Today, we return to our study of 1 Peter where we are being given tools to withstand the onslaughts to undermine our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. After God created this world and all its inhabitants, man chose to give life a go apart from God. It did not go as well as they thought. In fact, they found themselves in the clutches of that fallen angel who had long ago decided the same thing. We naturally want to be autonomous beings but we can not make it on our own apart from our Maker.
As made obvious in today's verse, it is through the Lord Jesus Christ that we came to believe in the God of the Bible. The Lord Jesus Christ is the revelation of God to man. And, in His revealing, we have come to understand that God is love. It is out of our understanding that God is love that we discover our truest identity. God created us with two basic yet most profound needs: to be loved and to love. It is from our need to be loved that we discover security, the type of security that creates a certain familiarity with growing in our trust of God. And, from our need to love we discover our significance, or the true meaning or purpose for which we are on this earth. This is the essence of this revelation; We are most fulfilled in a relationship with God and making Him known to others.
The Greek word translated "raised" in today's verse is best translated: "having raised up." God, having raised up the Lord Jesus from the dead, grants those who honestly seek for truth the ability to evaluate correctly what is really real. It was Joseph Parker who once said, "An extreme condition demands an extreme remedy. Until you see that you are doomed and damned apart from Jesus Christ, you will never truly count his blood precious in your sight."
Once we have gotten to the point of believing in God, even though we are yet in the midst of our struggles, we will discover ourselves being more and more defined by God as He reveals His truth to us. This is the hope of the believer in Christ. And, the cornerstone of our hope, the hope of the alien who is living in a world that is not his home, is the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.
In Romans 6:9 we read, “When Jesus was raised from the dead it was a signal of the end of death as the end.”
This explains why our cemetery experiences are different now. We once went to cemeteries on this earth to say good-bye to the dead but now we go to say we will see you later. It is all because of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus from the dead. Through His perfect life and perfect death and perfect resurrection, the Lord Jesus vanquished death for all who hope in Him. The resurrection of Jesus Christ shouts there is nothing too difficult for God.
C.S. Lewis wrote, “If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next. The Apostles themselves, who set on foot the conversion of the Roman Empire, the great men who built up the Middle Ages, the English Evangelicals who abolished the Slave Trade, all left their mark on Earth, precisely because their minds were occupied with Heaven. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.”
The resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ not only gives the believer hope, it emboldens us to place our focus on the goal of discovering Him and His purposes for each day of our lives. When our daily focus is on the purpose of His resurrection, it will draw forth the purpose of our suffering, enabling us to endure because we know that God's ways are enduring, purposeful and true. Many are His purposes for which we go through suffering, namely that others come to know Him through us. And, even though we suffer, we can rest assured that the results will be unfathomable when we are finally in heaven with Him.
In the end, as Peter points out in this verse the key is that the Lord Jesus is glorified. We glorify Him most when our faith and hope are firmly in Him. When we were slaves to sin, our fallen nature controlled us but once redeemed by the precious blood of the Lord Christ, we entered into a new realm, a realm of wonder and endlessly beholding the glory of the Lord Jesus. The great theologian John Owen once wrote, “No man shall ever behold the glory of Christ by sight in heaven who does not, in some measure, behold it by faith in this world.”
