If you were here a couple months ago when we looked at 2:1-8, you most likely remember Peter calls the church the house of God and us the living stones of which it’s built; you might not have caught the connection to this passage because the ESV here translates oikos as “household” rather than “house” for some reason, but it’s the same word. There, he articulates the reality that being part of the church is integral to our identity in Christ, in part because we collectively are the place on earth where God lives, the access point for the nations and his physical representation in the world. Peter has spent some time unpacking that second part, showing us what it means to be Jesus’ earthly representatives; he’s acknowledged living out our new identity in Christ will in some times and places bring persecution and suffering. Here, he turns to look from a different angle, showing us suffering for Christ isn’t just something to be endured patiently—it’s actually, strangely enough, reason to rejoice. This connects back, as we’ll see at the end, to the church’s role as the access point for unbelievers to God.
Peter makes the turn by describing persecution and suffering as testing by fire. He’s alluding to several Old Testament passages here and there are differing opinions as to which is most important, but I’m with those who see Malachi 3 as the primary background for his imagery here, along with a verse from Zechariah 13. There’s a noteworthy detail you might have caught in verse 3: the prophet says the Lord will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, then parallels that with the statement, he will purify the sons of Levi and refine them like gold and silver. Parallelism is the most important literary element in the Old Testament, and the structure here is weird. If you look, you can see the first part has refiner and purifier, while the second changes the nouns to verbs and flips them around to purify . . . and refine; that kind of parallelism, if you’re interested, is called a chiasm because it looks like the Greek letter chi, which is the same as our X. Given that, given that the second line has gold and silver, you would expect the first part to have silver and gold—but it doesn’t. The gold is omitted. That tells you the prophet is doing something deliberate here.
There’s a story about this; I don’t know if it actually happened, but when I looked into it years ago, I found solid support for its explanation of what Malachi is doing. As the story goes, there was a women’s Bible study on Malachi that decided to figure this out, so one of its members did some research. She managed to track down a silversmith, and then managed to talk him into letting her show up and watch him work. As she watched, he held a piece of silver in the middle of the flames. In refining silver, he explained, one must hold it in the hottest part of the fire to burn away the impurities. The woman thought about God holding us in such a hot spot and remembered Malachi says the Lord will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver. She asked the silversmith if he had to sit in front of the fire the whole time the silver was being refined. He said not only did he have to sit there holding the silver in place, he had to keep his eyes on it the entire time. If the silver were left in the flames even a moment too long, it would be ruined. The woman was silent for a moment, then asked, “How do you know when the silver is fully refined?” The silversmith smiled at her and said, “That’s easy. I know it’s done when I see my face reflected in it.”
This, says Malachi, is how the Lord is handling us and why he’s doing it. This, says Peter, is the nature of our suffering if we suffer for the sake of God and his righteousness. We shouldn’t assume suffering means we’ve done something wrong or we’re out of God’s will because God is using it to test and refine us. We have teachers in the congregation: when you give your students finals, or unit tests, or pop quizzes, does it mean they’ve been bad and you want to punish them? Sometimes, sure, but not mostly. They may perceive tests as punishment, suffering, and persecution, but the actual purpose of the test is to show them how well they know the material (and to give you a formal way to evaluate their knowledge). In the same way, suffering for Jesus shows us and others the genuineness of our faith. God doesn’t need the proof, of course, but we do. Faith which is never tested is merely theoretical; suffering makes it real.
This is reason to rejoice if we’re suffering for Jesus—if our eyes and our heart are fixed on him and doing his will, and we’re being persecuted because of it—as is the fact that the flames of suffering burn because they’re scouring away our impurities. More than that, Peter says, rejoice because if we suffer for Jesus, we’re actually suffering with him, sharing in his sufferings. It’s a sign of our unity and identification with him. That doesn’t mean we’re somehow earning our salvation (or anyone else’s) by our suffering, but it does mean we’re being brought into his experience to share that with him. God doesn’t expect us to be happy about it or find pleasure in it, but joy is deeper than both. When we suffer with Jesus, when we’re persecuted for following him instead of obeying the ways of the world, that shows we belong to him. That means we can rejoice, not because we like our present circumstances, but because we see ahead to the pure and unmarred joy we’ll experience when he comes again.
Peter takes this further by asserting, If you’re insulted for the name of Christ, you’re blessed. He’s drawing again on the Sermon on the Mount, summarizing Matthew 5:11-12. The blessing Jesus pronounces there is focused on future reward, much as Peter says to rejoice in suffering for the joy that’s coming. In verse 14, however, Peter brings the blessing to the present: the Spirit of glory and of God rests on you if you’re willing to stay true to Jesus in the face of hostility instead of bending to it. It’s only possible to hold fast in such an hour by the power of the Holy Spirit working in us and through us; if we do, then by the work of that same Spirit the glory of God—the character of the goodness and faithfulness of God which is revealed most clearly and powerfully in the suffering and death of Christ—is revealed in our lives as well.
In verse 15, Peter inserts a quick caveat, for two reasons. One is obvious: to repeat that you aren’t blessed if you suffer for doing wrong. Slapping the name of Jesus on sin doesn’t excuse or justify anything, it only makes the sin worse, no matter how many times people try it. More interestingly, take a look at the list in verse 15. Peter says, don’t suffer as a murderer or a thief—OK, no major criminal activities, that’s obvious as sunrise. He continues, or an evildoer—don’t suffer for any other criminal activity either, still bog-standard so far. But then we hit the fourth term in the list—and Peter sticks another “as” in there which isn’t necessary in order to separate this one out as a distinct addition—and it’s an unusual word to boot; it seems likely either Peter or his secretary coined it. Context gives us the translation meddler, one who interferes in someone else’s business and pokes his nose where it doesn’t concern him.
In other words: parent your own kids, not a stranger’s kids, unless they paid you for the privilege. Don’t go around lecturing and hectoring people who didn’t ask for your opinion. OK, so you see someone else sinning; that does not by itself give you the right to criticize or rebuke or denounce them for it. This is, I think, a word of correction the American church badly needs to hear and accept. There are a lot of folks—this is a lesson I’m still learning—who need to realize their “suffering for Jesus” is more often than not suffering for being a jerk.
Peter comes back to his point by playing with the word “Christian,” a word coined by unbelievers as a term of abuse. If they haul you into court for introducing an illegal religion and call you a Christian, he says, don’t accept the shame, don’t take it as a disgrace and an embarrassment, but respond in a way that gives glory to God. For, he says—this is why you should glorify God; this is why you should rejoice when you suffer for Jesus—it’s time for the judgment to begin with the house of God. This is a staggering statement with a lot to unpack, so let’s take it one step at a time.
First and most basically, what is God’s judgment? We misdirect ourselves something awful here because—understandably—we think of it as the same sort of thing as human judgment. God makes a set of arbitrary rules, and if you break them you get an arbitrarily-devised punishment. There might be some logical connection between offense and punishment, but no necessary connection—and he doesn’t even let us vote on it.
In truth, God’s judgment is a radically different reality. It’s more like the judgment of the law of gravity. God cannot endure sin, and nothing sinful can endure God. Throw a handful of straw in a crackling fire, and it burns. That doesn’t mean the fire sits there and decides it doesn’t approve of your action and doesn’t like straw and so it’s going to destroy it; it’s just what fire does, and what straw does. It’s the inevitable consequence of the nature of straw meeting the nature of fire. So it is with the judgment of God—it’s just what happens.
Two, what is this judgment? The ESV obscures this, but there’s a definite article in the Greek—the judgment. In other words, Peter absolutely means God’s judgment on the whole world, which will come to fulfillment at Christ’s return. This is the Last Judgment, the eschatological judgment, the final sorting-out of humanity. That’s important to understand, because this isn’t judgment on those who reject the gospel, it’s judgment between those who are Jesus’ faithful ones and those who aren’t. Peter is telling his hearers, and us, the fiery trial of persecution is the beginning of the judgment that will conclude the history of fallen humanity. That judgment will only happen in full when Christ returns, but it’s starting now and being levied now on the church. Again, note, this isn’t a judgment on individuals but a judgment between individuals, weeding those who aren’t truly of Jesus out of the visible institution of the church.
Three, that raises a fair question: why? Why is the church experiencing end-times judgment now? We have to begin with something counterintuitive to us but absolutely biblical: the phrase “end times” doesn’t mean just the very last sliver of human history before God rings down the curtain. I used the word “eschatological” a minute ago; this is from the word “eschatology,” the part of Christian theology dealing with the way the world ends. One of the challenges of eschatology is Scripture telling us we’ve been in the end times ever since Jesus.
A Swiss theologian named Oscar Cullman explained this reality by looking back at World War II. The war, he pointed out, was all over but the shouting as soon as the Allies established a secure beachhead in Normandy on D-Day—but it wasn’t done. There was a tremendous amount of shouting between D-Day and V-E Day. Similarly, when Jesus died, rose again, and ascended to the Father, the Enemy’s fate was decided; it was all over but the shouting. That doesn’t mean it’s done, because Satan’s no more willing to accept the facts and surrender gracefully than Hitler was—where do you think Hitler got that attitude, anyway? We live in the end times because we live between the times, when the kingdom is already present and not yet here.
The church gets in on this judgment early because God wasn’t willing to let the weeds grow unchecked between Jesus’ first advent and his second advent. I think we can understand that; without the fiery trial of judgment, the church would have ended up completely overgrown and corrupt. Even in a relatively short period of outward cultural acceptance, the American church has gotten overgrown and seedy. There have been many seasons of weeding over church history, from the persecution of the early church to the Protestant Reformation to gentler forms like the “rise of the Nones” in the contemporary US. This happens at the congregational level, too; from the stories I’ve heard, it happened here in years past. It should have happened at the church I served in Winona Lake, but God ultimately gave them over to the weeds.
It’s worth noting this pattern actually goes back before the church to Jesus’ earthly ministry. The obvious example is the Crucifixion, but he started the weeding himself well before that. Think of John 6, where he freaked out the crowds by telling them they had to eat his flesh and drink his blood. Then he looked at the Twelve and asked, “Are you going to leave me, too?” Peter spoke for all of them, as usual, in a tone the Christian writer Malcolm Muggeridge called “loyal despair”: “Jesus, where are we going to go? You’re the only one who has the words of eternal life.” Another example—I think we’ll get into this starting in January—is the Sermon on the Mount, which is designed partly to draw a clear, sharp contrast between Jesus’ two profoundly different groups of followers.
As we think about this, I think it helps if we reach beyond Peter’s language to 1 John’s image of the church as the family of God. As I said a moment ago, as a parent I discipline my own children, I don’t presume to discipline other people’s children. That’s not absolute—if they’re in my house, I reasonably expect them to follow the rules of the house—but simply asserting the authority to discipline someone else’s children would make me a meddler, and we know what Peter says about that. (I should admit there were days at the license branch where the temptation to do so was very, very strong all the same.) Anymore, I only discipline one of my children, because the girls are all accountable to themselves now. For Iain now, for them earlier, there were times when they perceived discipline as suffering, but that’s never what it was for. Their mother and I wanted, and want, them to turn away from their sin and grow in godliness rather than continuing in it and growing in sinfulness. Better they suffer sooner under discipline than later under judgment; the latter is far worse, with far more terrible consequences.
The fiery trial of persecution, when it comes, isn’t primarily God disciplining us for our sins, but if we’re honest, we know we never suffer entirely for Jesus’ sake because even at our best, our motives and actions aren’t entirely pure. Though we aren’t suffering for being sinners, we are still sinners. When the fiery trial comes on the church, it will find every crack and every flaw in us, and so the judgment on the church will sometimes and to some degree include discipline for our sin. Even this, however, is some small reason for rejoicing, because it too is sign and assurance we belong to Jesus.
It’s hard to look around the landscape and see what’s happened to the church in this country in recent decades. Prominent pastors brought down by moral failure, others by ego implosions, denominational splits and self-destructions . . . I could keep going, but why? It’s like a roll call of doom. Really, it is a roll call of doom: it is the judgment beginning with the house of God. This has been the Lord arriving of a sudden at his temple as a refining fire, burning much away to purify his people; it has been God threshing his church like wheat to separate the good grain from the husk and the straw. It has been, to sum it up, the cleansing of the temple.
The house of God is the place on earth where God is worshipped; it’s the access point for all those in the world whom he draws to seek him. He promised many times through the prophets the time would come when all nations would come to Zion, to the mountain of God, to his temple and his city, to worship him and to bow before him; the church is the spiritual Zion and the inheritor of those promises. One we should especially remember is God’s statement in Isaiah 56:8, “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations.” I say we should remember it because of something Jesus did—twice—which I’m sure Peter never forgot. The high priest set up a religious marketplace in the Court of the Gentiles; it probably made him a lot of money, but it also made it impossible for Gentiles to worship in the Temple. They couldn’t hear what was going on in the inner courts over the sounds of animals and money and business deals. When Jesus saw this, he flipped over the tables and drove out animals and moneychangers alike; the second time, he denounced the enterprise in the words of Isaiah: “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations, but you have made it a den of thieves!”
The worship of God had to be pure because those whom God was calling needed to be able to answer that call. It wasn’t, so Jesus purified it by driving out those who weren’t in that courtyard to worship. God’s judgment on the church is the separation of those who are focused on worshipping him, who are learning to love to worship him, from those who, in the last analysis, are really worshipping something else. It’s God renewing his church as a people who worship him in spirit and in truth, and whose worship is pure—as pure as we ever manage, anyway—so those who come are led and taught to turn away from the idols of our culture and worship him alone. This is part of what it means that we are the house of God.
Photo © 2012 David Stanley. License: Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic. Image has been cropped to fit.