What’s Love Got To Do With It? A Summation...

1 Peter 1:22

Now that you have purified your souls by your obedience to the truth so that you have genuine mutual love, love one another deeply from the heart.

The entire letter, to this point, has been inclusive of what was involved in the purification of the souls of Peter’s readers.  From the opening lines, when he claims them as God’s own, through the Lord Jesus Christ, through a review of the power of Jesus as Savior, to the challenge of the present times, to the mission that Peter is calling them to on behalf of God, it is gathering here for the next step, the application, or at least the first application of being God’s community among them.

Purification of their souls came by the obedience to the truth, the Truth being our Lord Jesus, the man and the mission, the death and the resurrection, the teachings and the promises.  It is one gathered religious message that can be boiled down simply to ‘the truth’.

This coming to God through Jesus Christ comes with a purpose.  It is to bring purity to the love that the readers have one for another, to bring the real love of God into the lives and communities of faith.  The love is genuine, it is mutual, it is the bedrock of the success of the ministry among these followers of the divine.  It is the bedrock that Peter is laying down among them as believers.

True love from the heart, from which they shall love one another deeply.  Such is the product manufactured from the things of faith through Jesus.  Though not an end unto itself, it is the proper interconnectedness of the community of faith that will allow for more to go forward.

I Am Head over Heels in Love with God…Does That Make Me Sound Nuts?

1 Peter 1:22

Now that you have purified your souls by your obedience to the truth so that you have genuine mutual love, love one another deeply from the heart.

Thus is the command of Peter.  All these things about Jesus and God and our interactions, new lives, obedience to, purification into, it is all about truly loving one another.  Is that not at the heart of our condition as human beings, the search for love? 

Yes, I am going to meddle in the realm of ‘romantic’ love with the overtures of ‘religious’ love.  We love God and our neighbors as Jesus commanded us in the summation of the law.  But isn’t that just one of those religious generalities?  A grand abstract command that we can give lip service to, but can it really exist in the real world? 

Can the grand and total love commanded by God really find an equivalent in the love between two people? 

Oh my, where do I start?

If romantic love, the starry eyed desire that two people have for each other at the beginning of a relationship, or even mutual love, the deeper, more satisfying, longer lasting love that develops as people seriously work to intertwine their lives for the long term, if that love were truly the expression of the church’s desire to fulfill the law, loving God and loving our neighbor, how different would the world be?

Would anybody go hungry?  Would anybody be poor?  Would anybody be at war?  But how can we even make that consideration?  In our culture, such love gets so wrapped up in issues of sexuality that to apply it to our relationship with Jesus, for example, would really make things weird.

But Peter is seeking to get his readers to understand the intensity of romantic love exists in a longer, more intense, less sexual form.  The grand and total love commanded by God is not only the equivalent of the love between two people, but it can surpass that love. 

But it requires much, our obedience to God, the purifying of our souls, the embracing of the sacrifice that Jesus has made for us.

The most amazing romantic lovers, the most excellent marriages, the most impressive partnerships between people in love with one another, the power of that love is not the engine of their success.  It is when their love, their human love, begins to take on the aspects of the love God has for us, the love we can have for God in return, that it becomes transcendent.

Ever Been Betrayed In Love?

1 Peter 1:22

Now that you have purified your souls by your obedience to the truth so that you have genuine mutual love, love one another deeply from the heart.

Have you been betrayed in love?  Has someone gotten close to you and deliberately sought to mess you over?  Or did they turn off the charm (charm is NOT an emotion) and become something different?  Betrayed trust is hard to bestow once again.  Sometimes it ought not to be bestowed again. 

The purification of their souls, their obedience to the TRUTH, the truth that is Jesus Christ and all that entails, these are the pieces Peter puts into place so that his readers will know “genuine mutual” love.  That sounds rather clinical.  The purpose of purifying their souls, of obedience to the truth, these are not so that they are going to get into heaven.  No, it is so that they will have genuine, mutual love for each other. 

So here is a curve ball.  John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever should believeth him should not perish but have everlasting life.”  So, to interpret this verse, the job of the church is to get people to believe in Jesus, no matter what or how.  Scare them with hell and damnation if necessary.  Exploit them in times of weakness.  Whatever it takes…

But if we are truly obeying the truth, and we have established that the Truth is a catchword for Jesus and what he stands for, and the reason to obey is to purify our souls so that we might, in turn have a genuine mutual love…that undercuts “in your face” evangelism. 

Peter is going after something completely different.  He is going after the human equivalent of God’s love for us.  It is genuine, without ‘if’s, and’s, or but’s, and God seeks it to be mutual, that we will love our God in return.  In Jesus-obedience to the truth-this love can be established.  It is what Peter is calling to be established.

It is to answer and overcome all the garbage that people do to people under the cover of perverting the true nature of love.

The Truth, We Must Obey… What is It? Or..Who?

1 Peter 1:22

Now that you have purified your souls by your obedience to the truth so that you have genuine mutual love, love one another deeply from the heart.

It was a stumper question that Pilate asked Jesus when Jesus was before him, on his way to the cross.  “What is truth?”  ‘The Truth’ is a recurring theme throughout the gospel of John.  I just finished a wonderful article exploring the use of the word ‘truth’ throughout John’s gospel.  What does that have to do with Peter?  No much except that ‘truth’ rang in my mind from John’s gospel.  And Scripture is supposed to be used to interpret Scripture.

We know a couple things about this ‘truth’ from Peter.  One is that it is obeyed.  Not ‘needs to be obeyed’, but is obeyed.  It is obeyed because by it, the reader’s souls have been purified.  It’s like the truth is some strong ‘soul soap’, if you will. 

A quick scan back up 1 Peter shows me that this is the first time Peter is using the word ‘truth’.  I think that the word ‘truth’ has a technical meaning to it, used to specify something that Peter wishes to make known, something that his original readers would have already known. 

John 14:6, Jesus says “I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life”.  “The Way” becomes a technical term in Acts to describe the early church.  “The Life” is Jesus, given to us through his death and resurrection.  The Truth, maybe not what, but who.  Not what is the truth, but who is the truth?  Jesus is the truth.

Could ‘the truth’ as Peter uses it refer back to the sum total of who Jesus was and what he did?  That has been the connecting theme through the verses that come before, it is all centered on the person and work of Jesus.  It, known together, is “the truth”.

Isn’t Forgiveness Enough? We also Need to be Purified?

1 Peter 1:22

Now that you have purified your souls by your obedience to the truth so that you have genuine mutual love, love one another deeply from the heart.

“Purified your souls”, sounds like the Mosaic laws of being clean and unclean.  During the Exodus, unclean had to purify themselves before they could come into camp.  The previous verse was about Jesus bringing us back to trusting God the Father, through God’s raising Jesus from the dead and lifting Jesus to glory.  There is the process by which the soul is purified, through Jesus.

Why do we need purified souls?  Isn’t forgiveness enough?  Are they mutually exclusive?  Or connected?  This takes us to the purpose of Peter’s letter.  His readers are being prepared to carry on the work that Peter began with them.  Purified souls sound like a ‘next step’ after forgiveness of sins, after coming to Jesus as Lord and Savior.  It is a development, a maturing, continuing the process of coming to God.

In the law of Moses, one had to be ritually clean to serve the Lord.  The high priest was considered so holy, that he could not even touch a dead relative to bury them, his duty was to God.  In Jesus, it is not just a matter of ritual purification, the purification goes even deeper, it goes to the very soul of the believer.  Sin may continue in our lives, because we are only human, but the saving power of God is in us no matter what. 

So what do we do with these purified souls?  Because we do not receive them as rewards for faithful service.  This is the introduction of how then we shall take this gift and extend it into the world in which we live.

What Shall We Then Do With The Love of God?

1 Peter 1:22

Now that you have purified your souls by your obedience to the truth so that you have genuine mutual love, love one another deeply from the heart.

From a consideration of the interconnection of God the Father and Jesus, God the Son, Peter takes us to how then we should act in the knowledge we have of God and the relationship we are to build in God and with each other through our God.

Now that you have purified your souls—Coming into relationship with God, through raising Jesus from the dead, and raising Him to glory, from thence comes the purifying of our souls.

by your obedience to the truth—This is the true measure of how we come into relationship with our Lord for the purification of our souls.

so that you have genuine mutual love,--It is not simply about an individual relationship with God that we do this work, it is for the building of relationship between us.

love one another deeply from the heart.—Thus is the command of how the community shall function.

Summing It All Up

1 Peter 1:21

Through him you have come to trust in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope are set on God.

The purpose of Jesus Christ is to bring us back to a trusting relationship with our God in heaven.  The proof of Jesus’ place and authority to carry out this work comes in two works from God.  The first of these works is to raise Jesus from the dead to a new life.  The second was to lift Jesus up from this earth to the Throne of Glory, the Ruler of Heaven.  “I and my Father are one” Jesus says in the Gospel of John.  What that means for us is that we come into the trust of God that Jesus lays out for us, taking into account His miraculous rising from the dead and he ascension to the Throne of heaven.  This shall bring us to have our belief set on God and our hope for what is to come also set on God.

Jesus returns us to right relationship with God.  God demonstrates God’s power by raising Jesus from death and to the Throne on High.  It is simply to open the way of our belief in God once more.

What is Old Hat For Us Was New To Peter’s Readers.

1 Peter 1:21

Through him you have come to trust in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope are set on God.

My faith and hope are set on God because God raised Jesus from the dead, because God gave Jesus glory-raising Jesus up to the throne of Glory in heaven, which happened because, through Jesus, I have come to trust in God.  Sounds like the circle of faith firmly closed around itself.

The Trinity celebrates God in three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Looks like, as we read this, that God the Father-or just God-is the one who raised the Son, Jesus, to the throne of glory.  In the gospel of John, Jesus expounds on this relationship, of how God has given the Throne of Judgement to Jesus.  The Father is making the Son into God. 

Great scholars have gotten twisted around discussions of trying to figure out the divine relationship between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  THAT IS NOT THE POINT.

The point is that our faith and hope are set on God.  We believe in God.  God is the hope of things to come.  That comes through the resurrection and the glorification of Jesus.  We take the story of Jesus for granted, but understand that the readers of Peter’s letter are trying to wrap their heads around this concept, that God has closed the distance between humanity and Godself, a distance that was opened at the advent of Original Sin.  It fulfills the purpose of their faith!

“Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”  Jesus loves them, so they are told, because Peter tells them so.  And Peter doesn’t have the gospels to back him up.  They are being written as he writes.  The stories are out there, but the narrative has not yet arrived.

I’ve been steeped in the gospel my whole life.  It is easy to get jaded.  These guys are getting the message of salvation for the first time, and it is blowing them away.  I feel some of the adrenalin as I try to put myself in their shoes.

From Creation to the Glory of Our Creator

1 Peter 1:21

Through him you have come to trust in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope are set on God.

The glory given to Jesus Christ is the Glory of God.  We are on one side of an uncrossed divide, between the creation and the Creator (we are the creation).  The Creator is perfect, we, the creation, are not.  We lost our trust in God.  But then God crossed the divide, through Jesus. 

Jesus was the creation as it was meant to be, without sin.  And he was willing to make the ultimate sacrifice, out of love for the rest of us, out of love of God.  Jesus is the bridge between the creation and the Creator.  This is what Peter is telling us, Jesus is the one who has restored trust between us and our God once again. 

In return, God raised Jesus from the dead and gave him glory.  What is that glory?  Jesus sits on the Royal Throne of heaven.  Jesus has been given the Judgeship of the Living and the Dead.  Jesus is God and human.  When Jesus comes back, returning to earth as he rose up to heaven, he will be returning in Glory.

How does that apply to our lives now?  Now, we begin the work that will be fulfilled when Jesus returns.  The glory does not wait for that day, but comes out in every life that we are able to aid in the Lord’s name.  Through Jesus, we have come to trust in God, through us, the way can be opened for others to trust in God as well.  Are we willing?

There is No Escaping Death, Unless You Are God

1 Peter 1:21

Through him you have come to trust in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope are set on God.

This is the centerpiece of God’s greatest power in our lives, the ability to raise from the dead.  It is a circular thing to consider.  Through Jesus, trust comes to God.  That trust goes to the God who raised Jesus from the dead.  Through the risen Jesus, trust comes to God.

We do not do well with death in our culture.  No culture has an easy time with death, but for many, it is more integrated into the cycle of life than in ours.  It was a telling conversation I had with the owners of a funeral home.  More families are not even conducting the most basic ‘funeral rites’, but simply want the body put under the ground with no memorial nor remembrance, no reminder that death is inevitable to us all.

Death is inevitable.  There is no way to escape it.  Of all the things we can do to conquer nature and build the world up in our own image, death is still going to come for us all.  But the power of God is that God can and has broken that cycle.  He broke that cycle with his Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.

In our faith, we trust in Jesus who was raised from the dead.  Through him we trust in a God who will raise us to new life, where death is no more.  It is the promise of life eternal.

Jesus-Bringer of Our Trust To God.

1 Peter 1:21

Through him you have come to trust in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope are set on God.

When Jesus says “I am the way and the truth and the life”, he speaks of how through him we come to trust in God.  In this way, Christianity is in contrast to Judaism and Islam.  In Judaism, God the Father, the Lord, He whose Name is too holy to be pronounced by humans.  In Islam, the relationship is directly with Allah, with God, the all-powerful.  We Christians come to trust in God through the Messiah, God-become-human, our Lord Jesus Christ.

Why have we come to trust in God through Jesus?  We could we not simply trust God directly?  What is it about the plan of God that dictates a human emissary to show us the way?  Now, I am not challenging Peter’s assertion.  I have come to trust God through Jesus.  But why does it have to happen this way?

What is the effectiveness of a personal, individual relationship with Jesus?  Maybe that is because this is the way that we thrive, in relationship to one another?  Perhaps, in a world where our greatest pains can come from relationships that failed or were exploitative or manipulative, having God not as some great “I AM” floating off beyond the clouds in heaven, but loving us so much that he did not consider being God as something to be grasped, but put off Godhood and took on the form of a servant…

If Jesus can be trusted, then so to God can be trusted.  It starts in relationship.

God and Jesus: Two Persons Yet One Purpose

1 Peter 1:21

Through him you have come to trust in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope are set on God.

“Him” is Jesus, in the fun of deriving the nouns behind the pronouns.  We just came off of what was planned for Jesus, from before creation.  Now Peter uses Jesus as the crux of our relationship with God, how we come to know God and set our ‘faith and hope’ on God through God’s only begotten Son.

Through him you have come to trust in God, -After outlining the grand plan of Jesus, set in motion before creation, we are told why, to reestablish trust in God.

who raised him from the dead -This trust is built upon the life returning power and work of our God.

and gave him glory, -But it is not simply built upon the power God has to restore life, but also in the unique reward that was given to Jesus.

so that your faith and hope are set on God. -Again, this is not something done in the abstract, but it is done for us, to recreate and strengthen our relationship with the Creator of the Universe’

When Did the History of Our Redemption Start?

1 Peter 1:20

He was destined before the foundation of the world, but was revealed at the end of the ages for your sake.

From the very beginning, before the very beginning, God knew what was going to happen and God set the wheels in motion.  The death and resurrection of Jesus, the Son of God, was in play even before God ever said, “Let there be light.”  But it did not come at the beginning.  It needed to play out in redemptive history theology that the Lord set in motion throughout the years.  What Peter considered to be the end of the ages shows the boundaries of his knowledge.  He could not have known in his lifetime that two thousand years were going to pass, at the very least, that our understanding of the end was going to move from an immediacy to some unknown future, well out there.  Still, all of this was done for us, for our sake.  God created and executed a plan before, through, and ultimately after recorded history, all for us.

We are privileged.

Jesus Did It All For Us

1 Peter 1:20

He was destined before the foundation of the world, but was revealed at the end of the ages for your sake.

He does it for us.  Destiny from before creation, revealed at ‘the end of the age’, the end of the age that Peter knew.  Jesus did it for us, for our sakes.  This is what Peter is telling his original audience and it is the same message for us now. 

If you look at the evidence of the supernatural in the Bible, you know about the devil, Satan, Lucifer, once an angel of the Lord, cast out of heaven, now the one who would seek to destroy the work of God.  What Jesus does for our sakes, a portion of that is so that we shall not end up in hell with Satan.  The battle for the fate of humanity is found throughout the bible.  Jesus was destined from the very beginning to provide us with victory.

Maybe the literal description of hell and the devil does not touch your soul as you consider your faith.  A fair consideration of evil and sin must.  Even if the idea of Hell and Lucifer are, for you, metaphoric in their intent, sin in the world is undeniable.  Actually, that is not entirely true.  There are some amazing ‘deny-ers’ out there.  But Jesus did the things of salvation history for our sake, to navigate us through the evil that humanity does and bring us to something better. 

Tradition tells us that God has done this, sent his only Son, become human, taking the form of a servant, because God loves us.  That is why all this is done for our sake.  Do we then move with what has been given to us or do we reject it?  Does it enrich our lives, does it lead us to trust God that we can be better than we feel right now?

I think it does.

It’s the End of the World as We Know It…

1 Peter 1:20

He was destined before the foundation of the world, but was revealed at the end of the ages for your sake.

One of the most basic mistakes of biblical interpretation concerns the end of time.  For us, ‘the end of the ages’ is somewhere out there-way out there I think it would be fair to say.  This is a reasonable interpretation.  It has been two thousand years since Jesus returned to heaven.  As he went, so shall he return.  But forgive me for the short-sightedness of my faith, I am not holding my breath at this point.  I pray and I hope, but I am living for the day I see grandchildren and beyond.

For Peter, and for John in the book of Revelations, and Paul, and the entire first generation of the church, the end of the ages was upon them.  That was what Jesus came for, to crown the history of God, to end the ages of sin, to usher in the renewed heaven and the renewed earth.  It is the labor of love that Peter is calling his readers to, of that first generation and to this generation. 

So what does that mean for us?  It means the destiny of Jesus from before the world is not yet fulfilled.  What has been revealed at the end of the ages, in the time of Peter, is not yet complete.  There is work for us, there is destiny for us, the work begun by Peter continues.  Such is our participation in the completion of the work of Christ.

God Had A, Has A, Continues to Have A Plan

1 Peter 1:20

He was destined before the foundation of the world, but was revealed at the end of the ages for your sake.

There was a time lag from the beginning of creation to the revelation of Jesus’ destiny.  We can surmise that if Jesus was destined for the work he would accomplish before the foundation of the world, that if God knew what was coming through the history of his creation, that the time he was revealed was built into his destiny.  What this takes an awful long time to say is that God has a plan.

That means Jesus’ coming during the Roman occupation of the Holy Land was no accident.  It was within that evil empire that the church was to be incubated, eventually conquering the Roman Empire.  That means the history previously is a lead up to the main event, the life of Jesus.  Therefore, a divine connection on one small piece of real estate tucked at the far edge of the Mediterranean Sea was set in motion by God to what has created the world’s largest religion.

It means that what is happening even today, well after the effective knowledge window of Peter as a writer in the Bible, is part of that same destiny.  It is part of that same plan.  I wonder how it will roll out for us next.

God Knew From Before Creation The Evil That Men Do

1 Peter 1:20

He was destined before the foundation of the world, but was revealed at the end of the ages for your sake.

“In the beginning, God made the heavens and the earth…”  And before the beginning, before the foundation of the world, Jesus was destined to be our Savior.  God knew from before how the whole “Earth” experiment was going to turn out, and God did it anyway.  God put Jesus among us anyway, to save us, despite all the evil and anger and destruction that humans have inflicted upon the creation.  That is a little mind-blowing.

So God knew all along what was going to happen in this world.  The death camps of World War 2, the Rwandan genocide, all the evils that humanity can commit.  I mean, of course God knew, but I never really thought about that.  What kind of evils did humanity commit for the Lord to destroy the Earth with a flood?  Even that was built into the destiny of Jesus from before the foundation of the world. 

Maybe that is why Jesus was destined to die from before the foundation of the world.  Maybe he was destined to die by the cruelty of the cross precisely because of the evils that humanity commits upon itself.  Maybe grace needed to come from cruelty so that we could find hope in even the most miserable of circumstances. 

I still do not understand why it all had to happen, why it continues to happen.  That is way above my pay grade.  But I do find myself grateful that God’s grace is sufficient, that God knew from before it even began what would be necessary to come through it.