1 Peter

The letter opens by blessing God, who “hath begotten us again unto a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead” (1:3). The hope lives because the one it rests on lives. It looks to “an inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away, reserved in heaven for you” (1:4), and the heirs themselves “are kept by the power of God through faith” (1:5). Peter tells them to “hope to the end for the grace that is to be brought unto you at the revelation of Jesus Christ” (1:13), and to be ready with “a reason of the hope that is in you” (3:15). The hope rests on a past event, the resurrection, and waits for a future one, Christ’s appearing; the trials between last “for a season” (1:6).

Peter calls his readers “strangers” in his first verse and “strangers and pilgrims” at 2:11, and tells them to “pass the time of your sojourning here in fear” (1:17). They are strangers because God has made them a people. The titles he gave Israel at Sinai, “a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation” (Exodus 19:6), now belong to them: “a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people” (2:9). Peter applies Hosea’s promise to them: they “in time past were not a people, but are now the people of God” (2:10). The faithful before them had confessed “that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth” (Hebrews 11:13). Belonging to God makes them foreigners at home, and their neighbours are watching: “Having your conversation honest among the Gentiles” (2:12).

Eleven verses of this short letter use the verb suffer, more than a quarter of the New Testament verses that do. Peter gives his readers the order the prophets saw in Christ (1:11): “rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of Christ’s sufferings; that, when his glory shall be revealed, ye may be glad also with exceeding joy” (4:13). None is to suffer “as a murderer, or as a thief”; “Yet if any man suffer as a Christian, let him not be ashamed” (4:15–16). Suffering for well doing has Christ for its pattern, who “suffered for us, leaving us an example, that ye should follow his steps” (2:21), and who “when he suffered, he threatened not; but committed himself to him that judgeth righteously” (2:23). And it is short: “after that ye have suffered a while” (5:10).

Christ was “put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit: By which also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison” (3:18–19). Irenaeus read a descent to the dead: the Lord descended into the regions beneath the earth, preaching His advent there also, and 4:6 speaks of the gospel “preached also to them that are dead.” Bede read a preaching through Noah, “a preacher of righteousness” (2 Peter 2:5), to the disobedient of his day, now in prison: Christ was in Noah and the other saints of that time through the Holy Spirit, as “the Spirit of Christ” was in the prophets (1:11). A third reading takes the spirits as “the angels that sinned” (2 Peter 2:4). Peter goes on to the flood: “eight souls were saved by water,” and baptism answers to it (3:20–21).