1 Peter 3:6 (b) — Displaced Fear

Picture: Small boy playing on the edge of a mud creek.

You are her daughters if you do what is right and do not give way to fear.

As a kid, one of my favorite things to do was to play in the dirt. If there was water nearby, that was even better. When I was about six years old, there was a small creek that ran through the woods at the end of the road by our house. As an adult, I wouldn’t look twice at this “creek.” It was just a trickle of ditch water that meandered away from the road under the trees. As a kid, though, it was a world unto itself. 

In the mind of a six-year-old boy, the woods and the creek took on mythic dimensions. Lit only by the soft green light of the sun filtering through the trees, shadows added another dimension of mystery. Sticks, rocks, and mud all transformed from the mundane into magical building materials. Within the space of an eye blink (time did not exist in this place), the trickle of water had transformed into a lake behind a large dam. There were roads, causeways, canals, and rivers. It was a peaceful and idyllic miniature world — until disaster struck!

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1 Peter 2:24 (b) — Signpost

Picture: Rustic sign pointing to the "Next Step."

… so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness …

Today’s passage speaks to a theme that has been on my heart quite strongly for the past year or so. What does it mean to “die to sins and live for righteousness?” If we want to follow Peter’s guidance, what do we do? Moreover, if we want our church body to follow Peter’s teaching here, what do we do? 

If we are to die to our sin, we have to be aware that we are sinning. If we are to live for righteousness, we need to have some concept of what that means. Is it possible for us to do either without being in God’s Word every day? 

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1 Peter 2:24 (a) — Innocence Found

Picture: An old teddy bear sits alongside an abandon railroad track.

“He himself bore our sins” in his body on the cross…

Experimenting is an age-old way of testing something to see if it is true. For example, when somebody says, “Try this, you’ll like it!” you might believe them or you might not. When I was twelve, my uncle handed me an oyster and gave me that line. It tasted terrible! “Try it again,” he said. I did. It didn’t taste any better the second time. So he took the oyster, tried it, and spit it out. “No wonder,” he said, “it’s rotten!” So I still don’t know if I like oysters or not, but I do know that I don’t like rotten ones. 

There is another kind of experiment that can be helpful. It is called a thought experiment. In this kind of experiment, we imagine a situation and then ask ourselves questions about what we see. I think it might be helpful to do an experiment like this to help understand today’s passage. 

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1 Peter 2:19 — Pain Gauge

Picture: Detail of old woodcut depicting hell.

For it is commendable if someone bears up under the pain of unjust suffering because they are conscious of God. 

Peter is going to talk about “unjust suffering” for a while. As he explores this theme, he segues into the topic of wives submitting to their husbands. I’m not saying that there is a connection here, but I suspect that the wives who are reading this might have some special insights on this passage. Anyway, for now, he is content to focus on the general topic of unjust suffering. 

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1 Peter 2:15 — Doing Good

Picture: two hands holding a candle against a black background.

For it is God’s will that by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish people.

There are some words in the ancient texts that give translators trouble. If you look in the NIV it might say something different than the King James Version. Sometimes out of thirty or more English translations you might find as many as ten different English equivalents. “Ignorance” is not one of those troublesome words. 

Except for one or two exceptions, every English translation uses the word “ignorant” to express the Greek, “agnōsia.” In English, the word “ignorant” is often confused with “stupid.” These are two very different words. The word “ignorant” means a lack of knowledge. The cure to ignorance is knowledge. 

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1 Peter 2:13 (a) — The Meaning of Submit

Picture of man's silhouette kneeling before the cross.

Submit

The word “triggered” has taken on new meaning in the English lexicon. It has always been around, of course, and used in the practical sense of activating something with a trigger. During the war, if a booby trap was set off you would say it had been “triggered.” These days the word is often used to describe a strong adverse emotional reaction to something. For example, “The student in the front row was triggered when the instructor mentioned that they had voted for the president.” 

Words that set off an emotional reaction are “trigger words.” One of the oldest trigger words in the English language is the word, “submit.” 

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