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.
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