Manna Praxis

The Book of 1 Peter: A Living Hope

Introduction

Today’s Passage: An Overview of the Whole Book

You are about to sit down with a short letter written to people who were having a hard time, and it is one of the tenderest and steadiest things in the New Testament. Peter is writing to believers scattered across five Roman provinces in the northern part of what we now call Turkey: Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia. That is an enormous stretch of country, hill villages and market towns and port cities, and the little congregations in it had one thing in common. Life had gotten difficult in a particular way. Nobody had passed a law against them. There was no emperor’s decree, no organized hunt. What there was, was worse in its own daily way: neighbors who talked, employers who no longer trusted them, families who could not understand what had happened to them, and a steady drip of suspicion and slander and social exclusion because these people had stopped going where everyone else went. They no longer joined the guild dinners in the temple precincts. They no longer poured the household libations. They no longer joined the old crowd in the old amusements. And in a world where religion and civic loyalty and neighborly belonging were all knotted together into one rope, to pull out of that was to be marked as strange, antisocial, faintly treasonous. So they were talked about. They were called troublemakers. Some of them were losing work, and some were being beaten by masters who owed them nothing. And into that situation Peter writes, and what is striking is what he does not say. He does not tell them how to escape. He does not promise that it will stop. He tells them, instead, who they are and where they are from and where they are going, and then he tells them how a person like that walks through fire.

As you read, hold this: Peter writes to believers scattered and slandered across five Roman provinces, and he answers their suffering not with escape but with identity and hope, telling them that they are exiles with a living hope and must not be surprised by the fire.

The name and what it means

The word that unlocks this whole letter is one Peter drops in his very first sentence and then picks up again in chapter two, and it is the word he wants these people to wear. In Greek it is παρεπίδημος (parepidēmos), pronounced pah-reh-PEE-day-moss (Strong’s G3927), and it means a resident foreigner: not a tourist passing through for a week, and not a citizen either, but someone settled long-term in a country that is not his own. He has an address. He has neighbors and a trade and a landlord. He learns the language and pays the local taxes and knows which market has the better bread. And still, and always, he is from somewhere else, and everyone in the street knows it. The old Greek translation of the Old Testament had used that word and its cousins for Abraham telling the Hittites, “I am a foreigner and an outsider among you,” and for the psalmist saying he was a stranger like all his fathers. It is the word for the life of a pilgrim who has not yet come home.

Now watch what Peter does with it, because it is one of the wisest pastoral moves in all of Scripture. His readers already feel like outsiders. That is the wound. The whole ache of their situation is that they do not fit anymore, that the world they grew up in has quietly closed its door on them. And Peter does not argue with the feeling or try to talk them out of it. He picks it up, and he baptizes it, and he hands it back to them as a title of honor. Yes, he says. You are foreigners here. You feel it because it is true. But you have got the reason backwards. You are not out of place because something went wrong; you are out of place because something went gloriously right, and you now belong to another country, and its King has already claimed you. The strangeness is not a symptom of failure. It is the mark of the passport. Everything else in this letter grows out of that single move. Peter’s whole strategy with suffering people is to tell them who they are and where they are from, because a person who knows that can endure almost anything, and a person who has forgotten it can be undone by a rumor.

The world of the book

The provinces Peter names had been Roman for generations, and the towns in them ran on a system so ordinary that nobody thought about it. Religion was not a private conviction; it was the plumbing of ordinary life. The guild of the leatherworkers held its monthly dinner in a hall attached to a temple, and the meat on the table had been offered on the altar first. The city’s festivals honored its gods, and everyone came out, and the man who stayed home was noticed. Households had their own small shrines, and the head of the house made the offerings, and slaves and children and wives went along with whatever he did. Above all of it stood the cult of Rome and the emperor, not so much a matter of belief as of loyalty: you burned your pinch of incense the way a man today stands for a flag. None of this required much devotion. It required participation. And when a group of people simply stopped participating, the reaction was not theological outrage. It was social suspicion. Who are these people? Why do they meet before dawn? Why do they call each other brother and sister? What are they hiding? The rumors that circulated about Christians in these decades were ugly and stupid, and they did their work anyway.

So picture the congregations Peter is writing to. Many of them were Gentiles, brought out of exactly that world, which is why he can say they were once not a people at all. A good many were household slaves, and Peter addresses them directly in chapter two, which tells you something about who was actually sitting in those rooms. There were wives whose husbands had not believed and who now lived with a daily awkwardness in their own homes. There were tradesmen quietly losing customers. Nobody was being hauled to an arena yet, but a life can be worn down without a single blow: the friend who stops calling, the job that goes to someone else, the relative who says you have become impossible, the neighbor who repeats what he heard. Peter calls it, without flinching, a fiery trial. And he writes to them from a place he calls Babylon, which the early church understood as Rome, the capital of the very system that was squeezing them, which means the man telling them not to be surprised by suffering was sitting in the middle of it himself. Tradition says he did not survive it. That is who is holding the pen.

The shape of the book

The one thread to carry

If you take one thing through these five chapters, take this: you are an exile with a living hope, so do not be surprised by the fire. Every part of the letter hangs on those two facts held together. The hope comes first, and Peter refuses to start anywhere else. Before he has said one word about their troubles, he bursts into blessing, and he tells them what God has already done and what God is already keeping.

"Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By His great mercy He has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, reserved in heaven for you, who through faith are shielded by God’s power for the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time." 1 Peter 1:3–5 (BSB)

Read that slowly and notice the two directions the keeping runs. The inheritance is reserved in heaven for you, kept safe where no thief and no fire and no empire can touch it. And you are shielded by God’s power for the inheritance, guarded on the road so that you actually arrive. Both ends are held by the same hand, and it is not your hand. That is why Peter can talk about fire without panic. A man who is being kept can afford to walk through a hot place.

Then comes the identity, and it is the answer to every whisper in the street. These people were being told, in a hundred small daily ways, that they were nobody. Peter tells them what heaven says instead, and he does it by reaching back and putting on a scattered handful of Gentile believers the very language God once spoke over Israel at Sinai.

"But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God’s own possession, to proclaim the virtues of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light." 1 Peter 2:9 (BSB)

Chosen. Royal. Holy. God’s own possession. Say those over a slave in a Cappadocian household who has just been struck for something he did not do, and you begin to see what this letter is for. Peter is not distracting anyone from their pain. He is telling them the truth about who is bleeding, and that truth changes what the bleeding means.

And then the end of the road, which Peter does not reach until he has walked all the way through the suffering rather than around it. He never pretends the fire is short from the inside. He simply says it is short from God’s side, and he tells them who will be waiting.

"And after you have suffered for a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to His eternal glory in Christ, will Himself restore you, secure you, strengthen you, and establish you." 1 Peter 5:10 (BSB)

Look at the little word Himself. Not an angel, not a process, not the passage of time. God of all grace, in person, doing four things to a worn-out believer: restoring what was broken, securing what was shaken, strengthening what was weak, establishing what was unsteady. That is the country these exiles are traveling toward, and it is why Peter can write a letter about suffering that reads, from beginning to end, like praise. So do not come to 1 Peter looking for a strategy to make life easier. Come to it to be told who you are. You are a foreigner here with a home elsewhere, bought with precious blood, kept by almighty power, and headed for a glory that has already been secured for you. Learn the Word, hold your hope steady, and give thanks.