Humility; Grace
Orientation
1 Peter 2:18–23
Open your Bibles with me to 1 Peter 2. We are getting into
a major section of 1 Peter which has to do with the outworking of God’s plan
and the individual believer’s responsibility and response to authority. I think
that’s an excellent way to think about this: How are we, as individuals,
supposed to respond to those who are in authority over us? Because everybody,
in numerous circumstances, has someone over them.
Whether it’s family, whether it’s in business or in
career, whether it’s in government, whether it’s in education, in the
classroom, whether it’s in the military, everybody has to deal with other
self-centered, corrupt, foolish sinners who want to make decisions that govern
our lives. As self-centered, corrupt sinners, we don’t like it when some other
self-centered, self-absorbed, corrupt sinner wants to tell us to do something
that we don’t want to do. So we have to learn how to respond to that.
As we get into this section dealing with submission in
relation to slaves towards masters and then submission in the home, I want to
talk about the underlying spiritual values that are reflected here—humility and
grace orientation.
It’s going to be interesting as we go through the
passage in front of you, because very few translations translate correctly a
word that shows up in the next few verses that helps us to understand that this
is talking about being grace oriented.
Just a reminder, this section began back in verse 13
talking about the believer’s responsibility toward government, using the same
word that we have in relation to slaves toward masters and wives toward
husbands, the word “to submit.” This is a word that is often misunderstood. As
I say, and have said many times before, this is not a doormat type of
situation. Jesus submitted to Rome. Jesus submitted to His parents. Jesus
wasn’t a milquetoast doormat.
Moses was considered the most humble man in the Old
Testament according to the Lord’s estimation, and he was no milquetoast
doormat. But we come to the text with these kind of cultural concepts; then,
instead of blowing up the cultural concepts, what we try to do is ram and cram
the Bible and twist it into the cultural concepts. So we have to talk about
this.
At the beginning we’re talking about the divine
institutions and the focus was on the authority of government.
First of all, the basic problem with every human being
and every human practice of the divine institutions is sin. That’s where, as
believers, we come in. Whatever the framework is in which you live—whether it’s
military, whether it’s education, whether it’s family—is a recognition that the
people that you’re dealing with are probably controlled by their sin
nature—certainly a major factor in their life. That sin nature is going to mess
up just anything. You can have an athletic situation and some coach lets his
sin nature get the best of him, and you are going to have problems. Marriage,
everything—it boils down to the sin nature.
So I wanted to start by just reviewing the sin nature
and looking at our sin nature chart. The basic orientation of every sin nature
is the self, this self-absorption, this arrogance, the “I will,” mirrored in
the five “I wills” of Satan in Isaiah 12:14–16. Those “I wills” indicate what
drives just about everybody. “I will,” what I want. I’m self-absorbed and it’s
all about me.
That drives these lust patterns. We see things in the
creation that we have to have in order to make life work for us in terms of our
idolatrous conception of what brings happiness and joy and stability. We, as
individuals and as societies, or cultures, trend in one of two directions.
These aren’t consistent. You can have one person who is licentious in some
areas and extremely legalistic in other areas. The same is true for cultures.
Cultures mirror those same things.
We can think of a culture today that is extremely
legalistic and tends to take a very high moral ground. What would that be? We
can think of ISIS with their
militant jihadism, driven by the arrogance of false
teaching, driven by the arrogance of Allah and Mohammed. Yet, at the same time
as they’re recruiting all of these young men to come fight for them, sexual
licentiousness occurs. The raping, the sexual sins that are taking place
there—usually with non-Muslims, although also with some Muslims—is justified.
So there’s a licentiousness that goes along with the
legalism. That’s usually true. You think of the Pharisees—very legalistic, yet
in some ways they are antinomian because they are rejecting the ultimate
authority of Scripture. These are not always mutually exclusive type of
categories, but they are excellent categories for breaking down understanding
human behavior, the behavior of your children, the behavior of your friends,
the behavior of a nation. These things are taking place.
If the trend is towards asceticism or legalism, what
he produces is a sort of moral degeneracy. These words are usually not linked
together, but you see it in the Pharisees. They are clearly degenerate in their
arrogance, but it is a degeneracy from morality. Any jihadist who is
emphasizing sharia law has also the same kind of
moral arrogance. It’s a degenerate mentality because it’s fueled by arrogance.
This will produce an ordered or structured approach to life, and it will
produce a lot of rationality.
In contrast, you have the trend towards
licentiousness, which means a license to sin, to do whatever a person wants,
everyone doing what’s right in their own eyes—moral relativism. Lasciviousness
is the promotion of sexual lust. This is evidenced in the ancient world where
you had all of these fertility religions and all of these orgies, and things
that were going on. That’s mirrored a lot in different areas of our own culture
today. And then just antinomianism: that we don’t have to submit any ultimate
law. That produces an immoral degeneracy. In terms of thinking, it produces
irrationality as opposed to rationality.
Rationality is based on logic. It’s very structured,
it’s very ordered, but irrationality is not. It is very difficult to try to
express. For example, the gospel and arguments for the truth of Scripture.
Arguments for the truth of Scripture are inherently logical, but try to use
logic with somebody who’s illogical or irrational—it’s impossible. You’re
talking two different languages. It’s ultimately mystical, because it is
looking internally for the ultimate guidepost for some kind of value system.
And it’s based just on intuition, not something that’s based on logic or reason
or absolutes.
The reason I set this up is because when we get into
the ancient world and we look at the civilizations produced by Greece and Rome,
they manifest these characteristics through their paganism. They manifest these
characteristics of the sin nature. In both Greece and Rome, there is a high
value placed on a very orderly structured society. In Greece, for the polis to
be healthy, you had much that was written by the ancient philosophers such as
Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.
Many others down through the centuries wrote about the
importance of family and wrote about the importance of marriage, that it was in
the home that you provided the teaching, the instruction, that’s passed on as
you go from generation to generation. They recognized that; that’s part of
establishment truth. But they also perverted it, because that’s what the sin
nature does.
So they have this trend towards a moral degeneracy in
those areas; they were very, very strong, and they were very adamant about
that. The Greek moral philosophers wrote quite a bit about this, Xenophon,
Plutarch; Seneca was Roman.
They emphasize the fact that marriage and family were
the central features that were necessary to preserve and protect the national
entity. The result of this was a sort of legalism that protected marriage and
family—and the nation. We see a trend in our culture with the advent of
postmodernism.
Think back to the sin nature. In terms of knowledge
and authority, postmodernism is an epistemological irrationalism. It rejects
all authority, and truth is whatever you want it to be. It is like the immoral
degeneracy and the moral relativism of the period of the judges. Everybody is
doing what’s right in their own eyes.
We look at what is going on just in terms of the
political battle today and understanding the whole issue with the Clintons. They
are corrupt; there is more and more evidence. It’s not just overwhelming; it’s
overpowering. It is snowballing now, this evidence. There are five different
federal criminal investigations against either the Clintons or the Clinton
Foundation. Yet we have a culture that is so inured to this kind of thing that
it doesn’t seem to matter. And they want to make more of an issue out of
somebody’s foolish, crude talk, than somebody’s criminal actions. This shows a
culture that is not oriented to logic or reason anymore. They’re not comparing
apples to apples; they’re saying that somebody’s criminality is somehow no
worse than somebody’s just foolish, crude talking. They’re not in any
comparison whatsoever.
Then we had this whole culture that’s in Western civilization.
We see it in a more developed sense in Western Europe where there’s this
promotion of sexual licentiousness and sexual immorality. You’ve got the rise
of pornography that has been going on for at least 20 or 30 years in Germany
and many European countries, as if this doesn’t have any impact on marriage, or
the family, or relationships. It’s just gotten completely out of control.
You have the rise of sexual perversion in homosexual
relations, the rise in the legitimacy of homosexuality to the point that if you
take a traditional stance, you are viewed as the enemy.
This has come to America, and we have a Supreme Court
that has legitimized homosexual marriage. We have just seen so many extremely
crude and distasteful things that are now part of the national dialogue ever
since the dalliances of Bill Clinton in the White House back in the 90s; it’s
just lowered the level of discourse in this country to the gutter.
There is no longer any sense of decorum, any sense of
what should be talked about in front of children. Most children are exposed to
things that I
still don’t know anything about, because that wasn’t part of the culture
when we grew up. We did not have that exposure to sexual perversion and sexual
degeneracy.
A lot of that was also true in the Roman Empire, but
they weren’t legitimizing the destruction of the family. Augustus promoted
several laws, as did Tiberius, that were emphasizing the family and made it
difficult for divorce to take place. They made harsh punishments when it was brought
to bear on adultery and immorality that broke down the family, and so there was
this strong emphasis on family because they understood that.
We live in a culture today that doesn’t understand
that strong marriage and strong family is the key to a strong nation. You
destroy the family and the marriage—even if it’s a distorted pagan view like
they had in Rome. It wasn’t anything like the biblical pattern. Even if it’s a
pagan view, it still provided a structure socially and politically for the nation
and preserved that nation for many centuries. Once that starts breaking down in
a licentious manner, it’s not long before the nation is going to just
internally collapse because there are no values that are passed on to the next
generation.
So we see these kinds of things that were taking place
in the ancient world. Seneca, who was a Roman philosopher, wrote that in
relationship to understanding the importance of conduct within the family and
within the household. They had these household codes of conduct that they were
constantly writing about among the philosophers of the ancient world. And he
wrote, “No one will do his duty as he ought, unless he has some principle to
which he may refer his conduct.” In other words, he recognized that there is
some sort of external absolute that gives meaning to any code of conduct.
Others have said that no finite reference point has
any meaning unless it is related to an infinite reference point. In other
words, if we don’t have a universal absolute, then nothing else in life can
matter. You can’t bring meaning and value to that.
So he said, “We must set before our eyes the goal of
the Supreme Good,” for philosophers. The Latin was summum bonum. There is just this
philosophical idea; where it came from, they don’t know. They can’t explain;
there is just this ultimate good. And that is what we have to understand. He
said, “We must set before our eyes the goal of the Supreme Good, towards which
we may strive and to which all our acts and words may have reference, just as
sailors must guide their course according to a certain star.”
Well, when you get into the Scripture, it is the
Almighty God Who has regenerated us. Peter explains that He is the one who has
revealed to us these absolutes—and only when we are oriented to Him. It’s not
some abstract philosophical concept that gives meaning to right and wrong and
how to deal with certain situations, but it is an orientation to the Scripture
and to the Word of God.
The third point is that in the New Testament the
Christian writers seek to straighten out these crooked, slightly distorted
so-called ethics of the household codes. What Paul writes in Ephesians 5 and 6
and what Peter writes here in 1 Peter 2, what Paul writes in Colossians 3
related to husbands loving your wives and wives submitting to your husbands,
children being obedient to parents, parents loving their children, raising them
in the admonition of the Lord, these fit the patterns of these so-called
household codes, these ethical standards that were written about in the broader
Greco–Roman culture. But like every culture, even though they have elements
that are true, they are just a pale reflection; they are a distorted reflection
of biblical truth.
Peter and Paul and James and John are not getting
their values from the culture. They are not getting their family values from
Rome and Greece. They’re getting their family values from the Old Testament.
And then they are seeking to correct the distorted family values that were present in
Roman culture.
So we have to understand that in the Roman culture,
there is an emphasis on submission. But slaves, when they were to submit to
masters, were viewed as non-relevant animals. They were chattel; they were
insignificant; they had no legal standing. But when the Bible, in a divine
viewpoint framework, addresses them, it understands that they have volition.
That’s the command: “Servants, be submissive to your masters.”
That’s divine institution number one. You have a choice. No one else in their
culture treated a slave as someone who could make decisions, and who was
treated with honor and respect. That is just one way in which there is a
similarity. So that when Peter says, “Slaves, submit to your masters,” it’s not the
same as when the pagan says, “You submit to your master,” because how they
implement that and their view of the individual involved is very, very much
different.
The fourth point, which I mentioned already: The
biblical framework was the Old Testament. The Old Testament takes us back to
Genesis 1, where God says, “Let us create man in our image.” So even the lowest member in
society, the slave—and no one was lower than the slave—had no legal rights, no
legal standing, wasn’t even considered a person. In biblical viewpoint, they
are to be treated with honor and respect because they are created in the image
and likeness of God.
They were to submit, but there’s a recognition in the
text that there are going to be times when the person you have to submit to
isn’t worthy of it—he’s harsh. We’ll get to the verse a minute, but if you look
at verse 18, Peter says, “Servants, be submissive to your masters with all fear, not only to the
good and gentle, but also to the harsh.”
What does he mean by “harsh?” Harshness was
legitimized in the practice of slavery in the Roman Empire. They could abuse
the slaves, they could be harsh to them in many different ways, they could
physically beat them in many different ways, and that was legitimized. But if
you look at the context, Peter goes on to praise him. He says, “For this is
commendable, if because of conscience towards God one endures grief.” It is
the next phrase I want to emphasize. It says, “Suffering wrongfully.”
“Suffering wrongfully” is parallel to the “harsh.”
What we have here is a situation where the harsh is defined by that word
wrongfully, which is the Greek word ADIKOS. This is the alpha prefix “A”, which means something that’s a negative
like our prefix “un,” and the word DIKOS for righteousness. So it’s unrighteous.
So it’s not suffering wrongfully. A better translation
would be suffering unrighteously. It’s a recognition
that this harshness is unjust; nevertheless, the slave is commanded to be
submissive and show respect for authority’s sake to the master.
Point number 5. We have to recognize that the
social/legal structure of Rome was very concerned with maintaining order.
That’s why they spent so much time talking about the fact that you have to
teach authority in the home, you have to teach the children, you have to pass
these values on, and that marriage and family are at the core of the success of
the nation. They were very concerned about these new religions that would pop
up—like Christianity—that they might teach anarchy and try to reverse the right
understanding and application of the roles of husbands and fathers and wives
and parents in the Roman Empire.
There was a cult, the Isis cult, the worship of one of
the Egyptian female deities, where the women were in charge. It promoted a
matriarchal authority structure within the family, and this was illegal in Rome
for that reason. Not because of the all the other stuff that went along with
the paganism; it was because it would bring disorder in the family, and a
breakdown of the home, and lead to a breakdown and anarchy within the culture.
So the apostles are also concerned that Christians not
use their freedom in a licentious manner, which would be viewed as anarchy and
the disruption of society. This is why they are commanded to not use their
freedom as a license.
The sixth point. Though New
Testament writers do not directly address social perversions such as slavery,
abortion, and infanticide, which were practiced in Roman culture, they
addressed the more significant underlying factor. Their focus was not on
changing the culture at that upper level, but doing something that was even
more insidious that would eventually lead to the transformation of that
culture. And that was emphasizing that Christians would use their freedom in
Christ in a way that would lead to a transformation of the culture.
Christians were to view themselves as slaves to God.
That’s the background here. There is this clear analogy that the slaves are to
submit to their masters. Christians are DOULOS, DOULOI to God, and so they are, in the same way, to be submissive to God.
Christians were to view themselves as slaves to God and they were to focus on
personal transformation into the image of Christ.
If Christians are transforming themselves into the
image of Christ, and that would include both witnessing as well as personal
spiritual growth, then they are going to be transforming the ideas that are
inherent in the culture. That, eventually, is what did transform the paganism of Rome and
Western civilization, the paganism of the Celts, the paganism of the Goths and
the Visigoths, and all the other groups that were in Europe.
They were all rank pagans, but they were transformed
not by revolution, not by imposing a top-down solution, but by the personal
transformation of individuals as they trusted in Christ, were regenerated, and
then grew. That’s the approach of the writers of Scripture—not to try to impose
this by overturning the government, creating some sort of revolution, but by
changing the lives, the thinking, the orientation, of each individual believer.
Look at 1 Peter 2:18. Peter says, “Servants, be
submissive to your masters with all fear.”
That word for servants, as I pointed out last time, is
the word for “household slaves” that were just marginally better treated than
the field slaves.
He addresses them and he says that they are to be
submissive to their masters. We talked about this last time—the word HUPOTASSO, which means to “submit yourselves.” You are to follow the leadership
and carry out the orders of the person in authority, unless it directly
contradicts the Word of God.
Their ability to maybe negotiate with their master was
limited, and at times they couldn’t do it all because their treatment was
rather harsh. Peter deals with that here; he sees the question coming, and he
says, “Even if they’re harsh, then you are to be good and gentle.” That is part
of grace orientation.
But he says that they are to be submissive with all
fear. This is not the first time we’ve seen this come up. At the end of the
previous section, in 1 Peter 2:17, Peter said to, “Honor all people.
Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honor the king.”
But it didn’t start there either. It started back in 1
Peter 1:17, where Peter said, “And if you call on the Father, who without partiality judges according
to each one’s work, conduct yourselves throughout the time of your stay here in
fear.” That is, ultimately, in fear of the authority of God.
In the ancient world, fear had two different
components to it, just as it does in our thinking. Aristotle defines the distinction
here in one of his treatises, Oeconomica. He writes, “The fear
which virtuous and honorable sons feel towards their fathers, and loyal
citizens towards right-minded rulers, has for its companions reverence and
modesty.” So if fear is oriented in the right way toward submission to the
authority and respect for the authority, then it produces an upright citizen.
The other kind is felt by slaves
for masters and subjects for despots who treat them with injustice and wrong,
and it’s associated with hostility and hatred. Just thought I’d throw that out.
The idea that Peter is talking about here is the first
kind that is characterized by virtue and it’s characterized by reverence and
modesty.
In Scripture, we see that the fear of the Lord is the
foundation for all knowledge, submission to the authority of God: that the
starting point for all knowledge isn’t with just abstract knowledge going out
and learning things so that you can make a better living.
See, this is a problem that’s happened in our culture,
and it has some subtle but devastating effects. We learn, we have an education,
for a pragmatic reason—to go make more money. Well, that doesn’t always work as
a good motivation. Ultimately, in the history of this country, what motivated
people to be educated was so that they could understand God’s creation, and
they could understand God, and they could understand God’s Word.
Today we have a pragmatic system of education, which
is built on just basically serving the state. We have about a 65% to 70% rate
of reading comprehension, and so you have many places where people can’t even
read—they’re just ignorant of reading.
Whereas, you go back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony,
and 95% to 97% (in the 1600s) of everyone in every village could read. Now that’s
incredible. But the reason is they felt that everybody had to read so they
could read their Bible. That’s a much higher and honorable and virtuous
motivation than going out and making money to pay your taxes for the state.
People responded differently that way in the 1600s.
But what happens is that when people go negative to
God and reject God, then they hate knowledge, and they hate the Lord, and they
no longer choose the fear of the Lord. That’s Proverbs 1:29.
We look at this command in 1 Peter 1:18–19. “Servants, be
submissive to your masters with all fear, not only to the good and gentle, but
also to the harsh. For this is commendable ...” That word for “commendable”
shows up again in verse 20. You’ll never guess what the word for “commendable”
is there. It’s the Greek word CHARIS,
which is the word for grace.
In other words, what Peter specifically does here is,
he says, “Submission to authority—even an unjust authority—is grace.” It’s
undeserved favor. It’s unmerited goodness. It is grace. It is grace
orientation. Somebody who is not authority oriented, somebody who is not
submissive to their parents, not submissive to their husband, not submissive to
their teacher, will never understand grace. They lack humility; they lack
grace; they lack authority orientation.
What we have here is a clear statement: This is grace.
“For this is
commendable, if because of conscience towards God one endures grief, suffering
wrongfully.” So he explains there, with the word “for” indicating he’s
explaining his primary statement. He says, “It’s because of conscience towards
God.” That has to be the motivation—you’re doing the right thing because that’s
what God says to do. As a result of treating this harsh, unjust person in
grace, you have the right motivation, you endure grief, you suffer unjustly,
and that is accepted.
In other passages, we have the same sort of admonition
to slaves. In Titus 2:9 it says, “Exhort bondservants [that is, slaves] to be obedient
to their own masters, to be well pleasing in all things, not answering back.”
So they’re not displaying a lack of respect for their master.
In Ephesians 6:5 and following, Paul says,
“Bondservants,” the same word. It’s DOULOI, the word for slaves. “Slaves, be obedient to those who are your masters according to the
flesh, with fear and trembling, in sincerity of heart ...” That means that
you’re not talking behind their back, you’re not showing them respect when
they’re in your presence and then disrespect when they’re out of your presence.
“In sincerity of heart [or thinking], as to Christ.” Paul just keeps hitting
us between the eyes with this—that how we respond to earthly authorities is a
barometer of how we respond to the authority of Christ. How we respond to the
authority of Christ is how we should respond to the earthly authorities that
are put over us, because, as he has already said, no authority exists aside
from the permission of God.
Slaves were to respond to masters as to Christ. “Not with eyeservice …” This has application to working for an employer.
He may not have the same level of authority over you as a slave, but you should
work for him, not just giving him eye service—as long as he’s looking you’re
going to do a good job, but when he’s not looking, then you’re going to slough
off.
“Not with eyeservice, as men-pleasers, but as
slaves of Christ.” Ultimately, I don’t know who your boss is or where you
work, but you just think you’re working for them; you’re really working for the
Lord Jesus Christ. That’s the pattern that we see in Scripture.
“Doing the will of God from the heart, with goodwill doing service, as
to the Lord, and not to men.” There he uses that comparison again. “Knowing that
whatever good anyone does, he will receive the same from the Lord, whether he
is a slave or free.” That takes place at the Judgment Seat of Christ. There
will be rewards to those who are serving, especially in an unjust circumstance,
and doing it to please the Lord with the right grace-oriented attitude.
Ephesians 6:9 is the flipside. Paul’s address, “And you, masters,
do the same thing to them.” Well, that works great if you’re in a situation
where you’re working for a Christian master; you’re a slave to a Christian. But
if you’re not, and you’re a slave to an unbeliever, then it may be an extremely
harsh situation, as Peter recognizes.
So this is commendable if we suffer unjustly and do it
out of grace and kindness because we’re serving the Lord.
Then Peter goes on to develop this, and says, “For what credit
is it [or what value is it] if, when you are beaten for your faults, you take it patiently?”
Even in the Roman world, the ethicists of the ancient Greco-Roman culture
recognized that if a slave is disobedient, then he justly deserves whatever he
gets. And they also understood that it was better to suffer for injustice, than
to suffer because you had done something wrong.
So he says, “But when you do good and suffer, if you take it
patiently, this is commendable before God.”
There are two words here that we need to pay attention
to. The first word is the word for “patient.” Usually, the word “patient”
translates the Greek word MAKROTHUMIA, which means long-suffering. That’s the idea of patience. This is not
the idea of patience. This is the idea of endurance. It’s the Greek word HUPOMENO.
MENO is the root verb that means, “to
abide, to stay in a tough situation over a long period of time.” HUPO is the prepositional prefix that means to stay under something in a
tough, tough situation.
He says, “For what credit is it if, when you are beaten for
your faults, you endure it [HUPOMENO]? But
when you do good and suffer, if you take it patiently [that is, if you
endure], this
is grace toward God.”
That’s our word CHARIS for commendable. Again emphasizing this is grace orientation. We think
of the basics in terms of the spiritual skills as confession, walking by the
Spirit, faith-rest drill, doctrinal orientation, and grace orientation. This is
grace orientation: It’s humility; it’s obedience to authority—even when that authority
is wrong; and it’s not always trying to justify yourself to that authority.
Our sin natures don’t like it because "it’s all
about me and getting my way". But that’s why we have authority. One
benefit of authority structures is that it teaches us not to be so selfish and
to always get our own way. So this is grace orientation.
This word HUPOMENO is found in another very important context. It’s found over in James
1:2–4. That’s just a couple of pages back—Hebrews, James, 1 Peter—so it’s the
one or two pages back to your left. Just turn back there—three or four pages—to
the opening of James.
James is an epistle that’s very similar to 1 Peter,
and it’s dealing with, once again, the Jewish-background believers in the diaspora who are scattered. James is probably the first
epistle that was written in the New Testament, and there are a lot of
similarities between James 1:2–4 and the opening of 1 Peter, especially in 1
Peter 1:6–8.
There are number of key words that I pointed out when
we went there, the idea of joy in the midst of difficult circumstances and in
trials. 1 Peter 1:6, “In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while, if need be,
you have been grieved by various trials.” Well, one of those “various
trials” would be having to submit to an unjust authority.
“That the genuineness of your faith” [that’s
related to the idea of the testing of your faith in James 1:3].
1 Peter 1:7, “That the genuineness [or the approval] of your faith,
being more much more precious than gold that perishes, though it is tested by
fire.”
That’s the word that is used there for testing in
James 3, DOKIMAZO.
You see there are these parallels.
In James 1:2, James is talking to believers and he
addresses them as, “My brethren.” That’s important. All the way through James,
he is addressing them as my brethren. These are believers; these are not
unbelievers. Nothing in James is talking about what you do for unbelievers.
That gets very important in James 2.
“My brethren, count it all joy when you fall into various trials.”
Some of us have been in circumstances where we have been under an unjust
authority—somebody who has treated us wrong in a lot of different ways, maybe
somebody who is completely unrealistic. I heard the story today of an
individual who was working at a job and had a supervisor who blackballed that
person and made a list of numerous complaints against that person—none of which
was true. And that person appealed and wrote a response to it, and eventually
had to change their job.
But this kind of thing happens when we live in the
devil’s world. There are all kinds of different circumstances and situations
that we may come into where we have to deal with an unjust authority.
I had a boss, a man I went to work for when I was in
seminary, and it turned out that he was a crook. I didn’t know it at the time,
but I knew that there was something wrong, and I just quit. The reason I got
the job was that I had a longtime friend, and I’d also known his wife for many
years, long before they were married or involved—and this was her
father-in-law. Now that’ll test the integrity of your marriage if you’re
working for your father-in-law and he’s a crook, he’s using the business in an
illegal manner, and you’re the one who ends up being the whistleblower. It
usually never ends well. But this is a problem in a fallen world. We run into
these kinds of circumstances, and they are tests of our integrity.
So, as Christians, when we fall into these kinds of
tests, we need to add it up. That’s the word “count” there. It’s an accounting
term, and it means, “to think it through.” Think through the issues and add it
up. The bottom line is joy, because we don’t know how God is using it in our
lives. We are to focus on Him and have joy no matter what the circumstances are.
When you fall into various trials, count it joy. I
happen to think that this is the primary command. If you want to be Star Trek,
this is the prime directive for James, for this epistle. Everything else in the
epistle of James is written to help you understand how to do this, because this
is not easy! Any of us who have gone through really difficult times know that
it’s not easy to just have joy and peace and stability in the midst of horrible
circumstances.
But the reason we can do this is given in verse 3,
because we know something. We have an understanding of biblical truth. We know
a principle, a fact. “Knowing that the testing [DOKIMAZO] …” It’s a word that means to evaluate—not to evaluate to see what’s wrong,
but to evaluate to see what’s positive. It’s the same word that’s used in
relation to the Judgment Seat of Christ. All of our works are burned up—not to
expose the wood, hay, and straw, but to expose the good—the gold, silver, and
precious stones. So, the idea of testing here is an evaluation to expose what’s
good—what’s valuable.
“Knowing that the testing of your faith …” Here it’s not your
ability to trust, but what you trust, or the doctrine that’s in your soul because you
know that the testing, or the evaluation of the doctrine in your soul, produces
not patience but endurance, the ability to hang in there and to apply the Word
of God.
“But let endurance have its perfect result.” That word there, in the
Greek, indicates maturity. “That you may become mature and complete, lacking nothing.” So Peter
is talking about this same kind of thing back in 1 Peter 2:20. You’re involved
in a specific situation where you are unjustly beaten, and he says, “If you
take it with endurance and you do the right thing in the midst of a wrong
situation, then that is grace toward God.” That is a grace-oriented solution.
Then we go on in 1 Peter 2:21, and Peter says, “For to this you
were called.” That’s an interesting phrase, isn’t it? How many times do we
use the word “calling” in reference to personal adversity and suffering? We may
think about the fact that we’re called to the mission field, or you hear people
say they were given a spiritual calling to the pastorate, or you have a
vocation.
The word vocation is the word from the Latin word vocare,
which means to have a calling. On Monday we celebrated Reformation Day, October
31, to commemorate the 499th anniversary of Martin Luther nailing
the 95 theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg. Next year will be the
500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. One of the
doctrines recovered was that every believer has a calling. It was related to
your talents, your spiritual gift.
Maybe God gave you a vocation, a calling, to be a
ditch digger, a computer programmer, a lawyer, or to work in law enforcement,
or to be a teacher; but everybody has a calling—not just the pastors, not just
the spiritual leaders. The error of the Roman Catholic teaching was that only
the priests had a calling, everybody else is laity. That’s where you get this
clergy/laity distinction: that the laypeople are just the common people; they
don’t have a calling from God.
The Protestant Reformation came back and gave value to
the individual. Rarely in the discussion of calling have I ever heard anybody
say that we are called
to submission, we are called to suffering, we are called to being gracious in the midst of
difficult circumstances, but that’s exactly how Peter uses it.
“For to this you were called, because Christ also suffered for us,
leaving us an example.” That’s our pattern. He is the example. “That you should
follow His steps.”
What are those steps? While this is what comes up in
the quote in 1 Peter 2:2. “Who committed no sin.” Jesus committed no sin. Therefore, He was
never worthy of any injustice. “Who committed no sin, nor was deceit found in His
mouth.”
Isaiah 53:9 is where that is found, in the second part
of the verse. The whole verse reads, “And they made His grave with the wicked [that
is, Jesus died between two thieves]—But with the rich at His death.” So He’s buried
in the tomb of a wealthy man, Joseph of Arimathea.
“Because He had done no violence [literally, nothing wrong], Nor was any
deceit in His mouth.” He is totally free from censure. You can’t say He did
anything wrong. His crucifixion was not because He had broken any law or done
anything wrong.
Peter goes on to describe this in 1 Peter 2:23. “Who, when He was
reviled, did not revile in return.” He didn’t talk back. When He went to
the cross, He was “silent as a lamb before his shearers is dumb, so He opened not his
mouth.”
“Who, when He was reviled, did not revile in return; when He suffered,
He did not threaten [yell, scream, throw a tantrum, go into a depression], but committed
Himself to Him who judges righteously.” He put it in the Lord’s hands. He
was going to go through unimaginable suffering for something He never did, but
it would secure our salvation. He was going to suffer on our behalf.
1 Peter 2:24. “Who Himself bore our sins in His own body on
the tree.” This is a great verse to memorize. “Who Himself bore our sins in His own body on
the tree, that we, having died to sins, might live for righteousness [our
purpose is to live for righteousness]—by whose stripes you were healed.” That is a quote from
Isaiah 53.
Then he goes on in 1 Peter 2:25 to say, “For you were like
sheep going astray, but have now returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your
souls.” The pattern that we are going to see developed by Peter in the next
chapter, is that Jesus is the pattern for handling unjust suffering and
submitting to authority.
This is seen in Philippians 2:8. We are going to stop here
and come back and develop Philippians 2 and some other things to think about as
we talk about submission in the coming weeks.