The Trinity Saves

(1 Peter 1.1-12)

Jason Procopio

First of all I just want to thank everyone who’s been praying for me, I had a bike accident almost three weeks ago that left me with three broken ribs and aneurisms in my spleen. They almost had to take the spleen out—it was touch and go, that’s why they kept me in the hospital for so long—but in the end they operated and managed to stop the bleeding. So I’m still hurting, and I can’t do much, but I’m here. (And just to let you know, I’ll be keeping a very good distance from everyone today—Covid is a slightly more seriously threat to me during recovery, since a strong cough could cause my spleen to rupture. So if I stay away, it’s nothing personal; it’s doctor’s orders.)

But I really appreciate all of your prayers and support, and I’m really happy to be able to be here with you today. It’s been a long time.

Church took on a weird life during the confinement, as it did for every aspect of life. So much of the way we thought about ourselves as a church was wrapped up in the faces of other people—and that’s not wrong. It’s right that a church’s life should be in part defined by the people in that church. It’s right that we should miss one another. It’s right that we should feel a little lost when we can’t see each other.

But in our sense of loss, I’m afraid it became all too easy to forget what that life was all about in the first place. We knew it wasn’t this—this isolation from other believers, this living alone in our homes or apartments for weeks on end. We knew it wasn’t that…but it may have been easy, during this time, to have focused so hard on what church isn’t that we forget what it is. 

The other strange reality we need to face is that we don’t know what the future holds. We know the virus is on the rise again, and so even if we’re thrilled to be back here, we don’t know how long we’ll get to stay here. We don’t know how long this place will remain open to us, if we’ll have to go back into confinement… We just have no idea what the future holds.

So the question we have to ask ourselves is, in this context of an uncertain present and an uncertain future, what is the church meant to be? It can’t be just the sum total of our activities, or the time we spend together, or even the people we love. If our activities are pared down, and the time we spend together is now drastically limited, and we don’t get to see the people we love as often as we’d like…what are we? What else is left? What makes the church the church in a time like this?

That is why today we are going to begin digging deep into the letters of Peter. I’ve been thinking of it as “Connexion Reboot”—after the dizzy spell that the first confinement was, we need to be firmly anchored in who we are, and what we are meant to do here. And Peter does a masterful job of telling us these things in his letters. So we’re going to be here for the next few months. (I promise we won’t take as long as we did with Luke, we’re talking eight chapters in total. But those chapters are very rich.)

Before we get into Peter’s first letter, let’s get situated. V. 1 of chapter 1 reads:  

Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, To those who are elect exiles of the Dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia...

So if you’re new to this, this can look a little strange. Back in Peter’s day they had the habit of putting the “Love, so-and-so” at the beginning of the letter, before the “Dear so-and-so.” It makes sense—back then there was no postal service, no return address written on an envelope. Letters were brought by courier or someone who volunteered to bring it. So when the letter was read aloud to a group of people (as it would have been here), they’d want to be clear on who had written the letter.

So we see that this letter was written by “Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ.” Peter was one of Jesus’s closest disciples during his ministry. This is the guy we all identify with. He was well-meaning but impulsive, wanting to do well but never quite grasping the nature of what needed to happen at any given time. He was the one who suggested they build tents for Elijah and Moses during the transfiguration. He was the one who cut off a guard’s ear at Jesus’s arrest. He was the one who walked out on the water with Jesus. And he was the one who denied him three times, before being forgiven by Christ and sent out (the word “apostle” means “sent”) to proclaim the good news of the gospel and establish the church.

Now to whom is he writing? V. 1 again: 

Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, To those who are elect exiles of the Dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia...

Peter is writing to Christians “of the Dispersion”. The term “dispersion” in the Bible is typically used to describe the scattering of Jews throughout the world. But the term is used in a broader way here, since elsewhere in his letter Peter makes it fairly clear that he’s writing to primarily non-Jewish (Gentile) churches. He’s writing to churches in cities which are all found in what is modern-day Turkey. These cities were all quite diverse, but heavily influenced by Greco-Roman culture and still under Roman control. So there would have been some Jews among them, but Peter makes it clear later on that his primary focus in his letter is Gentiles.

Now, why is he writing? Peter frequently mentions persecution in his letter: this was probably the persecution of Christians under the Emperor Nero. Christians were persecuted by Nero because Roman culture was profoundly polytheistic—there were many possible gods you could choose from—but also heavily under the thumb of the emperor. And here come these Christians who say there is only one God, and that their principle allegiance is to him. Christian belief was a threat to not only Roman culture and worship, but to Roman power itself.

So essentially—and we’ll see this many times in the coming weeks—Peter is writing to Christians who are finding themselves increasingly at odds with the pagan culture around them, less and less at home in a world which does not recognize their God.

And honestly—what could be more timely than that?

So that’s the context—that’s what’s prompting Peter to write this letter. Since we don’t have a lot of time left, we’re going to go easy this morning and only look at the first two verses of the letter. (Don’t worry, we won’t go two verses at a time throughout the whole letter.) But these first two verses are absolutely packed. 

We’re going to see, very simply, who we are; who God is; and how and why he has saved us.

God Naturalizes (v. 1a)

Let’s start again at v. 1. In his introduction to this letter, Peter says very clearly some important things about whom he is speaking to—particularly about how he sees them, and how they should see themselves.

Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, To those who are elect exiles of the Dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia...

So there are two words you want to hang your hat on in this verse, and those words are “elect exiles.”

The word “exiles” here isn’t literal, like in the Old Testament. Literally it means “sojourners,” or “temporary residents.” If you are an “exile”, in Peter’s meaning, you are there, wherever you are, but you don’t belong there. You belong somewhere else.

Anyone who is an expat understands what this feels like. You grow up in one country, you inherit the customs and language and ways of thinking of your home country. There are things about you which are part of you, but which don’t come from you—they come from outside you, from the culture in which you were raised. 

And then you move to a different country—let’s say, for a temporary assignment for your job. You know you’re not going to spend the rest of your life here, you’re going to be returning home eventually. So you’re not going to try and integrate into the culture—there’s no point, you’ll be gone in a few months. Instead, you’re just there, surrounded by this foreign place, with a different language, a different culture, different ways of thinking. And at least for a while you feel like a fish out of water: you’re here, but you’ve still got one foot in your home country. The customs and ways of thinking, the food and the language, are discernible and visible, but you don’t understand them. It doesn’t feel like home. And you don’t want it to feel like home, because you know you’re going back to your real home very soon.

Now the analogy isn’t perfect, because most of us love to travel, and love to experience different cultures. But how would we feel if the culture in which we found ourselves was actively hostile toward everything we are as people—everything we hold dear, every conviction, and every love?

That’s what it’s like to be an exile, taking the word the way Peter is using it. It’s being somewhere, but still belonging to somewhere else.

Now what’s interesting is that Peter is addressing people in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynia. And the people to whom he’s speaking, we have every reason to believe, come from those places. They’re Galatians, they’re Bithynians, they’re Cappadocians. So he’s not speaking to foreigners who have been exiled there, but to natives. 

If that’s the case, why does he call them exiles?

He calls them exiles because he knows something has happened in them to fundamentally change their identity. Something has happened to them which has so radically transformed everything about them that they are no longer truly Galatians or Bithynians or Cappadocians at all. That’s where they’re from, but they belong to another country. 

And I don’t think I’m spoiling anything by saying that their new country, their adopted country, is not a country on this earth at all, but rather the kingdom of God. God has taken these people, citizens of their earthly country, and he has effectively naturalized them into his world, making them citizens of heaven. They are living in their earthly countries, but they belong to a different place altogether. Something happened in them to shift them from one homeland to another.

The question is, what changed them?

God Elects (v. 1b)

And that is where the word “elect” comes in. This is a very loaded word in the Bible, so I’m going to pack a lot of information into a very short time.

The Bible says very clearly that human beings are born with a sinful nature. That means that we are all naturally inclined to sin—to rebel against God—and that is exactly what we do. That’s all we do if left on our own, even if we don’t realize it. Paul says in Ephesians 2.1 that we are all spiritually dead: that is, we have no natural inclination towards the life that is in God alone. So there is no possible way any of us would choose God by ourselves: dead people can’t choose to come alive.

But it’s worse than that: dead people can only choose dead things, but we do choose those dead things—our death is an active death. We live our lives and we want what we want, and the things we naturally want have nothing to do with the life of God, have nothing to do with the glory of God. So it’s not just that we’re dead—it’s that we love our death. We love the sin that is killing us. 

And our love of sin is the root of our problem. God is holy and perfect and good, and sin is an absolute horror to him—it goes against everything he is and everything he created us for. So when we love sin, that means we hate God, because by definition sin is everything God isn’t. I hope you can see that sin is much more than simply “doing bad things”; it is not living for God’s glory, in our thoughts, actions and attitudes. And because of our sin, every one of us deserves and sits under God’s wrath against our sin.

And that’s where we remain…unless God himself does something to change it. He’s the only one who could change it—and in his grace, he does.

In his own sovereign will, for no reason that any one of us will ever discern, God chooses to save his children. Ephesians 1.4 says that the Father chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world. Before the world was formed, before he did anything else on this earth, God chose us. 

We’ll get into this a little more in a minute, but just think about this. If you are a Christian—if you have faith in Christ; if you have placed your faith in Christ for your salvation—then that is because before God created the world, he looked across time and said, “I choose to save ________.” If one day you chose to follow Christ, it is only because an eternity ago God chose to save you. And not in a general way: YOU. Specifically, you. He chose you.

Peter is writing to “exiles”, people who are living in one world but belong to another, and who are exiles because God chose to make them citizens of his kingdom. These people have been adopted by a new country, by a new Father, who reached across time and said, “I choose to adopt you. Now as you live in this world for a short time, remember where you really belong. Remember your true home.”

The result of this, we’ll see more and more as the weeks go by. Peter will show us that to live as elect exiles means being increasingly at odds with the world around us. Not in a confrontational way—we’re not going to go out in the street and start demanding people live like us. But as we grow in our faith, we’ll slowly but steadily see our loves changing. We’ll look at the world around us, and the things people love and the way they live their lives and the things they pursue…and we’ll find that we’re no longer motivated by the same things. We no longer have the same foundational convictions, and we no longer have the same objectives.

And all of this means that the way we respond to the trials we will face living in this foreign land will be very particular and specific to our true home: the kingdom of God.

But that’s for next week. For now, we are elect exiles, living in a world not our own through the sovereign choice of God. 

After establishing this, Peter goes further into God’s involvement in our lives and salvation, and he does it by displaying the work of the Trinity. (You may not be able to see it, but I am beyond excited to be in these two verses this morning.)

The Trinity Saves (v. 2)

So before we get into it, let’s read it again.  

Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, 

To those who are elect exiles of the Dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia, 2 according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, in the sanctification of the Spirit, for obedience to Jesus Christ and for sprinkling with his blood: 

May grace and peace be multiplied to you. 

So Peter mentions a few things that God does for Christians here, and we’ll see them all, but it’s important to note that his list isn’t chronological. He’s not talking about what’s called the “order of salvation” (ordo salutis). There are many things that happen in and for our salvation, and Peter’s hitting some of the highlights.

His point isn’t to give his readers an exhaustive summary of what it is to be saved, but rather to show that salvation is the work of the God who is Three-in-One. That’s why I called this last point “The Trinity Saves”, rather than just “God Saves,” like in the first two. I just as easily could have called the first points “The Trinity Naturalizes,” and “The Trinity Elects,” because that is Peter’s point. He wants us to clearly see that our salvation doesn’t come through only the work of the Father, or the Son, or the Spirit, but all three.

Now if you’re new to the Christian faith and you have no idea what I’m talking about, here’s what I mean by the Trinity (and I’m sorry, it may not be any clearer after I’m done than it does right now). The Bible teaches that there is one true God, who created and sustains all things, and that this one true God exists eternally in three distinct persons: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. In Christianity we call these three persons of God “the Trinity”. Each member of the Trinity is distinct from the others—the Father isn’t the Son, the Son isn’t the Spirit, the Spirit isn’t the Son or the Father. But at the same time, each member of the Trinity is God—the Father is God, the Son is God, the Spirit is God.

People have tried for centuries to explain how this is possible—they’ve come up with illustrations and symbols to help us imagine how God could be three in one. Some of them are helpful, most of them are even more confusing than the simple explanation I just give. None of them gets it quite right.

If you’re confused, that’s okay—all of us are. The nature of God is, by definition, mysterious—above what we as human beings can comprehend. We all have had the experience of accepting certain things we don’t understand (the theory of relativity; or guys, if you’re married, how this beautiful woman could possibly want to be with me): this is one of those things we accept on faith.

But it’s important that we know that this is what the Bible teaches, because we want to know God as accurately as possible, even if we don’t understand everything about him. And verses like v. 2 help us enormously. Peter tells us, first of all, that his readers are elect exiles…according to the foreknowledge of God the Father.

Now, many people have used this as a way to get out of what I said earlier about God electing us. And I understand why they do—it’s a troublesome idea that God would choose to save some but not others. So people say that because God knows all things, he foreknew who would choose him, and he chose those people. The problem is that a) that doesn’t make any logical sense; if God’s only saving those who would have chosen to follow him on their own, he’s not choosing anything, but merely responding to our choice; and b) the Bible clearly tells us the opposite. We saw this earlier—we were dead in our sins, and unable to choose God on our own, and he chose us in him before the foundation of the world.

So that’s not what Peter means when he talks about the foreknowledge of the Father—he’s not merely saying that God knew ahead of time what we would do. When the Bible speaks of knowing someone, it is nearly always referring to an intimate relationship—that is, it is not just about information. When God knows his people, that means he sets his affections on them. It means he pours his love into them. It means he sets them apart to be his own. 

The foreknowledge of the Father is this type of knowledge. Before the world existed, before any of his children were here, the Father knew us. He set his affections on us. And because he loved us, he chose to save us.

I’ve given this illustration before, but it’s the best I can do. My wife and I waited nine years before we had our son, and another six before we had our daughter. In both cases, our waiting wasn’t entirely intentional; it took a long time to have both of our kids. So before they got here, we had been praying for them, and thinking of them, and dreaming of them, for a long time. And for both of my kids, I had the same experience. When they finally came out, and I looked at their little faces for the first time, my first thought was, I know you. I’d just seen them for the first time, but I knew them; and I knew them because they were mine.

The Father’s foreknowledge is that kind of foreknowledge. An eternity before he created us, he set his love and affection on every one of his children, and because his heart was set on us, he chose to save us.

Secondly, we are elect exiles…in the sanctification of the Holy Spirit. 

The Holy Spirit does a lot of things in us. He gives us faith to believe; he opens our eyes to see the truth in the Word of God; he gives us power for the life he calls us to live. And one of the most fundamental things that he does is that he sanctifies us. That is, he changes us, from the inside out, so that we might be like Jesus Christ. Not just live like Jesus Christ, but be like Jesus Christ.

God described this sanctification through the prophet Ezekiel, by saying he would remove from our flesh the heart of stone, and give us a heart of flesh (Ezekiel 36.26-27). He’s talking about a complete rewiring of everything we are. When we become citizens of heaven, we begin to take on the characteristics of heaven.

It’s a progressive thing—it doesn’t happen all at once—but it does happen: we grow into it. I grew up in the United States, and I’ve been in France for sixteen years now—more than a third of my life. There’s still a lot about me that’s very much American. But over sixteen years I’ve adopted a lot of characteristics that are definitely more French. You can’t help it: when you are adopted by a new country, you begin to take on the characteristics of your new country.

That is what happens in us when we become citizens of heaven, but far more completely, through the work of the Spirit. He takes what was spiritually dead in us and brings it to life. He reorients our desires and our thoughts and our attitudes, so that we might love what God loves. He changes us. And the change he works in us brings us into step with the Son, which is what Peter says next.

We are elect exiles…for obedience to the Son. 

Jesus Christ, the Son of God, became a man, lived a perfect, sinless life. And during his life and ministry, he taught his disciples, not just how they ought to live, but how he himself lived. Every single teaching of Jesus is a description of how he himself lived, what was precious to him, what was essential to him. 

I have two younger brothers. When we were kids, they obviously looked up to me, imitated me, wanted to be like me—for better or for worse. That’s how it is with all siblings who have a good relationship: the little brother imitates the big brother.

Paul tells us that through Christ’s work, God has made him the firstborn among many brothers (Romans 8.29). You see what I’m getting at: our big brother Christ teaches us how we ought to live, by showing us how he lives. The Father set us apart as elect exiles in order that his Spirit might make us like Christ, that he might help us live as he lives.

But all of that is only possible through what Christ accomplished after his ministry was finished. That is why Peter adds, finally, that we are elect exiles…for sprinkling with his blood. 

Under the Jewish sacrificial system, a pure animal was sacrificed in place of the people, for their sins; and the animal’s blood was sprinkled on the altar, as a sign before God that the people’s sin had been punished. These sacrifices had to be offered on multiple occasions, over and over, because no animal is sufficient to pay for the rebellion of God’s people.

Jesus Christ is the perfect sacrifice an animal could never be. The Son—God made man—lived a perfect life,  took our sins upon himself, and was punished for those sins. His punishment was brutal, and it was bloody. His blood, figuratively sprinkled like the blood of a sacrifice, satisfied the wrath of God once and for all. Because Christ absorbed God’s wrath for us, there is no longer any wrath against us. 

And in exchange for our sin, Christ gave us his perfect life, that we might be reconciled to God. When he was raised from the dead, he applied this finished work to us—and God adopted us as his own, brought us into his family, into his nation, into his kingdom.

Our salvation is not owing to anything in us; it is only and completely the work of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit for us.

Conclusion: Grace and Peace

Peter ends his salutation with this phrase which we so often take for granted:  

May grace and peace be multiplied to you. 

This is the most fundamental blessing one human being could wish upon another. And it is anything but generic. It is Peter’s prayer that God might multiply his grace, and his peace to his children.

It is not a small thing to realize that the grace of God for us is not merely a past event. Many of us think we received God’s grace—past tense—when we received Christ. And that is absolutely true. But so many Christians assume (often without even realizing it) that once they have received God’s grace in salvation, the rest is up to them. They see the gospel as the good news of what God did for them in Christ, and not the good news of what God is still doing for them.

But every moment of every day, God is constantly working in us, to bring us into conformity to his Son. He is constantly sanctifying us. He is constantly renewing our hearts and drawing us to him and changing us that we might obey and love him. God’s grace is on display every day of our lives, if we belong to Christ.

And the result of realizing this truth is peace. When we know that God’s grace for us is neverending, we know that we don’t have to be good enough to finish our race—we can’t. When we know that God’s grace for us is multiplied day after day, we know that it’s not up to us to get the job done. God is working in us to bring us where we need to be. 

That simple truth is the antidote to most of the things that worry us. When we know that God’s grace is working not despite our trials, but in them and even through them, we don’t see those trials the same way, do we? The last three weeks rank among the worst weeks of my life. I had a bike accident that left me in the hospital, three broken ribs, I had to have an operation to repair my injured spleen, I was in more pain than I can remember feeling. While I was in the hospital, Loanne discovered bedbugs in our home for the fifth time (and she’s allergic), so she and the kids had to get out of there. Then the day before I got out, Jack started coming down with some Covid-like symptoms, so I’ve been ordered to stay quarantined from them—after two weeks spent apart.

I have rarely prayed more than I did these last few weeks. Because everything about our situation was—is—painful and worrisome. I worried about my wife and how heavy all of this was weighing on her, I worried about my family’s health, I worried about my own health, I worried about the church… But every time I prayed, I came back to the truth that the God who elected us, the God who adopted us into his kingdom, the God who saved us, is the same God who preserves us in his grace day after day after day. He is just as sovereign over my family’s situation as he was over my own salvation.

What worry can stand in the face of such assurance? Knowing these things doesn’t take away the struggle…but it does bring peace into the struggle. 

We are elect exiles, brothers and sisters, saved by the finished work of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, so that he might multiply his grace and peace to us throughout all eternity. And we’ll be spending the next few months digging deep into that reality.