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.