But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. (1 Peter 2:9)

Okay, now we finally — finally, after a chapter and nine verses — have an outward “that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into light.” Why are you a chosen race? Chosen — verse 9. Royal priesthood — we just saw that priesthood. Holy nation — we saw that called to holiness, “Be holy, for I’m holy” (1 Peter 1:16). A people in his own possession — we know that he purchased us with ransom — all those things. He’s picking up the threads here of chosen race, royal priesthood, holy nation. Why? Why are you that? Why has he called you to himself that way?

Answer: That you may proclaim the excellencies of him. He called you out of darkness into His marvelous light. You have been made alive. You have been brought out of the darkness of death through the new birth, into the light of God’s everlasting hope, so that you might proclaim the excellencies that are being unfolded in verse in his book — the excellencies of God. A great thing.

If I were teaching a small group, I’d say next week everybody come back with a list of all the excellencies of God you see in 1 Peter 1–2:9 and see what you come up with. All the excellencies, the beauties, the virtues, the greatnesses of God — that’s what we’re supposed to declare to Vancouver and Minneapolis, all of Canada, all the United States, all the nations of the world.

Debt of Mercy

Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people. Once you had not received mercy, that’s right, and now you have received mercy. You are a debtor — this is to use Paul’s language now — you’re a debtor to everybody in Vancouver, a debtor to everybody in your hometown, a debtor to the world, a debtor to the unreached peoples of the world because you’ve been shown mercy.

Remember the parable in Matthew 18, this person owed the king ten dollars, and this person owed the king twenty years’ wages. And the king — I didn’t get that right. This person owed the king 20 years’ wages and the king forgave him. He goes out and rings the neck of his fellow servant who owes him ten dollars. Something went wrong there.

If you knew yourself to be treated with that much mercy, you wouldn’t go ring the neck of anybody. You’d be on your face with such deep humility, and deep gratitude, and deep self-denial, and hesitancy to be a demanding person. You would just know yourself so loved and so mercifully cared for. You’d be hating all the ways that you treat your wife, or husband badly, by treating them in a way that God has not treated you in Christ.

Exhortation to Sojourners and Exiles

“Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles” — there it is again, so let this hit you that you are a sojourner. Your citizenship is in heaven where your inheritance is being kept for you. You’re going to own everything someday here on this earth.

Sojourner, exile “abstain” — hold back — “from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul” (1 Peter 2:11). How do they kill you? How do they wage war against your soul? How do emotions wage war against your soul? Because they dethrone hope in God. They dethrone joy, glorified, and inexpressible.

You have been called out of darkness into marvelous light. You have been born again. You have been ransomed by Christ so that the emotions that fill your soul are hope, and faith, and joy, loving Christ, treasuring Christ. And then there are these other passions. You need more money. You need more sex. You need more approval from men. You need more success, you need, you need, you need, you need. And they start to come in and the joy, and the hope, and the faith, and the love start to become small.

What did Jesus say? “You cannot serve two masters. Either you’ll hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You can’t serve God and money” (Matthew 6:24). That’s what’s going on here. The war. The war. They wage war. They come in to displace. You can’t have them together. You can’t have them together.

Conduct Follows Passions

If you want to love this world, you cannot love God. And so he’s pleading as sojourners and exiles, take the cues for your affections from heaven and Christ, not from the flesh of this world. And again, conduct follows passions. It’s not the other way around. “Abstain from the passions” and then conduct will follow.

“Keep your conduct among the Gentiles” — this word right here, kalos in Greek — beautiful, honorable, beautiful. And finally, this is the main point of the book, this is the end of our linear summary of the book. Where’s everything going? “So that when they speak against you as evildoers” — and yes they do, but you can turn that around at least for some of them, by God’s grace — “they may see your good deeds.” So you are keeping your conduct honorable and now they are seeing this and they “glorify God on the day of visitation” (1 Peter 2:12).

The Day of Visitation

Again, here’s one of these arguments about what is the day of visitation. I’m inclined to think the day of visitation is the day God shows up to save them. In Acts 15:14, “Simeon has related how God first visited the Gentiles, to take from them a people for his name.” There’s a picture of the visitation of God: God coming through the preaching of Peter, and God visited and saved Cornelius and his family.

Luke 1:68: “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has visited and redeemed his people.” And over in 1 Peter 3:1, it says to the wives who are married to unbelieving husbands strive to win them without a word by your chaste behavior, your chaste conduct, so that would be glorifying God on the day of visitation when the husband puts his faith in Christ.

So I don’t know for sure that this day of visitation. If this were the second coming, then you’d have the same issue: Is the glorifying of God on the day of his visitation willingly or unwillingly? Like every knee will bow and confess that Jesus is Lord. Unbeliever and believer will all bow, but some will give him glory from a heart of faith and others constrained by a heart of rebellion.

I don’t think Peter is trying to get people to glorify God unsavingly. I think he’s saying, “I want you to so live that they will see your good deeds and glorify God.” And you all recognize this is a quote from Matthew 5:16, which raises the little question — I think it’s little — how do you want people to see your good deeds and give glory to your Father without disobeying Matthew 6:1, which says don’t do your acts of charity, your fasting, your praying, your almsgiving in order to be seen by men?

“For then you will have no reward from your Father who’s in heaven” (Matthew 6:1). So, don’t do them to be seen by men. And here, “Strive to have your good conduct noticed so that people give glory on the day of visitation.”

Visible Love

And I think the answer is very simple. Fasting, praying, and almsgiving can be done in secret and should be. Helping your neighbor change a tire at one in the morning is not possible to be invisible.

He called you — or you saw him out there. It’s 40 below zero — at least in Minneapolis it is — and he’s struggling to get those bolts loose, and he needs help. And if you go to help him, you can’t do it invisibly, and so it is with all loving good deeds, right? Face-to-face good deeds. Anything you do for people, by definition, is seen by people, and that’s what he’s talking about. You don’t have to have a sense of, “Oh, I’ve got to be seen! I’ve got to be seen!” Just do it, just love, and you’ll be seen. And that’s what he’s talking about here.

Now, we’ve got 13 minutes, and what I think I want you to see in those 13 minutes is here’s what’s coming next. Let me see if I can give you the big picture and then maybe use one of the paragraphs as an illustration.

Enduring Persecution

The next thing we have is, “Okay, I hear you talking about these new behaviors and conduct and readiness to suffer. What about government? What about Nero? What about slaves and their masters? What about wives married to unbelieving husbands?”

Those are three units that are right here, two of them at the end of 1 Peter 2, and then husbands, what about your response to the women that you’re married to? All three of those paragraphs have commonalities. They have interesting perspectives on how you deal with hardship in each of those government — you could call this “employment,” although that’s kind of a whitewash; slavery was not pretty — and then marriage. And the issue is how do you do it as an exile and a sojourner? How do you be a citizen of Canada and a citizen of heaven?

So let’s just take that paragraph, 1 Peter 2:13–17, and probably that will be as far as we can get. But let the principles here in 1 Peter 2:13–17 spill over because this book is really about how to get along in a culture in Pontius Cappadocia, Galatia, Asia — how to get along in those Roman provinces with persecution on the horizon and the society’s already indifferent or hostile to you. And can you be a citizen there, and can you be married there to an unbeliever, and can you serve as a slave and be a Christian when your slave master is so mean? That’s the issue.

Submission to Human Institutions

Okay, so let’s close with this paragraph. “Be subject for the Lord’s sake to every human institution” (1 Peter 2:13). That word right there — literally, it’s every human creature or creation, and it might mean only institution, but it is interesting that the paragraph ends — honor everyone, not just institutions. “Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honor the emperor” (1 Peter 2:17). So the emperor, for sure, is in mind here. But what about “honor everyone”?

My take is that Peter has in mind, not just how do you relate to institutions like family, or slavery, or government, but how do you relate to the people in your life, whether it be to the emperor as supreme.

’Better’ or ‘More Significant’?

Little pause there. That word, and I know I’m pulling rank here with regard to Greek, but maybe a few of you will be enticed to study Greek. I think that would be great, laypeople or pastor. Hyperechontas here is the same word used in Philippians 2:3 where it says let each of you “consider others [blank] than yourselves.”

I grew up reading “better than yourselves” in the King James Version, which I always thought was strange because I knew I was better at algebra than my sister was. So how to consider her better than me when she could read ten times faster than I. So she was the reader, I was the math guy, and I just didn’t get that. That’s not a good translation. “Better” like “better.” What do you mean better?

So I think the way the ESV translates it pretty good is “count others more significant than yourselves.” This is the word right here. The emperor has more, stronger, count others that way, which confirms my sense that it’s not just institutions that are going on here as you walk through life. Paul says, “Count everybody like that!” Not that they’re smarter than you are. You don’t know if they’re smarter than you are. Count them as worthy of your service.

Your default to the crabby guy, the loud guy two rows behind you on the airplane, or the people that are walking down the street and bump your shoulder and make you spill your coffee and weren’t watching what they’re doing — your default disposition should be to serve them. That’s what this book is about.

That’s what Philippians is about. Humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God. Look what he has done for you, and let this whole disposition of lowliness, and humility, and servanthood govern how you respond to the emperor, or to the governor as sent by him to punish those who do evil and praise those who do good. And we should have a whole seminar on how do you relate to governments that shift from rewarding the good and punishing the evil to rewarding the evil and punishing the good.

Clearly, here it says the point of government is to punish the evil and to praise the good. That’s why they carry the sword, and they have a right to put people in jail and to put people to death. But they shouldn’t put innocent people to death, and then they shouldn’t predict guilty people.

Silence, Shame, and Bring

Now, what do you do if they do? “For this is the will of God, that by doing good, you should put to silence the ignorance of foolish people” (1 Peter 2:15). Now, I think that’s a subordinate motive to 1 Peter 2:12, where you are to let your good deeds be seen, that they may give glory to your Father. On the way to giving glory to your Father is to silence them. Over in 1 Peter 3:16, where it says, “Do good deeds so that you might put to shame those who criticize your good behavior.”

So you got three steps. Silence them, shame them, bring them into the kingdom. And I don’t think Peter means for those to be alternatives. Some of them are shut up, and some of them are shamed, and some of them get saved and give God glory. I think this is a process. We want people’s mouths to be stopped when they criticize the church wrongly.

There are real criticisms of the church, and there are wrong criticisms of the church, and we would like to so live as to stop the mouths of those who do wrong criticism of the church, on the way to, if necessary, being shamed if necessary, if it works on the way to giving glory to our Father.

Free as Servants of Christ

“Live as people who are free.” This is so crucial right here. “not using your freedom as a cover-up for evil, but living as servants of God” (1 Peter 2:16). I’m going to get a color and put a big circle around that because I think that is stunning. So here he’s saying, “Okay, you’ve got Nero and you’ve got these governors that he sends to the provinces of Rome or you’ve got government in Canada, you’ve got government in the United States.” And he’s saying, basically, “We are a law-abiding, submissive people. We don’t get our backup. we submit, and the reason we submit is for the Lord’s sake. For the Lord’s sake.”

Meaning we don’t belong here. We are exiles here. This is not our home. You don’t own us. You can’t tell us what to do. We have a King. His name is Jesus. He tells us what to do. We obey our King. And what does he tell us to do? “Submit to the government,” which means that our mindset, 1 Peter 2:16 is, we’re free. When we keep the speed limit, when we pay our taxes, when we drive on the correct side of the road — this is not England, even though it’s kind of a connection — we do that because of Jesus. It’s worship.

I’m driving on the right-hand side of the road for Jesus’s sake. I know your law says to do that. Your law is not my final law, Jesus is my final law. That’s what it means to be an alien and an exile. And Jesus says, now, the way I want you to relate is not as seditious. I want you to win these people by submission. And the reason is that submission shows a far greater work of God than rebellion. We are wired to be rebels.

John Piper is wired to take people out who he doesn’t like. If God said to me, “Take out all abortionists,” that would not be hard. To submit to love, serve, and try to change that way, that goes against everything in this fallen human being, which is why I think that’s the strategy here.

But look at 1 Peter 2:16 says, “We are free.” We are free. In other words, you look like you are owned or guided by this society. You’re not; you’re owned and guided by the one who bought you with a ransom. You’re free from this, but don’t use your freedom as a cloak for evil, but as servants of God serve the people. It’ll look to them like you are being obsequious or serving them. You know you’re a free man. You are a free man.

Following Jesus

Do you remember the parable that Jesus told? I know we got one minute. Do you remember the parable where actually it wasn’t a parable? They said to Peter, “Does your teacher pay the temple tax?” He said, “Hmm.” He goes and asks Jesus, “Do we pay the temple tax?” And Jesus said, “The kings of the earth, from whom did they take tax, their children or others?” And Peter said, “Others.” He said, “Right, you’re free. Only, not to give offense, pay the tax.”

That’s this paragraph. That’s where he got this paragraph. Do you see what he’s saying? You’re free. You don’t have to pay this temple tax, pay it. But the whole motive structure of your soul, I’m a free man. As I die, as my head gets chopped off by Nero or I get crucified upside down, I’m not a slave to Nero here. I’m a free man, obeying my Jesus as I die like Jesus.

This is really radical. This is where we end, and this is what you have to come to terms with. How does Jesus mean to make a difference in Canadian society? Rebellion, sedition, upheaval, or a kind of self-denying servant heart and love that will silence, will shame, and will bring people to give glory to our Father who is in heaven. Close with this summary. This is almost as far as I thought we were going to get. I thought we might get through marriage, but next time.

Summary of 1 Peter 1–2

Summary of what we’ve seen so far — I think it’s the summary of the book: We are chosen by God. We are purchased with a great ransom by Christ and given a beautiful pattern to live (which we didn’t get to — that’s the next paragraph. Read that.) We are born again. We are born into a living hope with inexpressible joy, which are the new passions of our life — not like the old ones. The Spirit is sanctifying us, making us into exiles and not people who are at home in this world. We have a new conduct that is flowing. We love each other, and we love the people enough to lay our lives down in service to their structures of society so that they see we are free in a way that they can’t understand. And the Gentiles — then, God-willing, God-helping them—give glory to God. I think that’s where we’re going. Let’s pray.

So Father in heaven, even though we got a little bit into 1 Peter 2, I pray that the trajectories of 1 Peter, this precious book for how to live in the face of the coming fiery ordeal and the pressures of our present time and the various trials that are refining our faith would bear fruit now in the lives of these friends. Oh, what a difference it would make if we were all conquered in this way, from our selfishness, and our pride, and our rebelliousness, and made into servants who live lives of kindness, and gentleness, and meekness serving others that they might give glory to our Father who’s in heaven. Do this great work for your great name through Christ I pray. Amen.