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.