1 Pet 2.1-10
christ the stone
(1 Peter 2.1-10)
Jason Procopio
1 Peter chapter 1 is a grand, sweeping exposition of the Christian life: the grace we have received in Christ, the grace that is promised to us when Christ returns, the effect that this should have on us in our day-to-day lives—that if we have received this grace, we will grow to be holy, because God is holy, and he has saved us.
At the beginning of 1 Peter 2, he’s actually in this same zone. In 1.13-25, Peter gave us four imperatives—four commandments in response to the grace we have received:
1. Set your hope on future grace (v. 13).
2. Be holy, for God is holy (v. 14-16).
3. Take your holiness seriously (v. 17-21).
4. Let that holiness work itself out in love for one another (v. 22-25).
In the first three verses of chapter 2, Peter actually continues in this vein. I almost included 2.1-3 in last week’s sermon—he basically gives a fifth imperative here. The reason I didn’t do that is because this imperative serves as a kind of summary of everything we saw in chapter 1, as well as a transition for the next part of the letter.
Introductory imperative: Grow up (2.1-3)
And this transitional imperative is incredibly simple: Grow up. Since we have this great hope, since we have this perfect assurance, we are called to grow up into salvation.
2.1 So put away all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander. 2 Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up into salvation— 3 if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.
In v. 1, Peter is unapologetic in his commandment: he doesn’t say, “Try to avoid sin,” or “Do your best,” or “Really, it’d be good if you didn’t act this way…” He gives examples of sins which are common amongst believers, and he very unambiguously says, “Put these things away.” Have nothing to do with them.
Now what is interesting is that he doesn’t give an exhaustive list of all sin here—he lists a handful of sins which are directly related to our life together (because that’s where he’s going).
Malice, deceit, hypocrisy, envy, slander… He tells us to put these things away, and then he tells us what to pursue (v. 2): Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk. This can be an off-putting image if you don’t have kids. Everyone knows that the best nourishment a mother can give her baby is breast milk: milk that is pure, and naturally made for that baby.
There is one nourishment that we need above all others, and likely, he’s saying that this “pure spiritual milk” is the Word of God. We know this because the word “spiritual” here comes from a word in Greek that echoes the word “word”; and we know this because just before, in 1.23-25, that’s exactly what he’s talking about—the living and abiding word of God that was preached to us in the good news of the gospel.
So Peter tells his readers to put away sin, to long for the pure nourishment of the gospel, like a baby who absolutely will not stop crying until he is put on the breast. Do we long for the Word of God like that? There is only one thing we need, and only one thing which will satisfy.
We put away sin, and we long for the Word, the gospel that was preached to us, because it is by the gospel that we grow up into salvation. If we try to do one without the other, we’ll be sidelined, every time. If we try to put away sin without the gospel, we’ll just trade one form of sin for another (it’s only by the gospel that we are freed from sin); and if we long for the gospel without putting away sin, we’ll never be able to see the gospel clearly, because we’ll be blinded by our sin.
Now as I said before, he gives this imperative as a transition between his talk of holiness which leads to love (1.13-25) and his call on us as a church, as a people. Here he has one foot in both subjects. And that’s important because Peter’s about to talk about what God is doing on a large scale in the salvation of his people, and what type of people we are to be if we are going to be a part of what he’s doing.
He uses a lot of imagery to get there, but the main image he uses at the beginning is that of a house. God is building a house, and he is using very specific raw materials to do it.
Christ: The Cornerstone (v. 4-6)
4 As you come to him [Christ], a living stone rejected by men but in the sight of God chosen and precious, 5 you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. 6 For it stands in Scripture:
“Behold, I am laying in Zion a stone,
a cornerstone chosen and precious,
and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame.”
So we have a couple of pictures here. Peter says that God is building a spiritual house—this is what he’s doing, and he’ll explain what that means in a minute. He says that we are like living stones—the raw materials God is using to build that house. And he says that Jesus Christ is the cornerstone of that house: he is the first, foundational stone that allows all others to stay standing.
And Peter says that as we come to him, as we come to Christ by faith, as we grow to be like him through obedience to God’s commands, God isn’t just doing something for us; he’s doing something with us. In other words, God isn’t bringing us into a structure he has already constructed, solely for our own benefit. He is still building something, and he’s using US as the raw materials. He’s building his house, and we are the bricks he is laying to build it.
Now, what is the house? This is where it can get a little fuzzy, because Peter goes back and forth between the picture and the reality. The picture is this house that God is building. The reality that the picture represents is a holy priesthood, to offer sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. So if we had to define what kind of “house” God is building with us, it would be a temple—because it is in the temple that priests made sacrifices to God.
Now there were lots of different kinds of sacrifices. There were sacrifices that are offered to atone for sin—that’s not the kind of sacrifice we offer, because Jesus Christ was that sacrifice for us: he died on the cross as a once-for-all sacrifice for our sin.
But there were also sacrifices of worship; of consecration; of lament. Peter’s not trying to get into the theology of sacrifice here; he’s trying to show us that what the priests once did—coming into the presence of God to worship and pray and serve him—is something that we all do now. There is no longer a middleman—in Christ, we all have perfect access to God now. We can all come into his presence and serve him and receive from him and worship him.
God is building a temple on this earth; and that temple—the place where God and man meet—is no longer a physical building in a physical city somewhere on earth. It is us: the church, the body of Christ, the family of God, all over the world. We are the metaphorical “living stones” God uses to build this temple, and Christ is the cornerstone. Wherever the church of Christ is, there the presence of God is with them, in a particular way.
So just think for a moment what an amazing thing this is. (The Bible Project guys explain this beautifully on their video on the temple, if you ever have time to check it out.) When God created the world, his glorious presence was everywhere, and his presence meant nothing but good things for the world. But then man rebelled against God, and sin entered the picture—and this space which was wholly God’s becomes tainted. Now, suddenly, there are two spaces—our space and God’s space. God’s space is perfectly holy, no sin present; our space is completely broken by sin. God’s presence is still everywhere, but where there is sin, God’s presence means judgment and punishment—not blessing.
So God gave his people his law, and the tabernacle, and the temple; he gave them rituals they could perform to be forgiven for their sin. So in the tabernacle first, and in the temple after that, there was finally a place where God’s space and our space overlapped. Man could come into God’s presence once again, and not fear punishment from him. Man could come into God’s presence and receive blessing and grace.
Then Jesus came, and he paid the penalty for the sins of his people once and for all. And then he established the church, saved by his grace, and declared righteous before God. So in the church, there is now a permanent place where God’s space and our space overlap—where our sin has been punished, and we have received grace, and we can serve God without fear. And one day, when Christ returns, this place of “overlap” will fill the whole earth: purified of sin, the entire earth will be both God’s space and man’s space, together—as the voice says in Revelation 21.3: “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man.”
If we have grown up in the church, it may be hard for us to understand how incredible this news is for us. This is not the way it should go. We shouldn’t be able to come into God’s presence without fear. But because of Christ’s sacrifice for us, we can.
This is why, in v. 6, Peter quotes the book of Isaiah (Isaiah 28.16): to show that this cornerstone which Isaiah prophesied so long before was not just a picture. God is building his church—he is building his temple—and the cornerstone of this temple is Jesus Christ. The cornerstone was the first stone laid, at the point of pressure in the foundation—the stone which allowed all others to stand. If the cornerstone was strong, the house would stand; if the cornerstone was weak, the house would fall. Jesus Christ, Peter reminds us, is the foundation of our faith, without whom the church cannot stand and does not exist, but by whom it will remain strong for eternity.
Christ: The Builders’ Obstacle (v. 7-8)
But at the same time, Peter is under no illusions. He knows that while this is wonderful news for us, not everyone will see it that way. He says (v. 7-8):
7 So the honor is for you who believe, but for those who do not believe,
“The stone that the builders rejected
has become the cornerstone,”
8 and
“A stone of stumbling,
and a rock of offense.”
They stumble because they disobey the word, as they were destined to do.
Now we see the tricky nature of this passage from this point on. Peter uses the same image—Jesus Christ as a stone—to display two very different realities.
God is building his house, and Jesus Christ is the “cornerstone” of this house. He is the foundation, the basis on which and through whom God’s entire plan of salvation for his church is built.
But for others, who reject Christ, he is (v. 8) “a stone of stumbling, and a rock of offense.” So it’s clear here that when Peter talks about “stumbling,” he’s not just talking about sinning. He’s not referring to the kind of stumbling (i.e. “making mistakes” or sinning) that Christians can still do from time to time. He’s talking about stumbling over Christ—hearing what Christ says and who he is, and being unable or unwilling to accept him.
Peter uses two Old Testament texts (Psalm 118.22 in v. 7 and Isaiah 8.14 in v. 8) to show that while Christ is the foundation of all our faith, he is clearly and inevitably offensive to those who don’t believe. The question is, why?
Peter gives us two answers—one suggested, and one very clear.
These people who reject Christ, the cornerstone, are called “the builders” in v. 7. What are they building? Peter doesn’t directly answer the question, because he doesn’t really need to—the building in question is a very common picture which shows up throughout much of the Old Testament, and has echoes in the New.
During Jesus’s life and ministry, by far the most common clash we see is that of Jesus versus the religious establishment in Israel. The Jews had spent centuries “building their house”: upon God’s instruction, they built the tabernacle and then the temple…and then they built an entire system of religious practices in and around the temple, which often had much more to do with their own desire for power and reputation than the law God had given them. (We can see this pretty clearly in the often hypocritical practices and attitudes of the Pharisees, for example.)
And when Jesus comes proclaiming the kingdom of God, a kingdom which supercedes their religious ideals and fulfills not only the letter of the law but the heart of the law, how do they react? They reject him. They call him a blasphemer and a liar. And ultimately, he is so offensive to them that they crucify him.
Jesus Christ is the cornerstone on which the church is built. But he is inevitably offensive to those who do not believe.
This is one thing that so many Christians instinctively understand, but refuse to accept. They spend so much time and effort trying to make Jesus less offensive. And this leads us into all kinds of craziness in the church. We’ll try to turn church services into a rock concert. We’ll hold conversations with unbelievers in which we try to lay out logical arguments which explain why Jesus isn’t the big bad wolf everyone thinks he is; he’s actually really great! Now of course that’s true, and of course Christ is absolutely worthy of the biggest blow-out concert event any human being could imagine, and more.
The problem is that none of these things will convince anyone. Jesus Christ was rejected in the past, and he will continue to be rejected in the future. He is a stone of stumbling, a rock of offense. To put it simply: You will never make Jesus cool enough. You will never make Jesus easier to swallow. And you shouldn’t want to, because if you do manage to make Jesus cool enough to be acceptable, you’re not proclaiming Jesus at all, but a fiction you’ve created.
No matter how hard we try to reason with unbelievers, no matter how faithfully we share the gospel with them, the gospel will always be the stench of death to some. They will hear the gospel, and they will stumble.
Now again, the question is, why? Peter gave us part of an answer by referring to the “builders” who rejected Jesus: they stumbled because Jesus was offending their religious ideas. But he gives a much more explicit answer at the end of verse 8, and this is the part some of you will not accept, no matter how clearly you see it written there:
They stumble because they disobey the word, as they were destined to do.
Two reasons why people stumble over Christ. They stumble because they disobey the word. They don’t want to submit to Christ the cornerstone, and they don’t want to obey the word.
And they stumble over Christ because ultimately, they were destined to do so. There is only one person who can keep someone from stumbling over Christ, who can make someone see Christ as the Savior and not as an offense: and that is God himself.
Now of course that’s a sobering thought. And it should drive us to prayer that God might intervene on the behalf of people we know who don’t know him. But we mustn’t stop there.
Christ: Our Salvation (v. 9-10)
Peter is trying to help us see why so many reject Christ. But that’s not all. He’s also—and, I believe, most especially—trying to help us see how incredible it is that we DIDN’T reject him. Because outside of the free grace and mercy of God, there is absolutely no reason why we should have reacted any differently to the gospel than the builders who rejected him. “But,” Peter says in v. 9—
9 But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. 10 Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.
So what makes us different from everyone else who rejects Christ?
Firstly, we are a chosen race. People can get bent out of shape when you start talking about race; but he doesn’t mean it in terms of ethnicity. He means simply that in his grace, God has made us into a different type of people. We are no longer defined by our background or our nationality or our ethnicity. We are his people. We have been transformed on a fundamental level.
And it is only because of God’s free choice that this happened. We didn’t choose him; he chose us. Why? I have no idea. It’s like that old Woody Allen joke, where he said, “I wouldn’t want to be part of a club which would have someone like me as a member.” For the life of me, I don’t understand why God chose to save me, or any of us here. But he did.
Secondly, we are a royal priesthood. This is what we were talking about earlier. God is building his temple, and he has set us apart for a divine calling: to serve the holy God with faithfulness, and to proclaim the excellencies of him who called us out of darkness into his marvelous light.
The question we often ask ourselves, though, is who exactly is this referring to? Who in God’s kingdom gets to be the priests? That the question Peter answers next.
Thirdly, we are a holy nation. Now this is what boggles my mind when I think of God’s plan. I would understand God choosing a handful of people to serve as the “holy men”, so to speak, in his kingdom. (You would think these would be pastors or priests.) But God doesn’t merely designate only certain people in his kingdom to serve this function. He sets the entire nation, all the people of God, apart for holiness. He calls everyone—regardless of our job, our age, our maturity, our background, our talents—to represent him to the world, and to serve as priests in his temple.
Fourthly, we are a people of his own possession. This flies in the face of so much of modern Christianity. So many of us think of our faith almost exclusively in terms of what God has done for us. But God doesn’t belong to us; we belong to him. Our desires, our dreams, our goals—all of these things fall to the bottom of our list of priorities when we become Christians, because it’s no longer about what we want; it’s about what he wants for us. We belong to him; it’s not the other way around.
All of this serves to underline that the only difference between us and those who reject Christ is the initiative of God himself to save us, and to set us apart, and to make us holy. This is why spiritual and moral pride should be absolutely and completely foreign to our way of thinking if we’re in Christ. We’re not in him because we’re good, or because we understood something that someone else didn’t understand, or because we achieved a level of morality other people couldn’t attain to. We are in him because he brought us in. And that’s all.
The question is, again, why? Why did he do it? Why did he set us apart in this way?
V. 9 again:
9 But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.
There’s the answer. He set us apart that we might be his ambassadors on this earth—that we might proclaim his excellencies to all who would listen. There’s a difference between saying, “Turn to Jesus so you don’t go to hell” and proclaiming the excellencies of him who called us out of darkness into his marvelous light.
We always think of evangelism as a rescue mission. We share the gospel because we want to see people come to know Christ and escape the wrath of God. There is precedent to this—Paul speaks in similar terms in Romans 9—but this was far from the predominant way the apostles spoke about the gospel, or about sharing the gospel with others.
But without meaning to, when we go about evangelism in this way, for this reason, we adopt a subtle change of tone that can have ripple effects on our whole Christian life. When we make sharing the gospel all about escaping the wrath of God, we inadvertently make him into the bad guy. He’s the one who’s out to get us, and we need to come to Jesus to escape God.
But the authors of the Bible consistently frame the sharing of the gospel very differently. Rather than talking about God as someone to escape from, they speak of him as someone to escape to. Now, make no mistake: hell is real, and the wrath of God against sin is real. This is a real, legitimate threat. But over and above the threat of God’s wrath is a much greater threat.
The greatest threat which hangs over every human being who rejects God is the prospect of not knowing him—hell, as horrible as it is, is just the logical conclusion of what they’re living already, and they don’t even know how much better it can be.
We are called to proclaim, not mainly his anger, but his excellencies. His goodness and his mercy and his compassion and his glory and his power and his might and his righteousness. Even his wrath is excellent, because it shows exactly how just he is: God hates what is truly hateful, and loves what is truly good.
Peter gives us three prime examples of this excellency. Firstly, God shows his excellency in that he called us out of darkness into his marvelous light. Again, this is not how people always share the gospel. Rather than just speaking about escaping judgment, not often do people say, “Because of what God did for me, I can see now."
It’s no accident that one of the dominant miracles Jesus performs in the gospels is the healing of the blind. Every blind man healed is a picture—a picture of what God did for us when he saved us. He gives us new eyes to see, and then he shines the light of the gospel, so that we see everything else rightly.
We can see who we are, and who he is. We can see what we need, and what he gives. We can see what God deserves, and how we are called to respond. He calls us out of darkness into light.
Secondly, Peter says in v. 10:
10 Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people…
Remember: he’s speaking to Gentile believers. Now of course, these believers all belonged to some ethnic or national group before. But these believers weren’t united to one another. There were dividing lines of race and background and nation and language and culture… But now, through God’s grace, they had been brought together, united by the gospel, made to be a people when before they weren’t one.
It can be difficult for us to see how wonderful this news is, because we live in a time and in a culture which encourages individual freedom to a greater and greater extent. In our minds, the idea of freedom is inextricably linked to the idea of self—I’m free when I can do whatever I want to do.
But this instinct to lean in toward personal freedom is a relatively new thing. For as long as people have been on this earth, people have recognized the profound need in all of us for community. This is a deep need in every human being, which many of you felt particularly during the confinement. If you’re single, and you live alone, the confinement was likely very hard on you, because you know you need your people. Even those of us who are natural introverts know it.
I felt this particularly, not during the confinement, but in the two weeks after I was discharged from the hospital, after my accident. I had spent two weeks in the hospital, cut off from nearly everyone because of Covid, then I had to spend two weeks in confinement, for the same reason, when I got out.
Now, I was freer during that time than I usually am. I had no constraints, other than those imposed by my healing body. I didn’t have to do the things I usually have to do when I’m at home with my family. I was “free”. But I noticed that in that time of relative “freedom”, besides the fact that I missed my family, I didn’t like what I saw in myself. We let ourselves go when we’re cut off from other people, and turn into less appealing versions of ourselves. Having a community gives us the framework we need to be the best versions of ourselves.
And that is precisely what God has given us, with one notable exception: the community he has brought us into is an eternal community, characterized and defined by his grace and goodness. He has brought us into a people, united not by blood or by nationality or by culture, but by the shared grace we have all received, and which we will receive for all eternity.
And that’s the third example of God’s excellency:
once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.
Once, we were under God’s just wrath, deserving of his just judgment against us. But God took that judgment on himself, in the person of Christ. He took what we deserve, and gave us what he deserves. He took our punishment, and gave us his reward.
Can you see how different this is than the way we often share the gospel? It’s not: turn to Christ in order to escape hell. It’s: turn to Christ BECAUSE HE IS THAT EXCELLENT. He has brought us out of darkness into his marvellous light; once we weren’t a people, but he has made us a people; once we had no mercy, but now he has given us mercy.
So, Peter says, GO TALK ABOUT THAT. Tell others just how good he is. Proclaim his excellencies to the world.
Conclusion
Peter calls us to three immediate responses to everything he’s laid down in these verses. The first is in v. 4-5: he tells us that we, like living stones, are built up as a spiritual house as we come to him—as we come to Christ, the cornerstone.
So this is an opportunity for those of you today who don’t know Christ: come to him. Don’t reject him. Don’t let yourselves remain among those who stumble over him. See that Christ is the Savior, the cornerstone of God’s plan of salvation, and come to him in faith. Repent of your rebellion against him and accept the free gift of salvation he gives. Put your faith in him and trust him.
And as you come to him—as we all come to him—let yourselves be used by God as living stones to build his house. Obey his Word. Put away malice and deceit and hypocrisy and envy and slander. Realize that you are not just saved for yourselves, but as a people. Belong to God’s family, invest in God’s family, enjoy and love God’s family.
And lastly, proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Proclaim his excellencies to the world in which we are sojourners and exiles.
This is our calling.
Starting next week, in v. 11, Peter is going to begin showing us what that looks like in practice—not just for us as individuals, but for us as the church. But for now, let’s pray.
