Balance
Chapter 6
BALANCE
The late Duke of Windsor, who had for a short period been King Edward VIII, died in Paris in May 1972. That night a very interesting documentary was shown on British television. It included extracts from earlier films in which he was shown being questioned about his upbringing, his brief reign and his abdication.
Looking back to his boyhood he said, ‘My father [King George V] was a strict disciplinarian. Sometimes when I had done something wrong, he would admonish me saying “My dear boy, you must always remember who you are”.’ If only he would remember that he was a royal prince destined for the throne, he would behave accordingly and not misbehave.
So who are we? That is the question. I doubt if there is any New Testament text which gives a more varied and balanced account of what it means to be a disciple than 1 Peter 2:1–17:
Therefore, rid yourselves of all malice and all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander of every kind. Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation, now that you have tasted that the Lord is good.
As you come to him, the living Stone – rejected by human beings but chosen by God and precious to him – you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. For in Scripture it says:
‘See, I lay a stone in Zion,
a chosen and precious cornerstone,
and the one who trusts in him
will never be put to shame.’
Now to you who believe, this stone is precious. But to those who do not believe,
‘The stone the builders rejected
has become the cornerstone,’
and,
‘A stone that causes people to stumble
and a rock that makes them fall.’
They stumble because they disobey the message – which is also what they were destined for.
But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.
Dear friends, I urge you, as foreigners and exiles, to abstain from sinful desires, which war against your soul. Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.
Submit yourselves for the Lord’s sake to every human authority: whether to the emperor, as the supreme authority, or to governors, who are sent by him to punish those who do wrong, and to commend those who do right. For it is God’s will that by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of the foolish. Live as free people, but do not use your freedom as a cover-up for evil; live as God’s slaves. Show proper respect to everyone: Love your fellow-believers, fear God, honour the emperor.
In a series of varied metaphors the apostle illustrates who we are. Each carries with it a corresponding obligation. Together they might be called Christianity according to Peter.
BABIES
The reason why Peter likens his readers to newborn babies is that they have been born again (1 Peter 1:23). What, then, is the new birth? It is a mistake to identify this with what happens when we are baptized as members of the church. To be sure, baptism is the sacrament of the new birth. That is, it is the outward and visible dramatization of it. But we must not confuse the symbol with the reality, or the sign with the thing signified.
No, the new birth is a deep, inward, radical change, brought about by the Holy Spirit in our human personality by which we receive a new heart and a new life and become a new creation. Furthermore, as Jesus insisted in his conversation with Nicodemus, it is indispensable. ‘You must be born again,’ he said (John 3:7).
The point is that we do not emerge from the new birth with the understanding and character of a mature Christian, still less with the fully grown wings of an angel (!) but rather ‘like newborn babies’ – weak, immature, vulnerable and needing above all to grow. This is why the New Testament speaks of our need to grow in knowledge, holiness, faith, love and hope. So Peter writes here that his readers must ‘grow up’ in their salvation (verse 2). The matching truth is that they are to rid themselves of ‘all malice and all deceit, hypocrisy, envy and slander of every kind’ (verse 1), for (he implies) these things are babyish. So we are to grow out of them and grow into Christlikeness.
But how are we to grow? Staying with the picture of newborn babies, we note Peter’s reference in verse 2 to ‘pure spiritual milk’: ‘Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation.’
In other words, just as the secret of the healthy growth of a child is the regularity of a right diet, so daily disciplined feeding is the major condition of spiritual growth.
What then is the milk which we are to consume if we are to grow into Christian maturity? According to the TNIV it is ‘pure spiritual milk’. The Greek adjective is logikos. This could mean ‘metaphysical’ as opposed to literal cow’s milk, or ‘rational’ meaning food for the mind as for the body, or ‘the milk of the word’, as in 1:23. Certainly God’s word is as indispensable to our spiritual growth as maternal milk is to a baby’s growth. ‘Crave it,’ Peter urges, ‘now that you have tasted that the Lord is good’ (verse 3). E. G. Selwyn in his commentary 1 suggests that Peter has in mind ‘the ardour of a suckled child’. You have had a taste, Peter seems to be saying, now get a thirst.
There is a great need for daily discipline in the Christian life. William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury during the Second World War, said to a large crowd of young people:
The loyalty of Christian youth must be first and foremost to Christ himself. Nothing can take the place of the daily time of intimate companionship with the Lord...make time for it somehow and secure that it is real.
STONES
The second picture which Peter develops is that of living stones (verses 4–8). He turns from the world of biology (birth and growth) to the world of architecture (stones and buildings). We have been in a maternity ward watching a new baby thirsting for its milk; we now move outside and watch a building under construction. It is a stone building and we have no difficulty recognizing it as a church – not the sort of church building we know today but the church of the living God, the people of God. Since the stones in the building are people, Peter calls them ‘living stones’.
Let’s pause a moment and rejoice that all over the world God is building his church. Other faiths (ancient and modern) may experience a resurgence, secularism may make inroads into the church of the West, and hostile groups and governments may persecute the church and drive it underground. But the church continues to grow.
In fact nothing can destroy God’s church. Jesus promised that the ‘gates of death will not overcome it’ (Matthew 16:18). That is, the church has an eternal destiny. It is indestructible. Stone by stone the building grows until one day the coping stone will be put in place and the construction is complete.
How then do we join the church? We join the visible, outward expression of the church by baptism. But how do we become members of the people of God? See verse 4: ‘Come to him’, to that living Stone, i.e. Jesus Christ, ‘rejected by human beings’ but in God’s sight ‘precious’ and be built into a spiritual house. In verses 6–8 Peter gathers together a series of Old Testament texts (from Jeremiah and the Psalms) on the subject of rocks and stones. It is significant that he then applies them to Christ and not to himself. For Peter is not the rock on which we are to build our lives: Christ is the Living Stone rejected by Israel but chosen by God and precious to him.
What is the implication of all this? It is surely that we belong to one another. If babies need milk in order to grow, stones need mortar in order to stick to one another. Look in your imagination at the building. Each stone is cemented in with other stones and so is part of the building. No stone is suspended in mid-air. Every stone belongs to the building and cannot be dislodged from it.
Let’s pause a moment and reflect, applying Peter’s teaching to ourselves. What does Jesus Christ mean to us? Is he a stumbling-stone against whom we scrape our shins and fall? Or is he the foundation stone on which we are building our lives?
Some years ago I had the opportunity of meeting and speaking with Dr Hobart Mowrer,2 Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Illinois. He was well known in his day. He was not a Christian, he told me, and had had a lover’s quarrel with the church. Why? Because, he said, the church had failed him as a young man and continued to fail his patients today. And he added: ‘The church has never learned the secret of community.’ This was his answer. It is one of the most damning criticisms of the church I have ever heard. For the church is community, living stones in the building of God.
We need to recapture a vision of the church as fellowship, as living stones in the building of God. Moreover, there is a great need for better quality mortar.
PRIESTS
So far Peter has likened us to newborn babies with the duty to grow up, and to living stones with the duty to love and support one another. Now he comes to his third picture as he likens us to holy priests with the duty to worship God.
This metaphor comes as a surprise, even a shock, to many Christians. Yet we cannot avoid it. God has made us, Peter writes, both ‘a holy priesthood’ (verse 5) and ‘a royal priesthood’ (verse 9). What on earth did the apostle mean?
In Old Testament days the Israelite priests enjoyed two exclusive privileges. First they enjoyed access to God. Herod’s temple was surrounded by the court of the priests, from which the lay people were rigorously excluded. Only the priests were allowed into the temple itself, while only the high priest could enter the holy of holies or inner sanctuary, and then only on the day of atonement. To underline this, the law prescribed the death penalty to all intruders. This symbolized that access to God was restricted to the priesthood and denied to the lay people.
The second privilege enjoyed by the priests was the offering of sacrifices to God. The lay people brought their sacrifices and laid their hands on the head of their victim, both to identify themselves with it and symbolically to transfer their guilt to it. But only the priests were allowed to kill the sacrifices, to perform the ritual and sprinkle the blood.
In Old Testament times then, access and sacrifice were the two privileges which were strictly reserved for the priesthood.
But now in and through Jesus Christ this distinction between priest and people has been abolished. The privileges which were previously limited to the priests are now shared by all, for all are priests. The whole church is a priesthood. Through Christ all of us enjoy access to God (we have boldness to enter into the holy presence of God, Hebrews 10:19–22). Through Christ all of us offer to God the spiritual sacrifices of our worship. This is ‘the priesthood of all believers’ which the Reformers recovered at the Reformation.
Of course some Christians are still called to be pastors, and in the Anglican church some pastors are called ‘priests’. This is not because we have forgotten our Reformation heritage and claim a priestly role denied the laity. It is rather because the English word ‘priest’ (as any dictionary will tell us) is a contraction of the word ‘presbyter’ meaning ‘elder’ and has no priestly connotation. This is why Anglicans in the seventeenth century retained the word ‘priest’ in the Book of Common Prayer. But it can be confusing and I admire the wisdom of the leaders of the Church of South India and the Church of Pakistan in naming their three orders of ministry ‘bishops, presbyters and deacons’.
Why then are Christian disciples called ‘a holy priesthood’? Peter tells us in verse 5:
You are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.
Thus we are holy priests called to worship God. But is that all? Is the church to be a kind of spiritual ghetto? Are we engrossed in our own interior life? Are our only activities personal growth (as babies), fellowship (like stones in a building) and worship (offering God the spiritual sacrifices of our praise)? What about the lost and lonely world outside? Don’t we care about it?
GOD’S PEOPLE
These questions lead us to verses 9 and 10 in which Peter develops a fourth metaphor: ‘But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession.’
Here the apostle likens the church to a nation or people, in fact, to God’s own people or possession. What is fascinating about these expressions is where Peter got them from. He did not invent them but found them in Exodus 19:5–6, where God said to Israel newly redeemed from Egypt that if they kept his covenant by obeying his commandments, they would be his treasured possession (sĕgullâ), his nation out of all the nations of the earth, a holy nation.
Here in this letter, with great audacity given him by the Holy Spirit, Peter lifts these words out of Exodus where they applied to Israel and reapplies them to the Christian community. You followers of Jesus, he is saying to us today, are what Israel used to be – ‘a holy nation’, though now an international one.
But why did God choose Israel? And why has he chosen us?
The answer is not out of favouritism, but in order to be his witnesses; not that we might enjoy a monopoly of the gospel, but that we might declare ‘the praises (or ‘excellencies’ or ‘mighty deeds’) of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light’.
For at one time, Peter continues, quoting from the book of Hosea:
you were not a people, but now you are God’s people;
you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy;
you were in darkness, but now you are in his wonderful light.
Now then, we cannot possibly keep these blessings to ourselves!
FOREIGNERS
So far Peter has likened us –
Peter still has two more pictures, and with verse 11 he introduces his fifth: ‘Dear friends, I urge you, as foreigners and exiles, to abstain from sinful desires, which war against your soul.’ The Greek words are interesting. The word for ‘foreigners’ indicates people who have no rights where they live, while ‘exiles’ are those who have no home.
Why did Peter describe his readers by these words? Partly because this is what they were literally. They were scattered throughout the Roman Empire. They belonged to what was known as the ‘diaspora’ (1:1), in particular through- out the five provinces of Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynia (modern Turkey). But in addition this symbolized their spiritual condition. Now that they had been born again into the kingdom of God, they had become to some degree ‘foreigners and exiles on earth’. Therefore they were now citizens of two countries. And because their primary citizenship was heavenly, they were called to holiness.
This concept of a holy and heavenly ‘citizenship’ is a dangerous truth, for it can easily be distorted. Indeed it often has been misused and become an excuse to opt out of our earthly responsibilities. Karl Marx has not always been mistaken in his assertion that religion is ‘the opium of the people’ – drugging them to acquiesce in the injustices of the status quo while promising them justice in the world to come.
But Peter is careful to avoid this travesty of the truth. For he moves straight from his reference to our pilgrim status to our citizenship duties on earth. More of this anon.
SERVANTS
Peter’s sixth picture shows disciples as conscientious servants of God (verses 12–17). Peter urges his readers to live such good lives among the pagans that they may see their good deeds, to submit to the secular authorities, to do good and so silence the ignorant talk of the foolish; to live as free people without misusing their freedom; but to live as God’s slaves and to show proper respect to everyone: fellow-believers, God and the authorities.
Nevertheless, in spite of all these earthly duties as
conscientious citizens,
submitting to authorities
silencing criticism
doing good
respecting everybody
This fact (our heavenly citizenship) profoundly challenges our attitudes: to money and possessions, as we see life as a pilgrimage between two moments of nakedness; to tragedy and suffering, as we see them in the perspective of eternity; and especially our attitude to temptation and sin.
Verse 11 draws a deliberate contrast between ‘sinful desires’ and ‘soul’. Our soul is on its way to God. So we should abstain from everything which might hinder its progress, and must live a holy life in preparation for the holy presence of God in heaven.
BALANCE
My readers may well have been wondering why I have entitled this chapter with the one word ‘Balance’. The reason should now become clear. We have followed Peter in the six metaphors which go to make up the portrait he paints of the disciple. Here they are again:
This is a beautifully comprehensive and balanced portrait. These six duties seem to resolve themselves into three couplets, each of which contains a balance.
We are called to both individual discipleship and corporate fellowship...worship and work...and pilgrimage and citizenship.
First, we are called to both individual discipleship and corporate fellowship. Babies, although born into a family, have their own identity. Even twins are born one by one! But the primary function of the stones used in building is to be part of something else. They have surrendered their individuality to the building. Their significance is not in themselves but in the whole. So we need to emphasize both our individual and our corporate responsibilities.
Secondly, we are called to both worship and work. As a priesthood we worship God. As God’s own people we witness to the world. The church is a worshipping, witnessing community.
Thirdly, we are called to both pilgrimage and citizenship.
In each couplet we are called to balance, and not to emphasize either at the expense of the other. Thus we are both individual disciples and church members, both worshippers and witnesses, both pilgrims and citizens.
Nearly all our failures stem from the ease with which we forget our comprehensive identity as disciples. Our Heavenly Father is constantly saying to us what King George V kept saying to the Prince of Wales, ‘My dear child, you must always remember who you are, for if you remember your identity you would behave accordingly.’