"Therefore say I unto
you, The kingdom of God shall be taken away from you, and shall
be given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof"
(Matthew 21:43).
"Ye are... a holy nation" (1 Peter 2:9).
Reading: 1 Peter
1:1-4.
We are going to be occupied at
this time, with the Lord's help, with the significance of the
person and ministry of the Apostle Peter. The Apostle Paul
occupies such a large place in the New Testament that we are
perhaps in danger of losing the great values of the Apostle
Peter. This may be partly due to the fact that so little is on
record as to the life and ministry of Peter. He passes out of
view almost entirely, so far as the history of the Church is
concerned, after the council recorded in Acts 15, and Paul seems
to eclipse everyone else from that point onward, right to the end
of the Book of the Acts, which is the historical record of the
growth, the development and expansion of the Church. Peter, while
he has not gone by any means, does cease to occupy the place that
he had, once Paul comes in.
I must confess that I have
often been a little puzzled as to why, seeing that there were
twelve Apostles called, appointed and commissioned, only three or
four of them are on record. The rest are hardly mentioned at all
until you get right to the last chapters of the Book of the
Revelation, and then they are only spoken of as the twelve
apostles of the Lamb. They are not in view at all in that great
gap in the New Testament, and you do not know very much of what
is happening to them. You do not know very much, so far as the
record is concerned, of what Peter was doing during all that
time.
Of course, here, when Peter
opens his Letter, he lets us know that he has not been inactive,
and the elect in all these parts of the world have come under his
influence. However, it is strange, is it not, that the history of
the Church, so far as the New Testament is concerned, is very
largely confined to Paul.
But we have to think again
about this matter, for there are very great values indeed in
Peter, and we shall do very well if we give ourselves to a
consideration of these values.
Of course, in the first three
Gospels, Peter always has the first place, and is the most
prominent of the twelve disciples. I have made a list of some
thirty-eight incidents in which Peter figured most prominently. I
am not going to trouble you with all those thirty-eight, but
there they are, and that does not cover the whole ground by any
means. I am simply saying that, right up to the time of that
council in Jerusalem concerning what had happened over the
Gentiles, Peter occupied the foremost place, and it is quite
evident from his Letters that something very deep and very real
was wrought into this man.
I have been tremendously
impressed - I cannot tell you how much - as I have carefully read
through this comparatively short first Letter of Peter with my
eye on one thing, and that one thing is: Where did Peter get
that? How did that come to Peter? Why is Peter saying that? As I
have looked I have found that the Lord Jesus wrought Himself into
this man, that you can trace the Lord Jesus in this man so deeply
and so richly, and I have no hesitation in saying that this first
Letter of his is full of spiritual riches. We shall, of course,
only be able to touch the surface, but let us begin with some
little consideration of the significance and the value of Peter's
ministry.
We shall at once discover how
Peter has come to understand the Lord Jesus. What was Jesus
doing? Peter did not understand in the days when the Lord was
present in the flesh, but He was doing something. The wonderful
thing is this: that while the Lord Jesus was working, teaching,
living and moving right under the eyes of this man Peter, Peter
was not grasping it, was not understanding it, was not seeing it,
but here in his Letter he has it all. That, I think, contains
something we should lay hold of. We can hear, see, have under our
eyes and ears even for years, the Lord Jesus in what He is saying
and what He is doing, and He being really present, and we not
grasp the significance of it all. That is a terrible possibility.
It is one of the problems that we may come up against. It is
almost disconcerting to see Christians who for years have been
receiving all the teaching about the Lord Jesus, before whose
eyes and ears He has been brought over a long period, and then,
when you really come up to practical matters, they do not know
it, they have not got it, it is not in them. Or shall I say: the
Lord Jesus is not there in a way commensurate with all that they
have heard. They have missed it. That is a possibility, and it is
one of the big tragedies in Christianity that it is so, and that,
like Peter, at a certain crisis point, after all they have
received, it can be demonstrated under trial that they are not
really in the good of the teaching. They break down, after all,
in the hour of the ordeal.
But that, of course, leads to
this: How important it is that what we have heard, what we have
seen and what has been brought to us shall be put right into us
by the power of the Holy Spirit. Is that not necessary? That we
have not only been where it is, but it is in us by the Spirit.
And that is the tremendous
change from the Gospels, with all the place and prominence that
Peter held there, into his Letter. Something has happened to the
man, and that is what it is.
That is the first thing about
his significance, his person and his ministry: that he is not
retailing things that he has heard. He is not 'dishing up' (if I
may use the expression) that which has come to him secondhand.
Here is a man who, through a deep crisis and experience, has
himself moved right into the spiritual meaning and value of the
teaching and the work of the Lord Jesus. That is a very important
thing, and it is the first thing about his significance.
The New
Israel
But I ask the question: What
was Jesus doing when He was here? Of course you would answer:
'Well, He was doing this... that... and a whole multitude of
things.' Yes, but what was the comprehensive thing that He was
doing? What was it that embodied all His teaching, all His work
and activities, signs and parables? What was it that comprehended
the Lord Jesus when He was here?
We have answered the question
in the passages which we have just read together: "Therefore
say I unto you, The kingdom of God shall be taken away from you,
and shall be given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof...
Ye are... a holy nation." What was Jesus doing? He was
building, constituting a new Israel, a spiritual, heavenly Israel
in the place of the old one.
Jesus -
The Messiah
Who was Jesus? His name is
Messiah, which is the Hebrew form of the Greek 'Christ'. It is
the same thing in two languages. It might help you, and throw
light on things, and make something quite real if, wherever you
find the name "Christ" in the New Testament, you put
there "Messiah".
Now think what Messiah meant in
the Bible! Both "Messiah" and "Christ" mean
'the Anointed'.
The Old Testament had just one
Person in view. It was moving toward, looking for, longing for,
the day of the appearing of the Messiah. What was He going to do
in their expectation? He was going to save their nation. You
remember the words of Simeon, when he took the babe Jesus in his
arms? He spoke of Him as being for the salvation of God's people,
Israel. Messiah would save the nation. Of course, they had their
own ideas as to what that would mean, for their whole conception
of the coming Messiah was that He would constitute and establish
the Kingdom of Israel. From the beginning of Genesis, right up to
the end of the Old Testament, the one Person in view was the One
who was coming, whom the Jews called the Messiah.
You remember even the woman of
Samaria, when she got to that point of discovering something of
the truth of who He was who was speaking to her, went back to the
city and said: "Come, see a man which told me all things
that ever I did: can this be the Messiah?" (John
4:29). This showed that even in the Samaritans there was this
deep-rooted hope and expectation: the coming Messiah, who would
establish the kingdom of Israel and save it - and much more, of
course.
Well, when He came we know what
they did with their Messiah. We can leave that, but Jesus said:
"The kingdom of God shall be taken away from you, and shall
be given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof", and
Peter says: "To the elect who are sojourners of the
Dispersion... Ye are a holy nation." 'You are the inheritors
of the kingdom of God. You are the ones who have taken over from
Israel. You are the new Israel.' As you know, the Apostle Paul
speaks of "the Israel of God" (Galatians 6:16). This is
a new conception.
Here, then, is the Christ, the
Messiah. Now, I have said that Jesus was building a new Israel.
How was the old Israel built?
You remember that charming
little Book of Ruth? At the end of that romantic story of Divine
sovereignty, when Naomi has come back and Ruth is married to
Boaz, people say to Boaz: "The Lord make the woman that is
come into thine house like Rachel and Leah, which two did build
the house of Israel." The nation was built upon the twelve
sons of Jacob, and was composed of the twelve tribes of Israel.
Now, with Jesus that has passed
and been taken away, and He begins with twelve Apostles,
building, you see, on the same principle. There are twelve
Apostles, of which Peter is the first, and, quite evidently, the
most conspicuous to begin with. Twelve! You know what the number
twelve means? It is the biblical number of heavenly government
and rule - it is the Kingdom number. Well, here you have the
twelve Apostles, and to sum it all up you come at last to the new
Jerusalem, the heavenly city coming down from God out of heaven.
It is a figure, a symbol of the new governmental centre of Jesus
Christ in the age of glory. But the characteristic number of the
city is twelve: twelve thousand furlongs, twelve foundations,
twelve gates, twelve pearls, twelve angels. Twelve is the
dominating number of that symbolic representation of the centre
of government for the coming age.
Peter is the first in this, and
Jesus is very consistent with what is in His mind and in His
principles. Peter, on the day of Pentecost, is using the keys of
the kingdom, and keys are the symbols of authority, of
government, and they are entrusted to Peter to open the Kingdom
on the day of Pentecost. It is all so consistent.
A Holy
Nation
The point is - without being
too detailed - that Jesus was building a new spiritual Israel, a
'holy nation'. You and I belong to that new Israel. We are of
that holy nation - but what kind of nation is this?
If you look now at Peter's
first Letter, not only verse by verse, sentence by sentence, but
almost fragment by fragment, you will see what Peter is doing -
he is transferring the old Israel to the new at every point. That
is why we read those first four verses.
What kind of 'holy nation' is
this? What kind of an Israel are we? Here it is: "Elect...
according to the foreknowledge of God the Father." You know
those were the words that were used so often in the old
dispensation about the old Israel. God chose them, and that is
only another word for the same thing - He elected them,
or, if you like, selected them. They were an elect people,
a chosen people. That is how the old Israel is spoken of even to
this day - 'the chosen people'. But here Peter has followed up
Matthew 21:43, transferred from the old to the new, and says:
'You believers, scattered abroad throughout Pontus, Galatia,
Cappadocia, Asia, Bithynia, over the world, and over the nations,
you are the elect according to the foreknowledge of God the
Father. God has foreseen you before all time. He has had His eye
on you, and His hand on you in foreknowledge before ever you
were.'
Of course, Paul has much to say
about this. "He chose us in him before the foundation of the
world" (Ephesians 1:4). Peter and Paul agreed on this, at
any rate, and understood the same thing, although Peter did say
once about Paul's writings: "Wherein are some things hard to
be understood" (2 Peter 3:16). However, that did not apply
here. This Israel to which we belong is "elect... according
to the foreknowledge of God the Father". That is where the
new Israel begins.
But note! I said 'fragment by
fragment' ... "into sanctification of the Spirit". What
is that? What is "sanctification of the Spirit"? You
can put it this way if you like: 'Sanctification by the Holy
Spirit'. What is that? What is the meaning of sanctification?
Well, you see, sanctification
is just another word for 'separated unto God', and that is the
thing that happens in time... 'elect... through the
sanctification of the Spirit'. The eternal fact, now the
time act of being set apart for God. 'Sanctification'
basically means 'set apart', consecrated, given to God. Put it
how you will. When we use the word 'sanctification' we usually
concentrate our thought upon a condition. That is the working out
of the sanctification, but sanctification itself is a basic thing
that at a point the life is separated unto God, set apart for
God, by the act of the Holy Spirit; made the Lord's - there is a
race which is the Lord's, a nation which is the Lord's, a people
which is the Lord's of which every unit, individual, is the
Lord's.
You get a tremendous amount of
New Testament teaching into that! "Ye are not your own; for
ye were bought with a price" (1 Corinthians 6:20). You
belong to the Lord - not to yourself, or to anyone else. That is
the meaning of sanctification: Set apart, made wholly unto God.
This sanctification matter was
the real battleground of the Old Testament where Israel was
concerned. It does open the door to an immense amount of what
happened in the Old Testament, because the one thing, more than
anything else where Israel was concerned, was to break down their
separation, and in some way bring about a link with what was not
the Lord. This is where all idolatry came in and why all
intermarriage was forbidden. You know it was a battleground. It
was a battleground in Nehemiah, in Ezra, in the Prophets - this
broken-down distinctiveness of this people as belonging wholly to
the Lord, and the work of the evil powers to make them to belong
to someone else. To put it the other way, to take away the
absolute proprietorship and possession of the Lord of this
people. On that issue there is battle all the time.
You are in it every day, are
you not? The real battle is to keep wholly the Lord's and to
refuse to compromise where the Lord's rights are concerned. Peter
recognizes that battle. "Your adversary the devil as a
roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may
devour" (1 Peter 5:8). He is all the time taking away from
the Lord, drawing away, forcing away, enticing away somehow, and
this ground of sanctification in its deepest meaning - being
wholly the Lord's - is a battleground.
"In sanctification of the
Spirit, unto obedience and sprinkling of the blood..." - of
goats, rams, lambs? No! Peter has transferred from that
realm. All that is finished. The old Israel has gone.
"Sprinkling of the blood of Jesus the Messiah." And
when Peter uses language like this, it is amazing what has
happened. When you think that Peter was a Jew, a born, bred,
dyed-in-the-wool Jew, with all that Hebrew background of
tradition and ritual, sacrifices and all that hope and
expectation of the Messiah - and now he says: "The blood of
Jesus the Messiah"! The one thing that Israel could not
accept about their Messiah was that He had died in this way.
'But', you say, 'what about Isaiah 53?' We all know what is in
that, but how does it begin? "Who hath believed our
report?" They did not believe that their Messiah was going
to be the Messiah of Isaiah 53. They could not. Why, this man
hanging on the Cross? No, He could not possibly be the Messiah!
His being crucified was full proof that He was not the Messiah.
Peter, one of that nation, says: "the sprinkling of the
blood of Jesus the Messiah". Is it not impressive? Something
has entered into the heart of this man, he has now seen something
new - the suffering Messiah! Peter goes on in this Letter to say
a lot about the sufferings of Christ. "The sprinkling of the
blood of Jesus the Messiah." That is a transfer, is it not,
from the old to the new? And that is ours!
"Blessed be the God and
Father of our Lord Jesus the Messiah, who according to his great
mercy..." We are going to see, as we go on, some of the
weight of those words. Peter speaks of "his great mercy". Well, Peter knew something about that! He is the first
one of this new Israel, the outstanding one of this holy nation,
and he must know, perhaps more than anyone else, His great mercy.
If you and I are members of
this heavenly Israel, our membership rests upon this: His great
mercy. It will never rest upon anything else - He will see to
that.
How do you feel about that? I
wonder what your exercise has been about that? I believe, you
know, that that is the sort of thing the Lord will do with His
heavenly people. He will make them know that mercy is not just a
word in the Bible, and they will realize that but for the mercy
of God they would be nowhere. That is going to be brought home.
But, mark you, there is the other way of looking at it: If you
are there, where the mercy of God is your only hope and ground,
you are an inheritor of the Kingdom. You are an heir. We come to
that almost immediately. Ah, yes, that is safe ground, and Peter
is there right at the beginning of his Letter.
"According to his great
mercy begat us again unto a living hope by the resurrection of
Jesus the Messiah from the dead." Did I say that Peter had
the whole thing wrought into him? Well, think of him again. Cast
your eye back to that episode down there in the lower hall, when
the accusing finger of the servant maid pointed at him and she
said: 'Thou art one of them', and he denied it: 'I know Him not';
a second time, more vehemently; and a third time, with his
fisherman's old bad language, oaths and curses, he denied it.
Then Peter went out and wept bitterly. It was this that
necessitated the angel sending a special message through Mary:
'Go to his disciples, and Peter, and tell them...' That
man is in despair. He has come out into the dark, he is smashed,
desolated, devastated, hopeless. Perhaps his thoughts at that
time were: 'What a hopeless, hopeless fellow I am!'
"Begat us again unto a
living hope by the resurrection of Jesus the Messiah from the
dead." That man knows what he is talking about! He has been
through it - and he is the first of the heavenly Israel.
Do we know it like this? We go
on: "The resurrection of Jesus the Messiah from the dead,
unto an inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth
not away, reserved in heaven for you." Here is another point
of the great transition. The old Israel had an inheritance, which
was the land of promise, the land of Canaan. It was defiled,
corrupted and faded away. They lost it. It is not theirs now in
fullness, and for many centuries they had little place in it. You
know the Book of Joshua, when their inheritance was divided up,
apportioned and made over to the tribes. There is a lot about it,
but they lost it all. It faded away and was corrupted and
defiled. That is why they went into Babylon, and why they went
under Roman domination. They defiled the land. That is the whole
accusation of the Prophets, is it not? It was lost... "unto
an inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not
away" ...but now not on this earth, subject to all the
changes and influence of a world like this... "reserved in
heaven for you." A wonderful nation, is it not? Well, this
is the kind of nation it is.
"Reserved in heaven for
you, who by the power of God are guarded through faith unto a
salvation ready to be revealed in the last time."
That is only opening the door
to Peter's significance in person and ministry. I think it is
opening it enough - even if it is still only just open - to see
that there is something here of riches, and we are going to agree
with Peter when he says: "For you therefore which believe is
the preciousness..." Of what? Of Christ, yes, but of the new
inheritance, of what He has brought us to, and what He is
bringing us to.
May this have a very practical
application to us! Go out from this place and say to yourself, if
you have never said it before: 'As a member of the new Israel I
inherit in Christ all that the old Israel lost through unbelief,
through disobedience. I am of the Israel of God.'