What Are We to Do Today? (1 Peter 2:11-12)

Peter addresses his readers as those he loves. He has a pastor’s heart and cares for them. He knows that they are facing difficult circumstances in which external and internal opposition will take place. The opposition is unavoidable, but submission to it is. So while the opposition is powerful, there is no necessity for failure. Even in the most difficult of circumstances, Peter wants them to flourish as Christians. He has no idea how long their external circumstances will last, but he knows that what is required of them is holiness. And he wants them to be the best that they can be as God’s people. 

The abstaining

The inward opposition comes from the passions of the flesh. Passions are uncontrolled emotions, the enjoyment of wrong things. The flesh is our sinful tendencies and the number of them is large. By flesh, he has in mind the part of our inner life that wants to sin, that is attracted to sin, and every Christian is affected by the flesh. It can show itself in pride, in indulgence, in priorities, in the promotion of self. A person influenced by the flesh lives for his own sinful glory and sinful pleasure and not for God’s holy glory and holy pleasure.

 

How can we deal with the flesh successfully? Peter mentions three responses or one strategy with three aspects that his readers should have. The first is to recognise who they are – they are sojourners and exiles. They are away from their homeland; they do not belong to the world in which they currently are. At that moment, they lived in the Roman Empire which was, at that time, the most advanced and the most powerful empire that the world had seen. The Roman Empire was the definition of progress and achievement; and if one had the possibility to do so it made sense to live for it. But it was not a godly kingdom. It was an exhibition of the flesh. It lived for the glory of man. Christians did not belong to it; it was not the world that they wanted. Their homeland was the kingdom of God, the eternal kingdom of Jesus Christ, the kingdom they entered at conversion and which they were waiting to come in its fullness when he returned.

 

The second aspect is to recognise the importance of abstaining. I suppose Peter could have used the word ‘avoid’ rather than ‘abstain’. Yet avoidance could imply no sense of difficulty whereas abstaining indicates opposing a current pressure to participate. For example, a person could easily avoid a big cake if the shopping arcade was full of alternatives. But what if the whole arcade was one big cake shop? It is not easy to avoid a cake then, especially when it is open twenty-four hours a day and the person is inside the arcade for all that time, and there is something in him that loves cake. That is what the flesh is like. It is constant, and the required response is constant abstaining from what it offers. There will be no let up, and the attraction of the flesh will be exaggerated by the devil who will aim to convince us to participate. We can say that a basic part of the Christian calling is the ongoing response of no to the flesh.

 

The third aspect is to recognise what the flesh is doing – it is waging war against our souls. Why does someone wage a wrong war? Usually, it is to gain the upper hand, to grab more territory, to dominate the opponent. That is what the flesh wants to achieve, and it will use powerful weapons in the process. Its most powerful weapons are temptations to sin and lies about the outcome. It will never suggest that its temptations are harmful to our souls, but they all are.

 

Surely, it is straightforward to see the wisdom of the apostle’s instruction. Of course, we know that he writes from personal experience of ignoring the effects of the flesh in his own life. We cannot imagine Peter forgetting what happened to him when he listened to the call of the flesh when he denied the Lord. That denial had been preceded by him forgetting that he had been called into another kingdom, caused him to think that he was better than the other disciples, led him to disobey his Master when he told him to watch and pray, and resulted in the awful mess of his denial. 

 

Peter here is asking his readers to engage in a certain way of life. He asks them if the things their souls are focussing on and enjoying will be available for them to consider in their heavenly homeland. If not, why consider them in the place of exile?

 

The accusation

At that time, it was inevitable that the Christians would be accused of being evil. In fact, the more devoted they were as Christians, the more likely it was that they would be accused of evil. The reason for that was that they were different from anything else that existed in the world. 

 

How are we to regard the Christian life? We could have it as the top level and below it we could have a range of other levels ranging from someone who is kind to his neighbours, then down to someone who works hard at his work, then down to someone who engages in some wrong actions, and down to someone who engages in a wide range of wrong actions. That is a wrong way to look at it. The Christian lifestyle is not merely better than all others, it is not even in the same area. It comes from elsewhere, it is empowered from elsewhere, it lives for another world.

 

So what do Christians do when the world disapproves of them, which is a very real question today? They must keep their conduct honourable, which means that their conduct cannot descend to the standards of the world, even its religious standards. What is honourable conduct? Peter says it is good deeds, but he says more; he says that honourable conduct is visible good deeds that the Gentiles see day after day after day. Good deeds are actions of obedience to the commandments of God.

 

The acclamation (v. 12)

What is the point of engaging in such good deeds so that the Gentiles will see them? There are two possible answers from the verse. One is that unconverted Gentiles will be so affected by the upright lives of Christians that they will be led to conversion in a day of God’s visitation. The difficulty of that interpretation is that it suggests that all the Gentiles who see the good deeds will be converted, and I don’t think that is what the verse says. So the reason is that the Gentiles who see their good deeds will glorify God on the Day of Judgement, or as Peter calls it, the day of visitation.

 

It is always possible that God will use the good witness of his people to challenge the lives of those who know them, and that such will become believers. But here Peter is dealing with the false accusation of evil made against believers. When will that false accusation be dealt with? The obvious answer seems to be the Day of Judgement. Those who made the accusations will be forced to admit that the honourable lives of those they despised had been changed by the grace of God and they will acknowledge his goodness to his people.