Living Stones

Jesus is the living Stone promised by God.  He is the keystone of the arch of the living temple of God; he is the cornerstone of the whole building, the one from whom everything else is built out.  For you who believe in him and bow before him as Lord of all creation, he is an unshakeable foundation for your souls, and a sanctuary that will never fall.  The one who trusts in him will never be put to shame and will never have to fear the things of this world, no matter what storm may come.

For those who don’t put their trust in him, Jesus is the cause and occasion of judg­ment.  His blessings aren’t promised to everyone regardless of what they do or what they believe; his promises are only for those who come to him and lay all the weight of their lives on him, accepting him as the only trustworthy foundation.  Either you commit to rest your whole life on Jesus and put all your hope in him, or you don’t.

Granted, none of us put all our trust in Jesus all the time without fail; we have to keep choosing to trust him alone, because we drift.  We’re well trained to put our trust in our money, our education, our résumé, our family, our connections, and so on, and if we aren’t vigilant in our own hearts, we will always tend to revert to old habits.  Even so, the commitment to trust him alone, to follow him alone, to serve him alone, has to be there.  We can’t have Jesus as half our foundation, whether we take money or anything else as the other half; as he himself said, a house divided will never stand.

In the last analysis, we’re either all in with Jesus or we’re all out, and he drives us to make that choice.  You can maybe be neutral about Jesus from a distance, where you can’t see him clearly, but as you get closer, that quickly becomes impossible.  You either bow before him in utter surrender as the king of everything, or you refuse his demands and go your own way.

For those who reject him, who refuse to acknowledge him as the only true cornerstone for life, their refusal changes nothing:  he still remains the cornerstone.  He still remains a massive, immovable, unbreakable stone right in the center of life.  For those who build their lives on him and are built on him, he is the firm foundation.  Those who refuse to acknowledge that must still deal with him.  They may try to pretend he isn’t there at all, or that he isn’t what he is, but that doesn’t mean their way is clear.  In trying to walk through a stone they will not admit is there, they will stumble and fall and break themselves, and willfully refuse to under­stand why.  When the storm of God’s judgment breaks on the lies of humanity, they will be swept away, still rejecting the refuge.

This is the Prince of Peace who said, “I did not come to bring peace on earth, but a sword.”  He was, and is, a divisive figure, because he demands and deserves our absolute allegiance and our highest loyalty.  No lesser promise of support and service is ac­ceptable to him—it’s all or nothing.  And this is the mighty God in whose image we are being remade day by day.  He is the living Stone; we are being made living stones.

This is significant for us in a couple ways.  First, it connects to one of the main themes of this letter:  because we are in Christ, because of who we are in Christ, because we take our identity from him and not from the world, we will have conflict and we will have trouble.  People stumbled over Jesus, and they will stumble over us, and then they’ll blame us for their fall.  It doesn’t matter if they weren’t really looking where they were going; it was the stone’s fault, and they will vent their anger by kicking it and beating on it, even if it means they break a toe and bruise their fists.  This is the inheritance of the children of God—in this world.  We need to expect it.  We need to stop assuming that conflict means we’re doing something wrong.  It may mean we’re being like Jesus.

Second, this is the point at which Peter shifts from talking about our individual identity in Christ to our collective identity in Christ, and note how he does this.  I’m sure you’ve heard the line, “We don’t go to church, we arethe church,” and he affirms this in a profoundly concrete way.  Unlike Paul in 1 Corinthians 3, he doesn’t talk about us as the people who build the church—Peter tells us that we’re the building materials.  We are the stones with which God is building his temple on earth.

Think about that.  The home of God on earth is us—he lives in us by his Holy Spirit—and he builds it with our lives.  We are the visual representation of the character of God, in the way we live together; we’re the ones given to draw in the nations and lead them in the worship of God.  We’re called to carry on the ministry of Christ as a sanctuary and a shelter; we aren’t the foundation, but we lead people to the One who is.  We stand as a great rock in the world’s way.  For some, that makes us a beacon of hope; others see us as an obstruction to be bulldozed at any cost.

This is what our lives are for, and this is what our life together as the church is for.  Nothing more, and nothing less.  We don’t exist for ourselves, and the church doesn’t exist for us.  Like Jesus, we don’t exist to support ourselves, but to spend ourselves for the world; supporting us is God’s job, and he’s better at it than we are anyway.  We’re part of something much, much larger than any of us, or all of us together, and the measure of our lives is—is the temple of God more glorifying to him, more true to his character, and more dedicated to his work, because we’re a part of it?