How to Handle
Hostility
1 Peter 3:8–9
Open your Bibles to 1 Peter 3:8. We are shifting
gears. For the last several lessons we’ve been talking about the topic of
submission. Submission of slaves to masters, submission of wives to husbands,
and then instruction to husbands. Now we get into a section from 1 Peter 3:8–12
that is something of a summary. There are five adjectives that are describing
Christian character in verse eight, and if those are in place in your Christian
life, then it doesn’t matter if you’re a slave, if you’re a wife, if you’re a
husband, if you’re a child, if you’re a parent, if you’re a teacher, if you’re
a student. You’re going to have no problem being submissive to authority,
whatever the authority is that’s over you, because that’s the essence of being
grace oriented and understanding these authority relationships because it’s
grounded on the character of the Lord Jesus Christ.
When we started this and we started talking about
Peter’s illustration of Christ, starting from 1 Peter 2:21–25, I went over and
took the time to talk about Christ in Philippians 2 and the importance of that
in relation to humility. Humility isn’t being a doormat. Humility is being
obedient to the authority that’s established over you—willingly, from the
heart, not grudgingly, not resistantly, not in terms of what the military used
to call “silent insolence,” but in terms of positive responsiveness.
So that’s embedded in all of these characteristics
that we’re getting to in 1 Peter 3:8–9. It’s illustrated by a passage
we just finished on Tuesday night in Psalm 34. In fact, were going to see a
certain amount of parallel between what is happening here in 1 Peter and what
is going on in David’s life in 1 Samuel 21 and 22; which is why, as Peter is
going to illustrate what he’s talking about, he goes to Psalm 34, because it’s
a parallel situation, parallel circumstances.
Just to remind you of the context of this epistle,
Peter is writing to a community of Jewish-background believers who are living
in what we would refer to today as central and northern central Turkey. They’re
believers in Yeshua, in Jesus, as the Jewish Messiah, and they are living in
the Jewish Diaspora. In the Jewish Diaspora they are scattered; they’ve been
scattered; the Diaspora actually began in 586 BC and is coterminous with the
“times of the Gentiles,” a phrase we have seen already in Luke 21 in the Olivet
Discourse as the Gentile empires dominated Jerusalem and dominated Israel.
They live among the Diaspora, which is a word that
means “scattered.” They are scattered because of divine discipline, which we
studied on Sunday morning, in terms of the fifth cycle of discipline. They’re
living in a somewhat unsympathetic, non-responsive environment, just as Jews
living in the midst of Gentiles. But then they’ve got this additional problem,
and that is that they are Jews who believe in Jesus as the Messiah.
That’s not quite the hostile thing that it becomes
after the end of the first century and especially after the end of the third
century. Certainly not the circumstances that you run into, for example, if
you’re a modern Jew and you trust in Jesus as Messiah. You may not know this;
some of you may be interested; some of you maybe not. But just recently, Ariel
Ministries, which is Arnold Fruchtenbaum’s organization, published a fascinating biography of Arnold
Fruchtenbaum [called Chosen Fruit]. It’s about 350 pages, and I’m about
one third of the way through it. It’s really interesting.
I found it fascinating, especially the initial part
that talks about his family background as well as the impact of the Holocaust
on his parents, how that brought his father and his mother together, and why he
was born in Siberia. So that’s part of the diaspora. I’ve just finished reading
the section about when he graduated from high school. Right before he was bar
mitzvahed, he trusted in Jesus as his Messiah and his father became
increasingly hostile to him.
The family moved from Brooklyn to California; his
father somewhat hoped that that would cause him to change his mind if he got
away from those Christian missionaries back in Brooklyn. But he didn’t, because
he understood the truth, and he understood the messianic prophecies in the Old
Testament. The last year he was there—talk about a hostile environment—his
father refused to talk him—at all. His mother was about the only one in the
family who did
talk to him. But there was a silver lining in that cloud. Remember, every
cloud has a silver lining—but every silver lining has a cloud. Think about it.
The silver lining he had was that he recognized that
his father wouldn’t tell him not to go to church, wouldn’t tell him not to read
his Bible, wasn’t arguing with him about anything, and so he, for the first
time in three years, had the freedom to go to church and to go to Christian
organizations, to fellowship with Christians, to read his Bible, and he was
left alone completely. So that was the positive side. There are always positive
benefits in God’s plan, even when we go through suffering.
But in the early church there was a lot of hostility.
Remember what happened to Paul when he took the gospel to the synagogues in
Lystra, Iconium, and Derbe, and they ran them out of town when he went to
Thessalonica? They ran him out of town from the Jewish community. They would
follow him from town to town, causing more and more riots. So there was
hostility there.
Peter is writing to these Jewish-background believers
to teach them how to deal with the hostility that they would face from the
world around them, from the Gentile Greco–Roman culture, as well as from within
their own Jewish communities. And they might also, because Christians are
sinners too, deal with some sort of hostility or people testing from other
believers.
We have to understand that the world system surrounds
us, so we’re always living in a hostile environment. And even the world
system—we will understand it in a minute—penetrates our own defenses and often
is a dynamic force in our own thinking. More often than we like to think, our
rationalizations for our behavior are not only strengthened by our sin nature,
but we select the elements within what seems normal to us because it’s our
culture. In this sense “culture” can often refer to those aspects of our belief
system that are influenced by our surroundings, by our community, by our
American culture as opposed to British culture.
One of the things that we see in this passage is that
Peter is emphasizing the importance of the Christian community as a
counterculture to the world’s culture. That is something that is often lost
today in American Christianity, because part of American kosmic thinking is
this idea of rugged individualism—I don’t need anybody. Just me, my Bible,
maybe my MP3 recorder or my computer, and God—that’s all I need. That is just
blasphemy! Because so many passages in the Scripture talk about how we are
placed in the body of Christ for interdependency with other members, and we
will see that. That’s what Peter is talking about here—the importance of what
should characterize the church as the Christian community over against what is
experienced by those in the world or the kosmic system.
As we start, just a reminder of the context in 1 Peter
2:17. Peter said to, “Honor all people. Love the brotherhood.” That’s going to be
reiterated here. “Fear God. Honor the king.”
This is developed, then, in those four imperatives
related to being submissive—how, in fact, to do that—and we’ve seen this in the
last few weeks. Servants, you do it by being submissive to your masters; wives,
by being submissive to your own husbands; husbands, by dwelling with them with
understanding.
That is how that application comes about. The first
thing I want to talk about tonight is that we have to understand this thing
that surrounds us—and sometimes penetrates us—and that’s the kosmic system.
We’re going to cover briefly in the introduction ten points as a reminder on
the kosmic system. This is what I developed for the closing of Tuesday night’s
class, because David’s dealing with the same issues in 1 Samuel 21 and 22—with
the hostility of the kosmic system around him. So there is going to be a
certain amount of redundancy and repetition between the next couple of lessons
here in 1 Peter and where we are in 1 Samuel, because obviously there is a very
close connection textually. Because we’ve got Psalm 34 growing out of the
circumstances in 1 Samuel 21, and we have Psalm 34 quoted here as an
illustration of how Christians should be responsive.
Understanding the kosmic system. First of all, we all
live within this kosmic system. I remember when I was in the 9th or
10th grade, some pastoral intern from Dallas Seminary came to the
church where I grew up and was teaching about the kosmic system. What he said
was so far over my head. Of course, I’m talking about Charlie Clough when he
was probably in his third year at Dallas Seminary.
I didn’t understand that it was kosmic with a “k.”
What he was teaching was straight out of Chafer’s Systematic Theology, but I had never
heard it quite addressed that way. So it’s kosmic with a “k.”
In Adam’s fall, we sinned all. We’re all fallen
sinners. Romans 3:23, “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”
Isaiah 53:6, “All we like sheep have gone astray; We have turned,
every one, to his own way; And the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.”
It is that iniquity that has led us astray. We are all corrupt. The starting
point is that human thinking is corrupted by sin. So, in terms of that
corruption, we are, as Paul puts it in Romans 1:18, “suppressing the truth in unrighteousness.”
I am going to develop more on this, but when you
suppress the truth, the more you suppress truth, the less you’re able to
recognize the truth; and the less you’re able to recognize the truth, the less
you’re able to evaluate what is true and determine the difference between truth
and error. Because the more we get away from truth, the more our framework for
evaluating what is right and what is wrong changes until we reach that point where God
indicted Israel in the Old Testament—where He said that they were calling evil good
and good evil. That is why we have a lot of the problems in our culture
today.
We have rejected, as a nation, the Judeo-Christian
heritage that defines right and wrong; as a result of that, because the
community of our national culture has moved away from a biblical standard of
right and wrong, they are redefining what is right or wrong. As a result of
that, they’re losing the ability to determine what is right or wrong, and
everything becomes relative. We are galloping towards the motto of the judges
period, “everyone
did what was right in his own eyes.”
“In those days there was no king in Israel.” What that meant wasn’t that they didn’t
have a human monarch, but that they weren’t allowing God to function as the
theocratic King of the nation at that time.
Because human beings are fallen sinners, we
reconstruct reality according to our opposition to truth. That reconstruction
of reality is what we mean by the kosmic system.
The Greek word itself can refer to the ordered
physical world or universe. It can also refer to the inhabitants of the world.
It can also refer to and describe the thinking of the world that goes back to
fifth century Greek and philosophical Greek.
It can refer to the spatially ordered universe, or to
the ordered earth, or to the inhabitants of the earth; but it also refers to
the structured thinking.
The Bible talks about God’s viewpoint. In contrast, “There is a way
that seems right to a man.” You look at the wisdom literature in Psalms and
Proverbs, “There
is a way.” There’s a right way—and everything else is a wrong way.
Jesus referred to this, and He talks about, “Broad is the way
that leads to destruction.” “Narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which
leads to life.” There are many different paths on the wrong way. You have
philosophical paths, you have religious paths, you have irrational paths,
mystic paths—all kinds of different paths. Because everyone’s doing what’s
right in their own eyes, so it just multiplies over time.
But that’s always juxtaposed in Scripture to God’s
absolute. There’s one way of thinking that is God’s way of thinking, and that’s
juxtaposed to all human viewpoint. Human viewpoint becomes a term that we use
to describe this. But we could also use other terms, such as Satan’s viewpoint,
the world system, pagan viewpoint; all of those would basically represent the
same thing.
The head of this type of thinking, and the one who
originated it is Satan. That’s why he is given these kinds of titles.
2 Corinthians 4:4 says he’s the “god of this age.” The
Greek word there for “age” is AIŌNOS.
It’s not the word KOSMOS, but it has to
do with the time period in which this philosophy operates. So the Germans, who
are so philosophical, developed a term for this called the “Zeitgeist”, which
means “the spirit of the times.”
Satan is the god of this age, Paul says in 2 Corinthians
4:4. In John 16:11, Jesus said he’s “the ruler of this world”; he’s the ruler
of this KOSMOS. So he’s the
ruler of this type of thinking; he’s the one who originated it. In Ephesians
2:2, Paul says that the Ephesian believers “once walked according to the course of this KOSMOS, according
to the prince of the power of the air,” connecting the kosmos to Satan. The
term “prince of the power the air” is another term for Satan.
Autonomy refers to everything that’s related to self;
it’s related to independence. That word “autonomy” has to do with self-law. Man
becomes a law unto himself—or any creature becomes a law unto himself—and
rebels against God. In that autonomy we see the essence or core of arrogance,
which is anything that affirms or emphasizes self: self-absorption,
self-indulgence, self-justification, self-deception. You recognize those as the
arrogance skills. Self-reliance—in a bad way.
Self-reliance, where you’re so deeply dependent upon
yourself and asserting your own independence, that you’re no longer dependent
upon God. You are either God-reliant or self-reliant in the Scriptures, one or
the other; and the only way we can be God-reliant is if we are trusting in the
Lord. Self-assertion. We assert our own ideas, our own opinions, our own
values. It’s just self, self, self. It’s all self-absorption.
That represents one aspect of kosmic thinking. The
other is antagonism. Because when we assert ourselves over against God, then we
are going to become antagonistic to God. Because we are going to say, “I’m
going to assert my ideas against God,” and God is going to say, “that’s wrong.”
Then we’re going to get mad at Him, because He won’t let us have our own way.
Antagonism is expressed hostility to the Word of God,
hostility to divine viewpoint—or even establishment truth, hostility to
Christians because they just represent God. The very fact that you have a
Christian having his presence in Congress is just absolutely anathema to a lot
of atheistic, self-righteous unbelievers. They just hate the idea that somebody
can be a Bible-believing Christian and have any say in anything; because,
ultimately, they have rejected God. So there’s hostility to anyone who stands
for the absolute truth of the Word of God. That’s point number three.
There is only one way. Jesus said, “I am the truth.”
That means that anything that disagrees with Jesus is not the truth. You’re not left with
another option: Jesus is either the truth, or He’s a liar. You have to be
intellectually honest there. If He’s a liar, then He’s the most deceptive
Person in all of human history and He’s leading billions of people to their
eternal death. So God’s thinking is divine viewpoint; man’s thinking is human
viewpoint.
Now the kosmic system includes all unbelievers. They
can’t think any other way, because they don’t have divine truth. No matter how
moral they might be, no matter how much they steal ideas from Christianity …
Think about it. If God created everything, and everything runs the way God says
it runs, then the only way you can have a measure of stability is to do things
God’s way. Whether they like it or not, they have to borrow from God in order
to make life work for themselves.
So all unbelievers operate in the kosmic system, and a
lot of believers operate in the kosmic system because they don’t know any
biblical truth. This is what we see in Romans 12:2.
Paul says, “Do not be conformed to this world.” The
assumption there is that as a believer you are already conformed to the world
in your thinking from the minute you got saved, because you haven’t had any
divine truth yet, other than the gospel. After you’re saved, what you do then?
Well, you have to quit thinking like the world. “And do not be conformed to this world, but
be transformed by the renovation [or overhaul] of your mind [of your thinking].”
That’s an important word there, because the word
that’s in the Greek relates to, as part of the semantic range of a word we’re
going to run into in a little while related to being like-minded. We do this to
prove that God’s will is good, acceptable, and perfect. In other words, we’re
out to prove something; we’re to demonstrate something in our lives. That’s
part of our mission: to demonstrate that what God says is true, that it’s good
and acceptable and perfect.
So you have this interplay. The sin nature thinks of
ways to suppress truth and to organize its thought systems apart from God, and
that develops all these different philosophies and religions, but that in turn
reinforces the sin nature. So you get this codependent spiral between the
function of the sin nature and the world system. The world system often
provides the philosophies and the religions and the rationalizations that we
use to justify what makes us feel comfortable, other than doing what God says,
the way God says to do it. This is really an important point, that we see that
codependency between kosmic thinking and the sin nature.
Jesus said it this way in John 8:44. This is another
one of His statements where He is currying favor with the Pharisees; I’m being
facetious. “You
are of your father the devil.” He is talking to the religious leaders in
Israel, “You
are of your father the devil, and the desires of your father you want to do. He
was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because
there is no truth in him.” It’s either Jesus who is the truth or it’s
Satan, who is the lie.
“When he speaks a lie [that is Satan], he speaks from his own resources, for he is
a liar and the father of it.” So the juxtaposition is God is light and in
Him there is no darkness, and Satan is a liar from the beginning—the beginning
of human history.
Those who represent the world system: religious
leaders, political leaders, philosophers, the everyday person, are all
characterized by the sin nature.
If they are Christians when they’re characterized by
their sin nature, then they are friends with the world. The Scripture says that
those who are friends with the world are enemies of God. That’s a pretty strong
statement—that we are one or the other; we’re either letting the world shape
our thinking, which makes us enemies of God, or we’re letting the Scripture
shape our thinking.
“These things I have spoken to you, that in Me you may have peace.”
No matter what’s going on in the world around you—the hostility of the kosmic
system is always going to be there, but in Jesus there should be tranquility.
An application of that would be in the body of Christ, functioning within the
church, that is, walking by the Spirit, there should be tranquility. But it’s
not going to happen unless you’re all walking by the Spirit.
“These things I’ve spoken to you, that in Me you may have peace. In the
world you will have tribulation [you’ll have adversity; you’ll have hostility;
you’ll have rejection; you’ll have difficulty, because you’re dealing with
other sinners]; but
be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.” And when Jesus said, “I have overcome,”
He uses a perfect tense, which means it’s a completed action at that point.
He’s not overcoming the world—in process; He’s not going to overcome the world
the next day when He goes to the Cross; He has already overcome the world and
defeated it. That word for overcoming is the Greek word NIKAO, which means to be a victor. That relates to us as believers becoming
victors in our spiritual life and receiving special awards, rewards, and
inheritance blessings.
Now I’m bringing inheritance in here because last
time, as we finished up in 1 Peter 3:7, we were talking about husbands and how
they are to live with their wives and honor their wives. They are to treat them
as heirs together of the grace of life; that refers to being heirs of God, that
first category of inheritance that’s true for every believer.
Tonight, in 1 Peter 3:9, we’re going to see another
reference to inheritance. We are to obey God in all of these attributes so that
we may inherit
a blessing. That is talking about blessing in time—as well as in eternity. That’s the other kind of
blessing that comes as a result of spiritual growth and obedience.
Romans 12:2 says that we are to “be transformed by the renewing of our mind.”
That’s the only solution—to walk by the Spirit, to take in the Word of God,
apply the Word of God, and let our thinking be transformed.
Then the last point in this introduction.
We’ve got a new game. When you get saved there are new
rules; you move from being an unbeliever and operating according to the rules
of Satan, the rules of the kosmic system, the rules of your culture, to where
you are now in a countercultural game. There are new rules; you’re on a new
team. We are on God’s team; we are not on Satan’s team anymore, and we function
differently. We have a higher calling. We’re not going to lower ourselves to
the standards of others, no matter who they are—whether they are unbelievers or
whether they are carnal believers. We’re going to take the high road; we’re
always going to operate on these qualities that are emphasized here.
Before we get into the text itself, I have three
points of basic summary. As we look at this section, it sets us up for the same
kind of situation that David faced. He is surrounded by Saul and Saul’s army,
and he’s in a hostile environment. What Peter is doing is juxtaposing the Christian
community as it should be—the church as an oasis of tranquility and peace and
stability in contrast to the world.
I hear so many different stories from people who are
in petty little situations at their office, or on their team at work, or with
other people who are vindictive and filled with revenge. They’re always out for
themselves; they are totally self-absorbed; they’re lazy; they’re
irresponsible; they take credit for other people’s actions. All these kinds of
things take place in the world. When we come to be with other believers, those
kinds of things should not characterize the body of Christ. That’s what Peter
is talking about here.
That doesn’t mean that our characters have been
changed—that’s the process of spiritual growth. But what undergirds that is
realizing the interdependency of every member of the body of Christ. We’re
members of one another; we’re not just individuals; we’re not a bunch of
separate atoms just floating randomly in space. We are brought together into an
organism, and we are members of one another.
That’s the importance of the body Christ, that when we
face challenges in life, we face the hostility of the world, we face
difficulties in our own personal life, or our spiritual growth, we have a team
that supports us. We have a team that comes together on the basis of the Word
of God. It’s not on the basis of this pseudo feel-good, let’s all hold hands
and sing Kumbaya kind of emotional psychobabble nonsense you get, but a team
that plays on the basis of the rules of the Word of God.
Paul says, in Romans 12:5, “So we, being many [that emphasizes our
individual natures], are one body in Christ.” That’s not just a unity in Christ—that
is talking about a practical value, on the ground, of our interdependency. We
are “individually
members of one another,” and that’s important.
We are members of one another. That’s a different
term. It’s not just that we play on the same team. There’s a more fundamental
and foundational unity there, an interconnectedness because we’re in the body
of Christ.
In Ephesians 4:25, Paul is addressing the problem that
creates disunity and fragmentation in a local body of Christ because of the
deceptions that were going on there, apparently. He said, “Therefore, putting away lying, ‘Let each one
of you speak truth with his neighbor.’ ” Why? “For we are members of one another.” So,
truth should characterize our relationships with one another, not lying and
deception, which is characteristic in the unbelieving community.
This was a problem in Ephesus. It was a problem in
Corinth. It was a problem in Philippi—big problem in Philippi. And wherever
there are sinners, there is going to be a problem; that is because they’re not
following the divine solution. But when we implement the divine solution there
can be harmony and tranquility.
He’s focusing on the fact that they’re living in a
hostile environment, but it also has application in case there are problems
with other believers.
This a problem we get in this war-between-the-sexes
mentality; they have taken these passages where Paul talks about wives being
submissive to the husbands, and Peter talks about this, and they blow it out of
proportion. The ultimate framework for this has got to be understood. Paul and
Peter are not singling out either males or females for some sort of special
browbeating. Okay? He’s not a misogynist, and he’s not mad at men, either.
Okay? That’s not the point. The fact is that he’s applying to both the men and
women that which should be true of every single believer. Okay?
In Ephesians 5:2, Paul says, “Submitting to one another in the fear of God.”
That’s your first use of “submit”; it applies to every believer. What Peter says here, in
1 Peter 3:8–9, applies to every believer. What he said in 1 Peter 2:17 applies
to every believer. He’s just giving instances of it in between—to slaves, to
wives, and to husbands. It also applies to masters and children. It’s true for
every believer; so he is not picking on anybody.
What we learn from all of this is that it’s about
God’s plan. That’s the focus. Once we get saved, it’s about God’s plan. We’re
playing for the other team; we’re running to the other goal. Okay? To put it in
a football analogy. We’re under a different rulebook. It’s about Jesus. It’s
about serving the Lord—no matter what. It’s no longer about me.
This is a hard thing for us to learn. How many of us
still struggle with the fact that when I’m explaining the gospel to somebody
and they reject it, that we feel that they’re rejecting me? They’re not
rejecting me. They’re rejecting God; they’re rejecting Christ. But that’s such
a hindrance for most of us in giving the gospel, because we don’t want that
rejection.
We get the superfluous overflow of that directed
towards us, but they’re not rejecting me. Just like Samuel. When Israel wanted
a king, God told Samuel, “They’re not rejecting you; they’re rejecting Me.”
That’s the real issue. They’re not rejecting us; they’re rejecting God. It’s
God’s plan, it’s Jesus that we’re serving, and it’s the mission that He gave
us. That’s what everything is about.
It’s not about our feelings. It’s not about our
wishes, our wants, our desires, because a lot of that comes out of our sin
nature. Our sin nature creates a comfort zone, and we want to stay in that
comfort zone because of the deception of the sin nature. It would’ve been much
more comfortable for Peter and the other disciples to stay in Jerusalem.
What was the last thing Jesus said? “I want you to
take the gospel to Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria and the uttermost part of
the world.” What did they do? They stayed in their comfort zone. They camped
out in Jerusalem. They lived in Jerusalem. They didn’t go to Judea and Samaria.
So what did God do? God came in and He brought testing; He brought adversity
and persecution in Jerusalem so they had to leave.
See, you have a choice. You can either leave your
comfort zone out of your own volition in obedience to the Lord, or you can
leave your comfort zone because God’s got a flyswatter after you. And He’s
going to cause that trouble. You’ve got an option: do it God’s way out of your
own volition, or do it God’s way as a result of a little divine discipline.
So it is not about how we feel, it is not what we
think, it is not about our prerogatives; it is about what the Lord wants to
accomplish, the mission. As such, the Scripture says that we are to love our
enemies. We are to love those who mistreat us and bless those who curse us.
This is what Jesus says in Luke 6:27, “But I say to you who hear: Love your enemies.”
That includes people who believe differently; that involves militant Muslims.
That’s a hard thing for a lot of us. Because not only is that a personal issue,
but it’s a national issue, because they have declared war on the West—even
though the West is trying to ignore it.
But we are to love our enemies. That doesn’t mean we
don’t go to war against them. That’s the tension we have. We are to love our
enemies, and we are to do good to those who hate us. We are to bless those who
curse us; we are not to react in anger; we are not to react in resentment or
bitterness. We are to be even more kind and generous.
I read a testimony of a believer who was serving in
the military, and as he was serving in one of his early assignments, probably in
boot camp or one of the other training situations, he came under assault from
another soldier. I’ve heard this from many, many guys here in the congregation;
when they were in boot camp and they were going through basic training, every
night these guys—believers—would take out their cassette player or something
and they would spend time in the Word and praying. They would focus on their
biblical study and get that in every single day if they could.
So that’s what this soldier was doing, and he was always
getting ridiculed by another guy in the barracks. One night as he was praying,
all of a sudden he was hit in the side of the head with a muddy boot. So what’s
your natural reaction? That’s right! “Let’s go to Fist City; let’s fight.” “You
want to fight?” Take him on. The next morning, the guy who threw the boot found
the boot cleaned, polished, spit-shined—first class condition—boots lined up at
base of his bunk. See, he was blessed instead of cursed. As a result of that,
according to this guy’s testimony, several of the men in his unit came to
believe in Jesus Christ. That’s the difference! Believers respond differently
than unbelievers. We don’t let the sin nature cause us to react that way.
So we’re to, “Bless those who curse you, and pray for those who
spitefully use you. To him who strikes you on the one cheek, offer the other
also.” That’s not a pacifist verse. Dan Inghram wrote his master’s thesis
on this verse. What that means is that if somebody insults you, just ignore it
and move on. Don’t seek offense; don’t take offense. Because the issue isn’t
your feelings, or whether you’ve been offended; the issue is the mission for
Jesus Christ.
1 Peter 3:8 summarizes this. As he’s bringing this to
a conclusion, talking about submission, explaining how to honor the people,
love the brotherhood, fear God, and honor the king, Peter summarizes it in
relation to “all of you.” He says, “Finally, all of you [this relates to every
believer].”
“All of you be of one mind, having compassion for one another; love as
brothers, be tenderhearted, be courteous.”
These are five qualities that are expressed by five
adjectives. If you look at the verse in your English text, it says “all.”
You’ll notice that “of you be” is in italics. That’s because “of you be” is not
in the original—it’s implied. “All” and then it just has all, same mind, and
compassion for one another—and that’s not even in the original—brotherly love,
tenderhearted, and courteous. The verb is left out. This happens a lot in
Greek. When you are emphasizing something, you drop out the verb, it’s implied;
it’s called an ellipsis. The only thing that would make sense is a “to be” verb
here, which is how they’ve translated it. But it is translated as an
imperative. It would have to be an imperative verb—this is a command. This is
not an option. This is not a suggestion. This isn’t something that might work
out for you someday, “So give it a try.” This is an order for every believer.
Be likeminded. That has the idea of being in harmony,
being harmonious, not having discord.
Sympathy is the second word. That is pretty much based
on a transliteration, but it has the idea of understanding the suffering of one
another.
The third is brotherly love, PHILADELPHOS. This is where we get the name for our city Philadelphia, which was
named for a city of like name in Asia Minor in Turkey. But it means “to love
one another.”
Then, to be “kindhearted to one another.”
“Courteous” is completely wrong, because the Greek
word there is very important; it means “to be humble toward one another.”
Let’s take these apart one by one. The first word is HOMOPHRON. That’s an interesting word, because the root PHRON comes from the verb
PHRONEO, which means to think—not to emote, but to think. The HOM at the beginning—the H represents the rough breathing mark—is from the
Greek word, HOMOS, which means the
same, as opposed to HETEROS which means
something different. Okay? We get words like homogenized milk. The “homo” at
the beginning of homogenized means everything is made the same. Okay?
Homosexual means the same sex.
So HOMOPHRON means to think the same. This is the only time this word is used. In
fact, most of the words that are used here—I think three of the five—are only used
this one time in all of the New Testament. But it’s clear that it is a synonym
for another phrase that is more common, which is “to think the same thing” or
“to be like minded.”
We look at this particular word and think about it. As
[Edward Gordon] Selwyn says, in his well-known commentary on 1 Peter, “It
reflects a common heritage of faith and ethical tradition.” Let’s break that
down a little bit. When he says, “It’s a common heritage of faith,” they all
believe the same thing. That’s what Paul says in Ephesians 4—one faith—we all
believe the same thing. And, in the Old Testament, Amos 3:3, “Can two walk
together, unless they are agreed?” If we don’t have the same belief, then
we can’t be united. We all have to submit to the teaching and believe what the
Word of God says. We have “a common heritage of faith.”
Then he says, “a common heritage of ethical
tradition.” What that means is we believe in the same values of right and
wrong, what is correct and what is incorrect. This is the idea here: because we
have a common belief system, we have a common behavior system. We’re all going
to play according to the same rules and the same rulebook that God has given
us.
The problem is that we all face the same three
enemies—the world, the flesh, and the devil. The flesh represents the sin
nature. Any of us as believers, when we stop walking by the Spirit, then the
sin nature gets control and that can cause all sorts of problems. That’s what
Paul lists in Galatians 5:19 and following, the works of the flesh, which
include strife, divisions, and all kinds of disorder.
That’s how that section in Galatians starts, “Walk in the
Spirit, and you shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh.” Only by walking
by the Spirit and letting our beliefs and actions be transformed by the Word of
God, will the Spirit be able to produce the kind of unity and oneness within a
local church that will exhibit the characteristics of Christ.
That doesn’t mean it’s all going to be perfect. That
doesn’t mean that we’re not going to have problems and issues between different
members of the local church. But together we stand in unity on what we believe
and our common mentality of behavior, and then we stand against the world
system. So that’s what this like-mindedness is all about. We find this a number
of places in Scripture, because this was a problem in churches in the ancient
world as it is today.
Romans 15:5, “Now may the God who gives perseverance and
encouragement grant you [that’s a grace idea] to be of the same mind with one another
according to Christ Jesus.” The phrase “according to” in the Greek means
“according to a standard.” We’re of the same mind according to one standard;
that’s the only way we can have unity, and that’s according to the thinking of
Jesus Christ.
In 2 Corinthians 13:11, Paul ends his 2 Corinthian
epistle, “Finally,
brethren, rejoice, be made complete, be comforted, be like-minded.” This is
not some secondary idea. We are to be of the same mindset toward everything. “Live in peace;
and the God of love and peace will be with you.”
Philippians really has a lot to say about this. In
Philippians 2:2, “Make my joy complete by being of the same mind [think the same
way].” Don’t be divided. Don’t have conflicts between you.
Philippians 2:5, “Have this mentality [PHRONEO—same idea] in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus.” Then he addressed
the problem in the congregation that was causing a lot of waves outside of even
Philippi, “I urge
Euodia and I urge Syntyche to live in the same mind in the Lord.” Any
people who have personal problems need to focus on being of the same mind in
relation to, or according to Christ Jesus, as Paul put it in Romans. None of
this can happen apart from walking by the Spirit and applying the Word of God
in our life.
So first of all, be of one mind. Second, have
compassion for one another. This is the Greek word SUMPATHES, which is obviously where we get our word sympathy. It’s just
transliterated, or brought over into English, and it means to have an
understanding of what other people are going through. It’s not just patting
them on the back or feeling sorry for them; it’s caring about their needs and
their joys, and as they are going through difficult circumstances, being
willing to encourage them.
Two verses illustrate this. Romans 12:15, “Rejoice with
those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep.” This all flows from
having relationships—knowing other people in the congregation. You can’t know
everybody at the same level or the same depth. That’s impossible, but this is
having some intimate relationships with different people where you can
encourage them and strengthen them. When they go through good times we rejoice
with them; when they go through hard times we weep with them.
1 Corinthians 12:26, Paul says, “And if one member suffers, all the members
suffer with it.” See, some people get so caught up with privacy that they
don’t want anybody else in the congregation knowing that they’re going through
anything. I don’t think that fits with this verse. How can “if one member is
suffering the whole body suffers” if nobody knows about it? Because there’s
an interdependency within the body of Christ.
That doesn’t mean you go around and tell everybody
about every hangnail and paper cut and everything that goes on in life, but
we’re talking about the difficulties that people face—when somebody loses their
job, when they go through unemployment, when they’re facing a medical crisis,
when there is a loss of a loved one, when there are other significant issues in
life. We don’t want to burden people with the nonessentials, but we care about
each other.
Then we come to the third example, the third
adjective. We have brotherly love. This is the word PHILADELPHOS, and it means to love someone in the family. Because it using the word PHILOS, which comes from the verb PHILEO, it’s not talking like AGAPE.
The meanings of AGAPE and PHILEO can overlap, but the distinction is that PHILEO indicates a more intimate love—not a more emotional love, but a more intimate
love. You know
the other person, there’s a relationship there, so it’s a more intimate
involvement with someone else.
We’re to love one another—it’s not just at arm’s-length.
We are to love one another. Some people make it more difficult to do that, and
I understand that. Some people are very difficult. We’ve had some folks in this
congregation—I’ve had folks in every congregation—that just make it difficult,
socially, for anybody
to be close to them. That’s more their problem than anybody else’s. But we all
run into that.
One thing I learned years ago. I was a counselor in my
first year at Camp Peniel; I think it was about the fourth camp of the summer.
We had one more to go after that, and because Mike Turnage had had a brain
tumor, I had been picked at the last minute to also run all the canoe trips
that summer. I was a cabin counselor one week, then on a canoe trip the next
week, and then a counselor—and I was tired.
I was tired of some little kids that were somewhat of
discipline problems. It was a Sunday afternoon and the bus was going to get
there in a couple hours, and I was worn out. I was laying on my bunk, and I
said, “I need to pray about my attitude, because my attitude just really
stinks!” I prayed that the Lord would change my attitude. I fell asleep and
slept for about 30 minutes. When I woke up, I was refreshed, my attitude
changed, and I learned a lesson there that as I face crises in life—and I don’t
want to do what God wants me to do—I need to pray that God will help change my
mind, the Holy Spirit would help transform my thinking, so that I can apply
what I know I ought to apply—willingly and happily—even though it may not be
exactly what I want to do.
Some years after that—not long—I was teaching an
in-school suspension class with a bunch of snotty-nosed middle schoolers—junior
high kids—and nothing can be worse than a bunch of juvenile delinquents in an
in-school suspension class. There were many mornings I woke up and the last
thing I wanted to do was get in the car and drive to school and face these
little brats. Because they really were—they were just incorrigible.
They couldn’t stick to the rules of the school long
enough to get out after three days. There was one girl that was just lovely.
She was there for over 65 days. She didn’t care, her parents didn’t care, and
she was just absolutely hostile to everything. The last thing I wanted to do
was face that. But I would pray about it, and God would change my attitude.
So that’s important, because none of this comes
naturally. If you think this is impossible, guess what? It is! Just
remember—you’ve heard it all your lives: The spiritual life isn’t difficult;
it’s impossible. You can’t do it on your own. It is a product of God the Holy
Spirit and your willingness to walk by the Spirit.
Loving one another. Jesus said, “A new commandment I give to you, that you
love one another; as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this
all will know that you are My disciples [not that all men will know that
you are believers, but you are learning the Word of God and applying it in your
life], if you
have love for one another.”
Now this is repeated. This command to “love one
another” is repeated at least 10 more times in the New Testament. In John
15:12, “This
is My commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” John
15:17, “These
things I command you, that you love one another.” Paul, in Romans 13:8, “Owe no one
anything except to love one another.” In 1 Thessalonians 4:9, “For you
yourselves are taught by God to love one another.” In 1 Peter 1:22, what
we’ve already seen so far, “Love one another fervently with a pure heart.”
We’re to “Love the brotherhood” in 1 Peter 2:17. In 1
John 3:11, “We
should love one another.” 1 John 3:23, “That we should believe on the name of His Son Jesus
Christ and love one another, as He gave us commandment.” In 1 John 4:7, “Beloved, let us
love one another, for love is of God; and everyone who loves is born of God and
knows God.” That’s talking about spiritual growth—it’s not just automatic
from salvation.
1 John 4:11, “Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love
one another.” 1 John 4:12, “No one has seen God at any time. If we love one
another, God abides in us [that’s fellowship].” On and on and on.
Now the fourth word is to be tenderhearted. This is
the word EUSPLAGCHNOS.
The EU indicates doing
something well, or good, or beneficial towards others; and SPLAGCHNOS is usually related to mercy or compassion. It’s an action type of noun,
where you are doing something merciful to help others in a difficult situation.
Believers are challenged to be compassionate to those who are enduring
difficulty in many places.
Philippians 2. A major theme in Philippians is this
idea of unity in the body and being like-minded. “Therefore if there is any consolation in
Christ [and there is], if any comfort of love [and there is], if any fellowship of the Spirit [and
there is], if
any affection and mercy.” That’s the idea—and there is.
Colossians 3:12, “Therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved,
put on tender mercies, kindness, humility, meekness, longsuffering.” Same
idea.
Then the last word is “being humble.” I’ll make this
really brief; there is a lot I could say about this. Humility is one of those words
that changed its meaning because of the teaching of Christ. A lot of words
change their meaning over time. In Middle English it was a real insult for
somebody to say that you were “nice.” I actually remember being in a teen Bible
class when I was about 15 years old, and half the Bible class was on the word
“nice,” that it was a word you should never use. I don’t know about that, but
its original meaning was “to be stupid or ignorant.” It wasn’t until the 16th
century that it began to change its meaning and to have the idea of being
something positive, something that was appropriate, or something that was
attractive, and that’s based on what the Oxford English Dictionary gives as the
background for that.
Meanings change with language. TAPEINOPHRON. PHRON we’ve already
seen; it has to with thinking—thinking of yourself as being lowly. The basic
meaning was “to be low.” It originally talked about people who are on the dregs
of society, the lowest of the lower social economics in society. It was that
the bottom of the rung—and it was always in insult. Jesus came along and said
Christians are supposed to be humble. That really didn’t sound right to a lot
of people. Because, up until Jesus, this is a negative word. It is a bad word.
In fact, in Greek culture you were to be self-assertive, you were to assert
your own rights, you weren’t supposed to give up your rights.
But see, you are compared to a slave. Jesus came as a
slave, as a servant, to God. He gave up His rights. He said, “It’s not about
Me. It’s not about what I want. It’s not about how I feel. I don’t want to go
the Cross. I’m sweating blood. Father, let this cup pass from Me.” But Jesus
focused on the mission, and He went with the joy set before Him—joyfully. It’s
not just a matter of doing what God says, but not doing it grudgingly, but
doing it out of a genuine response of obedience.
Next time we’ll come back and talk about 1 Peter 3:9, “Not returning
evil for evil or reviling for reviling, but on the contrary blessing.” Now
that’s really hard. Somebody insults us and we want to throw it back at him.
But what did Jesus do?
“Who, when He was reviled, did not revile in return; when He suffered,
He did not threaten, but committed Himself to Him who judges righteously.”
What we do is we turn it over to God and the Supreme Court of Heaven. Let Him
handle it. We just move on like nothing ever happened and let God take care of
it. He is the Judge of all things, and He’s going to do the right thing. Then
we’ll get into how Peter is using Psalm 34 here.