Sermon Tone Analysis

We saw over the past couple of sermons that Peter spent some time reinforcing with his hearers just who they are in relation to one another in the Church.

In today’s passage, Peter describes the church, not in terms of who they are to one another, but who they are in relation to God.

The relationship we have with one another can only occur and be properly understood when we understand our relationship with God.

Peter has already pointed out that the OT prophets had foreseen the days they were currently experiencing.

Now Peter will dive deep into those prophecies to describe just who and what they are in relation to God as His people.

Peter presents Jesus Christ as the foundation of God’s redemptive work.

(Jobes)

1.

The Church: the New Temple of God (4-8)

a.The Living Stone and the living stones (2:4–5)

Christ is corner stone, the stone used to guide the builders in the construction of the building.

He was rejected, but is a living stone.

When Peter describes those who come to Jesus Christ as “living stones,” he is implying that our nature derives from the nature of the resurrected Christ.

In light of this, we must understand our situation and circumstances by all that Christ has experienced, most important, by Christ’s victory over suffering and death.

The Christian community is portrayed as a temple, implying that now it—not a literal stone building—is the place of God’s earthly dwelling by the Holy Spirit, a place of true worship and of acceptable sacrifice.

The image of living stones being built into a spiritual house whose cornerstone is Christ also speaks of the unity, significance, and purpose of all believers, concepts essential for Christian self-understanding.

The primary attribute of a temple in first-century thought was its holiness.

Just as God’s presence sanctified the temple of Jerusalem, the Holy Spirit lives in each believer and corporately together as the Church.

By His presence, we are made holy, set-apart from the world and set-apart unto God.

What, or rather, Who makes us One is God’s gracious presence by His Spirit, of Christ Himself Who is our chief cornerstone.

We need to understand that the Church is not primarily a social organization but the new temple where the transformed lives of believers are offered as sacrifice to the glory of God.

Even if Peter’s readers find themselves alienated from their society and suffering a loss of status, Peter assures them that they have become part of a much grander and everlasting community.

It is by the values and convictions of this new community that they must now understand themselves, not as self-centered individuals, but as each taking his or her place in the spiritual house.

Each living stone has a role to play for the integrity and well-being of the whole.

God’s true house is “spiritual” in the sense that it is constituted by the lives of those who come to Christ.

If you belong to Christ, then you also belong to his church—not just the local church but also the universal church, made up of all God’s people from all over the world and through all the centuries.

Jesus, the living stone, is building his living stones into a house where God dwells by his Spirit.

This means that we need each other.

We cannot live the Christian life on our own.

We are meant to be an active, engaged part of a local church, not just showing up every now and again but fully involved and committed to God’s people in that place.

b.The Stone placed in Zion (2:6)

But because of their faith in Christ, Peter’s readers are experiencing rejection by unbelievers that results in various trials and hardships.

Peter explains that their misfortunes are not a sign that God is rejecting them but are the very opposite: the various ways they are being rejected correspond to the rejection the Living Cornerstone has experienced and confirm their election as living stones in God’s building program.

With God’s promise through Isaiah, Peter reassures them that the one who trusts in Christ, the chosen cornerstone, will never be put to shame.

c.Jesus—honored cornerstone or stone of stumbling?

(2:7–8)

In the first-century Roman society of Asia Minor, did conversion to Christ lower one’s social status?

By all accounts, it brought dishonor or shame to oneself and one’s family.

Apparently Peter’s readers were receiving

a barrage of verbal abuse designed to demean, discredit, and shame the believers as social and moral deviants endangering the common good.

This procedure of public shaming was employed as a means of social control with the aim of pressuring the minority community to conform to conventional values and standards of conduct.

(J.

H.

Elliott 2000: 117)

Such sustained social pressure resulted in undeserved suffering that could lead some to despair and eventually even to renounce the Christian faith.

And so Peter reminds his readers of Isaiah’s promise that whoever trusts in the Cornerstone placed in Zion will, in fact, never be shamed, and thereby reverses the basis of honor and shame in their self-understanding.

Those who trust in the Living Cornerstone that God has placed in Zion will never be put to shame, but those who reject Christ will suffer shameful judgment by God himself, the one who ultimately arbitrates true honor and shame.

Therefore, despite the shameful treatment they receive from society, Peter encourages his readers that they, not their accusers, are the ones who receive the true honor by believing in Christ.

(Jobes)

Peter explains the unbelief of non-Christians as something that was anticipated in the Old Testament, something that should not be surprising.

(Marshall)

2. A New Identity (9-10)

Peter now turns his thought back to his readers who have believed in Christ.

“But you,” he says to his readers, are not among those who have been appointed to stumble because you have obeyed the word.

(Jobes)

a.You are a chosen race (2:9a)

In a sense each of these phrases is simply unpacking what it means to be chosen by God—the overarching theme set out at 1:1.

To be chosen by God whilst others are not (2:8) means that believers belong to God (a people for His possession).

They have been set apart and marked out as different within the world through their beliefs and behaviour (holy nation), and have a specific purpose: to offer sacrifices (royal priesthood).

b.You are a royal priesthood (2:9b)

Christians together form a holy and royal priesthood.

It is not that some of them are in some sort of special priestly category whilst others are ordinary believers.

Instead all Christians are a priesthood with particular responsibilities in view which will be explored later.

c.You are a holy nation (2:9c)

Separated from the World

d.You are a people for God’s special possession (2:9d)

Separated unto God

e.You are a people who have received God’s mercy (2:10)

Peter’s final description of his readers in 2:10 alludes to Hos. 2:23

implying that Peter’s readers are, amazingly, a fulfillment of that ancient prophecy: “You were once not a people, but now you are the people of God; you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.”

In Hos. 2 the Lord speaks of a time when his royal priesthood and holy nation would be restored after the people’s outrageous failure to keep the covenant with him, which had constituted them as his royal priesthood and holy nation.

In running after other gods and indulging in pagan practices, Israel had broken covenant with the Lord God.

The nation was no longer his special possession in that it had forsaken its role as a royal priesthood and a holy nation.

Consequently, God no longer had a people who were functioning as his special possession.

Because his people acted like the pagans of the surrounding nations, they were to be sent into exile, scattered among them.

But God spoke through the prophet Hosea, promising a future restoration, a time when by unmerited love and mercy God would again constitute a people for his special possession, who would declare the mighty act of God that brought them into existence.

“I will show mercy to the unloved, and I will say to those who are not my people, ‘You are my people,’ and they will say, ‘You are the Lord my God’ ”

Peter’s final statement about the identity of his Christian readers implies that their conversion to Christ is the fulfillment of that promised restoration.

Amazingly, God’s love and mercy to His chosen race was no longer limited to the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Isaiah and Hosea had spoken of a reconstitution of God’s exiled people, traditionally interpreted to mean the regathering of Judah and Israel from their far-flung places of exile.

But Peter addresses his Christian readers as people of the Diaspora (1 Pet.

1:1) and sends greeting from those in “Babylon,” the symbolic capital of exile (5:13).

God’s regathered royal priesthood and holy nation—his newly chosen race, according to Peter—would be those who had been reborn as the children, not of Abraham, but of God the Father himself through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The Church declares by its existence, by its worship, by the daily lives of its members the mighty deed of Christ’s resurrection, which reveals the praiseworthy character of God.

3. Applications

a. God has turned us into a worshiping community

In this grand account of what it means to be a Christian Peter says at the beginning and again at the end that God’s purpose in choosing us, in redeeming us through Christ, in granting us the new birth, and in calling us to faith in him is that we might worship God.

(Rayburn, Saved)

Homo sapiens = Thinking man

Homo adorans = Worshiping man

R.C. Sproul used to teach that man is homo sapiens, that is, thinking man.

But he is also homo adorans, worshiping man.

We were made to praise God.

Praise “…is the most perfect and complete expression of love.”

(Rayburn, Saved) Praise is love.

Do we love to praise God?

If we know of His love for us, love for Him is the natural outflow.

Luke 6:45

Worship is the greatest purpose of the Christian life, because love looms so large in the Christian life, both the receiving of love and the giving of it in return, love for God, love for wife or husband, love for children or parents, love for brothers and sisters in Christ, even love for one’s enemies.

We were saved by love and saved to love.

Love is the great purpose of our redemption: that we might love God and enjoy his love, that we might live in love.

To say that God saved us to praise him is to say that he saved us to love him – it is as simple as that.