“Sanctified”-Godly-vocab-aphobia: the fear of Big Bible Words

Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, To the exiles of the Dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia, ²who have been chosen and destined by God the Father and sanctified by the Spirit to be obedient to Jesus Christ and to be sprinkled with his blood:  May grace and peace be yours in abundance.   

3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead,

We continue to narrow Peter’s audience in this phrase.  They are Exiles of the Diapora, they are chosen and destined by God, now they are sanctified by the Spirit.  This process of being sanctified is then to be obedient to Christ and to be sprinkled with his blood.  Obedience to Christ, sprinkled by his blood, these speak to the salvation won for us by the death of Christ and the means-obedience-by which we become followers of Christ.

To be sanctified is “to be made holy”, a process that, for Peter, comes by the Spirit, the Holy Spirit.  

So, being sanctified by the Spirit seems like a Pentecost experience, like when the Spirit came upon the disciples at the beginning of the book of Acts, turning them into apostles, bold to preach the message of Jesus Christ.  The Spirit came upon Moses, allowing him divine power to lead God’s people.  The Spirit came upon the artisans who created the tabernacle, allowing for divine power to artistically create.  The Spirit came upon King Saul, causing him to prophecy like the band of prophets, another manifestation of divine power.

So being sanctified, if we are to define it as a process of being made holy by the Spirit of God, is a process by which divine power comes upon those so touched.  And the difference between the Old Testament and the New Testament is that this sanctification process happened to only select people called to great things in the Old Testament narrative.  With Pentecost, the Spirit became available to all believers.

So Peter, in his greeting, is laying out what has happened to these exiles to whom he is writing.  They were chosen and destined by God, they were sanctified by the Holy Spirit.  But sanctification is not an end to itself, this coming of divine power, this coming of holiness, it leads to something more.  It leads the exiles “to be obedient to Jesus Christ and to be sprinkled with his blood”.

Those phrases we will consider next.