yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interest, but also to the interests of others.” Like the Jewish exiles in Babylon to whom Jeremiah wrote, our call is to seek the good of the neighbors, the community, and the nation to which God has given us, and then to put wheels on that by doing whatever we can to bless them.
Three, Peter tells us to love our fellow believers but he doesn’t tell us to love everyone else. He’s not saying we don’t need to love them; Jesus already did that. Peter wants to challenge us in a different way: honor everyone in general and the emperor in particular. We should treat everyone with respect and consideration as fellow human beings who are God’s beloved creations just as much as we are; to those in power we should add a certain degree of deference. I don’t hear much of any of this in our country these days. I hear a lot of disrespect, contempt, vitriol, slander, and abuse directed at the President, at Congress, and at politicians and government figures all down the line, and with the state of social media these days anyone who dares express an opinion on anything is liable to be hit by a firehose of the same filth. All this is nauseatingly wrong and ungodly, there’s no excuse for it, and don’t try to tell me there is.
I’ve thought about this more than I’d like the last seven months, because these days you can’t make it through even a cat video without getting an ad, and a lot of those are political. I know political figures in Indiana, not Ohio; what I’ve “learned” so far from online ads is John Husted is corrupt enough to get elected in Chicago and Amy Acton is an abusive drunk. That’s what passes for political discourse these days? Not only is that a sad commentary on the state of the Union, it’s despicably unbiblical. And maybe you think Peter just didn’t know how bad things could get. Maybe you think he would have changed his tune if he could see how bad our leaders are and how ungodly our society is. If you do, go read some Roman history. Go read about Caligula. Every new Caesar was a game of roulette—the Russian variety. We’ve never had it that bad. Peter tells us to honor the emperor anyway.
The bottom line here, I think, is Peter’s third command in verse 17: Fear God. He’s reinforcing something he said exactly one chapter earlier, in 1:17, that we need to take God’s holiness with reverent seriousness, in the full awareness of his power and greatness. There, his emphasis is on God’s loathing of sin and his impartiality as a judge, that he holds us to the same standards as the rest of the world—which was something that had to be made clear; there was a stream of Jewish thought in this period that believed God would judge the Jews more lightly because they were his people, to which Peter issues a resounding “No.” Here the emphasis is on how we represent God to the world. As we saw a few weeks ago, we have reason for holy fear in the cost of our salvation, which was Jesus’ willing sacrifice on the cross, and so we shouldn’t take our sin and God’s forgiveness lightly. We also shouldn’t live in such a way that people around us take them lightly, as though our sin and God’s forgiveness were trivial matters. We should be in joyful, reverent awe that the All-Holy One chose and is redeeming unholy us, and our lives should show that awe to the world, that the sacrifice of Christ might be honored and the love and hope he gives may be truly seen.
Photo ©2013 Johan Fredriksson. License: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported. Image has been cropped to fit.
