You Have Seen Before And After Pictures-Here Is A Bible Version

1 Peter 2:10

Once you were not a people,
   but now you are God’s people;
once you had not received mercy,
   but now you have received mercy.

Peter is preaching to those who have come to the Lord.  That is the outline that proceeds along Chapter 2 of his letter.  Rid yourselves of the bad stuff, come and get the good stuff, Jesus is the precious stone rejected by the people, but not by God, he calls upon them to become the Royal Priesthood.  Now we have a couple of couplets bound together, the ‘before’ and the ‘after’ of what God has done in their lives.

Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people;-- Such is ‘what’ happened.  They were alone, they were without the Lord, but that has changed.  There was the darkness, but they have come into the light.  There was what came before, but now there is a new creation in Jesus Christ.  There is a declared statement that it is God that binds them together, before they were not a people at all, just a bunch.  There is an implication of unity in God that, looking at the church today, could bring us doubts about what we humans have done with God’s church.

once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.—What happened was that a people was formed in God.  How it happened was through the receipt of mercy.  The mercy comes through the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.  That is the way around the lex talionis, the law of a life for a life which is the judgment of breaking God’s law.  By Jesus taking our place, the cycle is broken and we are in the hands of our Lord through loving mercy, not a relationship of power dictated by God’s perfect justice.

Taken together, the same message is being shared.  There was the before and the after, without God and with God-the implication being that “with God” is the team to be chosen.  Up to know, Peter has been exhorting the believers about their Lord and the establishment of that relationship with the Lord.  Now he takes a moment to remind them of the alternative-which is not pleasing to consider.