FOR THE LOVE OF GOD

Scripture References – 1 Peter 1:3-9

God’s protection has meant that He would not leave His people in the lonely hours of decision and pain. We can barely comprehend that. There may be some exception here and there, but most of us don’t know what it is to suffer for our faith. More than likely, no one threatened us as we made our way to worship recently. Some of you may have been threatened for just the opposite, for trying to stay in bed or trying to participate in some sabbath recreation by someone who felt strongly that you should be in worship. Some persons in the world were, and others will be threatened for their association with Christians and places of Christian worship. We were stunned a few years ago when a right-wing guerrilla group in El Salvador devised a “Baptist Hit List.” Two of the four persons on that list were murdered. More recently six Jesuit priests have been murdered under similar circumstances. This is not the extent of it either as we are seeing radical situations like this cropping up all over the globe.

Enduring suffering is one thing, but do you recall what else the writer indicated about suffering in the context of Christian hope? He makes it plain there is joy in adversity when it comes because of one’s faith in the Lord. He says that faithful suffering refines one’s faith in God and brings honor to Him. Suffering for Christ’s sake is like a refiner’s fire, bringing about a purer, more precious product according to the Apostle. We have to be refined in this way for pure gold to result. If you have to suffer for the cause of Christ, don’t despair. The end result will be a purer faith. In this way, we can see Christian hope as related even to suffering.

I can’t think of anything more frightening than possibly having to put my life on the line, can you? If we heed what our text says, when and if we should find ourselves in that most extreme situation, we can yet hope, not just that things will all end up OK but that, then and there, God is with us personally and intimately. There will be meaning in that event and perhaps even joy to be known at such a time. God grant us the courage to face life with such assurance and uphold in prayer our brothers and sisters around the world who are regularly threatened because of their Christian commitment.

Clearly, Christian hope is not our wish to be treated as something other than human; rather, it is in the midst of all that is human, and especially not excluding the pain, that Christian hope works. Christian hope has to do with life and actually, with life promised by Christ Jesus to be more abundant. There is no greater power than to give life. God gave life to humanity in creating us. And an even greater display of God’s power came in giving life where death had come, in raising Jesus from the clutches of death. God made hope more of a reality that day than ever before and from the raw material of shattered dreams, humiliation, and agony.

God is the basis of all our hope. Because of God’s power especially displayed in the resurrection of our Lord, we can boldly claim Christian hope. With the same divine power, God brings us to true life, when we come into relationship with Him.

For us there can be no ultimate pessimism about the future, and therefore no cynicism about the value of life in the present. . . . We move not only toward the end but also toward the fulfillment of life, the genuinely human life which God the Creator willed for us from the beginning, and which God the Savior is already at work here and now to restore and renew in us, and that more abundantly.

God raised Jesus Christ from the dead. God raised us to new life through God’s living Son, Jesus Christ. We can have hope in the present and in anticipation of the future that is not just mere hopefulness, the possibility of hope. It is hope, and because that hope is a fact in God, the best is yet to be.

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture taken from the New King James Version®, NKJV © 1982 by Thomas Nelson.
Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture References – 1 Peter 1:3-9

Peter directly relates Christian hope to an “inheritance” for God’s people; that inheritance, obviously, is salvation. “Receiving the end of your faith—the salvation of your souls,” Peter wrote. Seeing “souls saved” or “getting souls saved” are overused and underdefined phrases in evangelism. Peter is therefore talking about the whole human being in the experience of salvation when he makes reference to the salvation of souls. Salvation is God’s liberating us from the power of sin and self-destruction, setting us in a right relationship with God, and working in our lives to make us healthy and whole persons in all respects; it’s an ongoing process. All of the best we can know in these areas of life is just a mere “down payment” of that complete inheritance which is not fully realized until we step into eternity. We can’t even imagine the bounty awaiting us when we receive the inheritance in full. So, for now, we sing, “Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine! Oh, what a foretaste of glory divine.”

We have difficulty trying to comprehend the value of God’s gift of salvation which we as His children will someday fully inherit. The Apostle picks three beautiful terms to describe salvation, which is life with God. It is life unending and immortal. It is life undefiled and pure, unstained by any moral or spiritual evil. It is life unfading as a flower which never loses its beauty.

Christian hope gives God’s people the assurance of God’s protection. Now, that is not properly interpreted the way it is popularly treated. Protection by God means that once we become children of God, we are not left to “go it alone.” As we face the difficulties of life, as we struggle to make our lives more of what God wants them to be, as we deal with the continuing battle between good and evil, God is with us. God never leaves or forsakes us.

Through faith, we have continual access to God’s power as we attempt to handle whatever life may bring to us. Don’t misunderstand me to say that God protects Christians in the sense of insulating them from all the potentially bad experiences human beings can know. That isn’t true; and that isn’t God’s perfect will for His children.

God’s protection of His people means that divine power is available to us in such a way that we have sufficient stamina and courage to be God’s children in any and all circumstances. There’s a big difference between saying that God will be with us, making divine resources available to us, and saying that God shields us from situations. Protection in this context means that God gives us strength to be God’s people in spite of any temptation or evil that may come to us.

This protection is not a deliverance from suffering, grief, and pain. God does not inflict these upon us; however, they are the realities of living as human beings in an imperfect world. God will not forsake us when these times come; we have God with us as we walk through the dark valleys, and this is an essential part of Christian hope.

Peter wrote this in a time during which Christians certainly suffered because of their commitment to Christ. There were different levels of punishment inflicted upon the faithful, including death. When 1 Peter was written, suffering for the faith meant having your life threatened if you publicly confessed Jesus Christ as Lord. Christians in that time were often faced with a dilemma, a life-and-death dilemma. All people could be required by law to bow down before the statue of the emperor (probably Domitian) and say, “Caesar is Lord.” It was not uncommon for the emperors to make divine statues for themselves. Most had not insisted upon a universal acknowledgement of this deification; however Domitian was an exception. He referred to himself as dominus et deus, lord and god. To make such a statement as “Caesar is Lord,” would be to deny Christ as Lord, yet the penalty for refusing to worship the emperor was often death. Should the Christians say it and not mean it, or refuse and leave one less Christian in the world?

This is something we need to consider today, very seriously, as we see things turning against those with Christian values more and more frequently. It is obvious that history is beginning to repeat itself with the ultimate outcome soon upon the horizon. This is all the more reason to cling to Christian hope.

To Be Continued

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture taken from the New King James Version®, NKJV © 1982 by Thomas Nelson.
Used by permission. All rights reserved.