1 Pet 3.14-18
grow
(2 Peter 3.14-18)
Jason Procopio
Every kid wants to grow up fast. We’ve all had that experience of being young and wanting to be older (and if you’re still a kid, you’re probably feeling that now). But we rarely want to grow up for the right reasons. We want to grow up so we’ll have money to buy the things we want; we’ll be able to do what we want with our time; we want our freedom. Now I’m not that old (I turn forty in a month), but I am older than most of you here. So let me tell you a secret.
The best thing about getting older is stability. Now of course, that depends a bit on who you are—there are a lot of older folks who aren’t stable at all—but generally speaking, the waters settle a bit the older you get. You’re less able to be rocked by small things. The things that you’d lose sleep over when you were younger—just the drama of it all—are easier to let go. You’re less easily offended; less easily threatened; less easily shaken.
In the end of his letter, Peter wants to help us grow up. And to grow up for the right reasons.
It’s rare that a New Testament letter ends as carefully as this one. Often the author will address specific salutations or recommendations he has for the churches to whom he is writing, and often the things he says will have some link to what came before—but rarely (in my opinion) do we see it as clearly and completely as what we see here.
In these final verses of his letter, Peter gives both an application and a summary of what he’s written. And he does it in a really interesting way. First, he gives a direct application to what we saw last week, in the beginning of chapter 3; and then he walks back a bit to something he was saying in chapter 1, and helps us to know how to live that out. And in between, he applies what we saw in chapter 2, and contrasts it with what comes both before and after.
So we have a beginning section, a middle section, and an ending section; and in the first and last sections together, we have four distinct commands, as well as the reasons for which he is giving them.
V. 14-18:
14 Therefore, beloved, since you are waiting for these, be diligent to be found by him without spot or blemish, and at peace. 15 And count the patience of our Lord as salvation, just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, 16 as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters. There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures. 17 You therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand, take care that you are not carried away with the error of lawless people and lose your own stability. 18 But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be the glory both now and to the day of eternity. Amen.
OK, so in v. 14 Peter begins by saying, Therefore, beloved, since you are waiting for these… What are the “these”? What is the “therefore” referring to? Remember, this isn’t a book, but a letter; we are meant to read it all at once. So if we were reading it all at once, we would remember what Peter has just said.
In v. 1-13, Peter talked about what Jesus Christ will do on the day of his return. He will judge the ungodly (v. 7). He will cleanse the earth of the effects of sin, burning them up as with fire (v. 10). He will establish new heavens and a new earth, in which righteousness dwells (v. 13).
And as we saw last week, historically, the testimony of the church has almost always been that is earth will not be destroyed, but rather renewed—the new heavens and the new earth are what this earth will be once it has been cleansed of every effect of man’s rebellion against God; freed from our sin and corruption and competition and selfishness—made perfect, so that we might genuinely enjoy it, not just for ourselves, but for others as well; and fully inhabited by the glory of God, made manifest and visible everywhere we will look.
These are the “these” we are waiting for. These are the things God has promised to us. These are the things in which our hope is found.
Therefore—because we are waiting for these things… First command:
Be diligent to be found spotless (v. 14)
Therefore, beloved, since you are waiting for these, be diligent to be found by him without spot or blemish, and at peace.
I’ve never understood Christians who want to be Christians, but who have no real interest in holiness. These are the folks who love the idea that God has promised to care for us and bless us and give us eternal life in Christ…but who want to keep on living their lives just the way they did before, on their own terms. They want all of the advantages of the Christian faith, but none of the work. They want the benefits of knowing God, but they don’t want to change. These are the folks who will insist that God likes us just the way we are, and so he doesn’t want to change us. He just wants us to be happy.
Now, God does love us as we are. That’s true. But the idea that that means he wants to leave us the way we are—on top of being the exact opposite of what he says on practically every page of the New Testament—this idea just doesn’t make any sense.
My daughter is two and a half, and I love her just the way she is. Just as she is, I love this child with everything in me.
But I’d also love to see her not wearing diapers when she’s seventeen. (Or even earlier, if possible.) I’d love for her to not throw herself on the floor and scream when she doesn’t get her way. I’d love for her to be able to cook her own dinner. And the fact that I want these things for her doesn’t mean I’m being judgmental or harsh towards her! I want her to change because I love her! Because an adult who still acts like a toddler is not a healthy adult.
Do you see why the idea that if God loves us, then he won’t want to change us, makes no sense at all? God created us to be holy—to live as he lives, to love the things he loves. That’s how he made us; so that’s how we can be as happy as humanly possible in this life. And because God loves us, he’s not going to be okay with leaving us in the same poisonous habits we have now. He’s not being unloving to us when he calls us to put our sin to death—when he tells us that some things we think are good are actually bad; that some things we think are right are actually wrong. Because he loves us, he will not rest until he has changed us.
On top of the logic of it, we see throughout the Bible that this is what God has always planned for his people.
…Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her…that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.
The reason Christ came—the reason he lived and died and was raised—was to make his church holy. The day of his return will be the day when that work is finished and made perfect, once and for all.
Now this may sound obvious, but let me tell you why it is so essential for us to understand this. Even though many of us understand that God wants to make us holy because he loves us, we don’t see the process of becoming holy as a gift, but rather as a burden. Even if we won’t say it out loud, we often feel like obedience to God’s commands is the unfortunate thing we have to do to get to heaven. We talk about being saved as the gift, and we feel like being holy as an unpleasant part of that process. And if you want to test yourself for this, ask yourself: When was the last time I was happy about resisting temptation? When was the last time I was tempted to sin, and thought, Thank you God that you’re giving me the opportunity to resist this temptation!
Do we feel the same way about physical exercise? Physical exercise doesn’t feel good—it burns. It hurts. But we like it, because we know what it’s doing for us. We know how good we’ll feel after.
Why do we feel that way about something that has a temporary, superficial effect on us (like physical exercise), while feeling weighed down about fighting our sin and obeying God, which has eternal and deep effects on us?
God loves us. Being holy isn’t the chore we perform to get the gift; being holy is the gift. There’s so much talk about becoming holy in the Bible because that’s what it looks like to be saved—being holy, and enjoying holiness. (This is why the longest chapter in the Bible is Psalm 119—a literal song of love about God’s law.
Think about it: it’s not hard to convince yourself to do something you really want to do. You may work hard to do it, but the work is not tedious or burdensome; it is a pleasure, because we want it.
That is what Peter is trying to impress on us here. He presents us with this beautiful picture of the day of Christ, when he will return and expose sin in all its ugliness. Sin will be burnt up, and all that is left will be a holy world in the image of our holy God, who has made a home for his holy people. That is what we mean when we talk about “heaven”. That is our hope; that is our goal and our desire and our joy.
So since that is where we’re headed, we are called to be diligent to get there the right way. To live our lives with clean consciences, knowing we’re doing what we were created to do—at peace. To not wait until the day of Christ to enjoy being a holy people. Our holiness won’t be perfect until he comes, but it can get close. When he comes back, let him find us holy, and happy in our holiness, and at peace.
Second command:
Count his patience as salvation (v. 15).
15 And count the patience of our Lord as salvation…
We don’t need to spend a long time here, because we saw this last week. Remember, he was speaking about those people who would come into the church claiming that Christ isn’t coming back, because look how long it’s been! V. 4:
4 They will say, “Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation.”
So he’s coming back to this objection, which we saw last week, and which he answered in v. 9, when he said,
The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.
This is one of those commandments that get more and more pertinent the more time goes by. The more time goes by, the more awful things happen in our world; so it would be easy to despair, to look at how long Christ is taking to come back, and see it as simply cruel.
But Christ’s waiting to return isn’t cruelty; it is grace. He is waiting, not to torture us, but to give his people time to repent—he wants to make sure all his people come home. Again, something which we sometimes see as cruelty is in fact a demonstration of his love.
This may not mean a lot to many of you now, but I promise you, a day will come—probably more than once—when you will be fighting so much pain that the only thing you will be able to think is, I wish he would just come back and end this. After starting another round of chemotherapy…or after losing a child…or after bearing the brunt of yet another cruelty from someone who should love you better. You’ll be curled up in the fetal position and you’ll be praying, Lord, please come back. Please just end all this.
When that thought crosses your mind—and it will—count the patience of the Lord as salvation. His waiting is a good thing, no matter how painful it may be. The pain of this life, which grows over time, helps us remember that this world is not our home—that we are indeed “exiles” on this earth. And we will rejoice in heaven when we meet our brothers and sisters whom we wouldn’t have met if Christ had answered our prayers and come back when we asked him to.
Interlude: Paul’s Authority (v. 15-16)
Now at this point, Peter makes a little detour, but this detour is remarkable.
Let’s start again at the beginning of v. 15:
15 And count the patience of our Lord as salvation, just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, 16 as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters. There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures.
OK so there are few things here that are pretty surprising. The first thing should reassure us: if you’ve ever tried to read Paul’s letter to the Romans, or his letters to the Thessalonians, or the letter to the Hebrews (we’re not sure who wrote it, but my money’s on Paul)… If you’ve ever read any of his letters and gone, “What is he talking about?!”, then Peter agrees with you. Paul can be hard to understand. Now of course Peter is really the pot calling the kettle black here, because some of the things he says are way more difficult than the stuff we find in Paul’s letters; but still—don’t be discouraged if you have a hard time understanding what Paul says. You’re not alone.
Second thing.
He wants to underline the fact that on this subject of God’s patience, Paul agrees with him. Paul says in Romans 2.4 (speaking to those who claim to know God but who judge others for their sin),
Or do you presume on the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?
Peter wants to remind his readers that—at some point in the past, apparently—Paul wrote to these same Christians, and the false teachers he spoke of in chapter 2 used a twisted version of Paul’s teachings to turn others away from the faith.
Third thing. Peter warns again that some people will not simply ignore the preaching of the Good News, but will rather twist it. They will make it say things it was never attempting to say. The easiest current example—once again—is those who take the life, death and resurrection of Christ and say that the reason he did all that is to give us a good job, lots of money, good health, a happy marriage and perfect, well-adjusted kids. That is (and I’m measuring my words very carefully here) a damnable lie. Peter says that people who say such things twist the gospel to their own destruction.
Fourth thing—and this is perhaps the most significant. He talks about Paul’s letters, says they are hard to understand, and that the ignorant and unstable twist his letters to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures.
Peter is writing at a time before the Canon of the New Testament was established—when we talk about the “Canon” of the Bible, we’re talking about the final consensus of the Christian churches concerning which books were inspired by God; this consensus was confirmed at the Synod of Hippo in 393 A.D.). Now, there’s a lot we could say about the Canon of Scripture—about why some books are in the Bible and why others are not—and we don’t have time to answer all of those questions here. We have very good reasons for trusting that the books we have in the Bible are the right books—that there’s nothing here that shouldn’t be here, and that there’s nothing missing.
But what is remarkable is that even at this early date—long before the Synod of Hippo—Peter speaks of Paul’s letters as Scripture. He says these people twist Paul’s words, as they do the other Scriptures. It’s an echo of what we saw in chapter 1, when Peter gave his reasons why we can trust what he and the other apostles said—he has a full and God-given conviction that the Lord was speaking through him and the apostles. And he includes Paul in their authority, even though Paul wasn’t one of Jesus’s disciples. It’s an incredible testimony of solidarity which Peter shows Paul, and especially powerful knowing how these two butted heads from time to time; we see in Paul’s letter to the Galatians that Paul publicly called Peter out for behavior which wasn’t reflecting the gospel.
Despite that—or perhaps even because of it—Peter affirms with confidence that Paul’s letters carry the authoritative weight of Scripture.
His point is this (and it’s the same as the point he was making in chapter 1): nothing is more important—nothing matters more—than hearing what God has to say, accepting what God has to say, and doing what God tells us to do. Truth is not subjective; truth is what God says it is. And Scripture—the Old Testament handed down to us through the prophets, and the New Testament transmitted to us through the apostles—is the truth, because it is the Word that comes from God. It is (as he said in 1.19) our light shining in a dark place.
So on that basis (here’s the third command)...
Do not be carried away by the error of lawless people (v. 17).
You therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand, take care that you are not carried away with the error of lawless people and lose your own stability.
It kind of sounds like this should go without saying. Especially if you remember the way Peter described these false teachers and sinners in chapter 2—he calls them irrational animals, blots and blemishes, waterless springs and mists driven by a storm.
Those last two descriptions are particularly telling. Nothing is worse for a land being ravaged by a famine than finding a spring with no water, or finally seeing rainclouds on the horizon…only to see those clouds pushed elsewhere by the wind. When we see the things Peter says about these people, it’s hard to imagine going along with them.
But it happens all the time. Because these people—whether they’re false teachers preaching a false gospel, or simply people who have influence on you, and yet who are living in disobedience to God—these people give you what you want. False teachers will tell you what you want to hear—not what is best for you, but what you want to hear. And I’m sorry, what we want to hear is not always what is best for us.
Have you ever bought, say, a new and expensive phone which you’ve wanted for a long time because you’ve seen the ads and you’ve got a picture in your mind of how cool it would be to have a phone like that…then once you get it, you realize that it doesn’t really change anything? That your life doesn’t actually look much like what you saw in the ad? Our desires can push us in some pretty twisted directions if we let them.
False teachers will tell you what you want to hear—or they’ll show you what you want to do, and make you think it’s okay to do it. We all struggle with some sins more than others. All of us have our weak areas. Sooner or later, you’ll see someone (probably even someone you like or admire) doing the thing you have a hard time not doing. And seeing them do it—even more seeing them do it with no immediate consequences—will make it look far better than it actually is. It’s really hard to not go along with that. To not do what you want to do when you see someone you like and admire doing it and seeming to be gratified by it.
But Peter says, “Don’t follow them. Don’t listen to them. Don’t believe that disobeying God will make you happier than obeying him. There will be some instant gratification, sure—but in return, what will you get? You’ll lose your stability. You’ll start to say things like, “But I thought when I became a Christian I wouldn’t want these things anymore! So…am I actually a Christian? Did God really give me faith?” You’ll start to wonder whether any of these things are true. So you’ll have uncertainty on one side, and dissatisfaction on the other.
We talked about this earlier, but I’ll say it again: when God gives us commandments, he doesn’t do it to burden us. He gives us commandments to free us. A train that runs on its rails runs smoothly. (Try to take that train off the tracks and see what happens.) God created us, so he knows how we can be free, how we can be as happy as possible—in this life and the next. Jesus said, “My yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”
Don’t see God’s commandments as heavy burdens to bear to get to what we actually want. Believe that his commandments are gifts, and take care that you are not carried away with the error of lawless people and lose your own stability.
Instead (final command):
Grow in the grace and knowledge of Christ (v. 18).
But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be the glory both now and to the day of eternity. Amen.
This is the kind of thing we say all the time—“Grow in grace.” Have you ever thought about what a strange phrase that is? Grace is something that is given to us—it is deserving something bad, and getting something good instead.
We all deserve punishment for our sin against God. We have all rebelled against our Creator, and for that rebellion, we all deserve to be eternally and totally separated from him.
But that punishment is not what God gave us. He gave us his Son instead, who lived our life and suffered our punishment and gave us his perfect life in exchange for our sin. We deserve punishment, but instead we receive reward—that’s grace.
But what does it mean to grow in that? How do you grow in something that someone else has to give you? We can’t multiply grace; we can’t make grace bigger than it already is. So what does it mean to grow in grace?
Here’s the best way I’ve heard it explained (this comes from Bob Thune and Will Walker’s awesome little study guide, The Gospel-Centered Life).
When we meet Christ, we learn two things. First, we learn that God is absolutely righteous and absolutely holy; there is not even a hint of imperfection in his character or person. But our understanding of God’s holiness is weak and often confused. On the other hand, we also learn that we are sinful. Naturally, we are fundamentally rebellious—incurvatus in se, as the church fathers used to say (“bent inward on oneself”). Even the seemingly good things we do are tainted with impure motivations. So in order to grow in our Christian life, we need to become more and more aware of who God is, in all of his perfections; and we need to be more and more honest and aware of how far we are from his holiness.
Now as we learn this, we’ll continually realize that the gap between God’s holiness and our sin is way bigger than we thought. What bridges that gap is the work of Jesus Christ for us—he took our sin (past, present and future) on himself; our sin was nailed to the cross with Christ. So now, the only thing left is his perfect life, which he gave us. Christ effectively took the sinners we were and allowed us to be declared holy as he is holy.
That is wonderful news—that is grace. So we accept it. We place our faith in it. We thank Jesus for it.
And we keep growing. And as we keep growing, we realize that the gap between God’s holiness and our sin is even bigger than we knew at first. And then we realize that Christ’s sacrifice covered that gap, too—just as the gap got bigger, so does his grace. So we accept it. We place our faith in it. We thank Jesus for it. We’re even more amazed by it.
And we keep growing. And as we keep growing, we realize that the gap is even bigger still than we realized before. And just like before, Christ’s grace fills that gap.
This is how we grow in grace. And this is how we grow in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. We learn who God is, and who we are, and we trust in Christ’s work to bridge the gap between us. And as we grow, our realization and understanding of his grace keeps getting bigger…and bigger…and bigger.
This is what gives us stability, brothers and sisters. This is what gives us the strength to say no to sin when we are tempted. This is what gives us the strength to get back up and repent when we do sin. This is what keeps us on the rails.
And this is the goal of Peter’s letters to these churches—and to us. To keep us awake. To keep us stable. To keep us growing.
We will never be as holy as we want to be in this life…but we know where we’re going. And we know what we’ll be and what we’ll do when we get there. So we must not wait.
Therefore, beloved, since you are waiting for these glorious promises to be fulfilled, be diligent to be found by him without spot or blemish, and at peace. Count the patience of our Lord as salvation. Take care that you are not carried away with the error of lawless people and lose your own stability. But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
To him be the glory both now and to the day of eternity. Amen.
