Full Transcript

Welcome to Share the Word. What does the gospel really say and promise? Do you know? When you accepted Jesus, what did you think would happen? Do you understand what it means to be a foreigner in this world? Well, keep listening and get the answers to all of these questions and more.

First Peter chapter one. Foreigners. Let’s begin today with a short quiz. I’m going to give you three names. You tell me, or your dog or cat, since I won’t be able to hear you, what these three have in common. Are you ready?

Here’s the first set: Germanicus, Claudius, Trajan. Think you know the answer? Well, here’s a second set. What do these three have in common? Suetonius, Tacitus, Pliny. What do you think?

You got one? You got both? If you said Roman emperors for the first group of names, give yourself a pat on the back. If you said Roman historians for the second group, you can take yourself out for ice cream later. Why are these fellows on my mind as we start looking at the epistle of First Peter? Well, because they had a lot to do with, in the case of the emperors, or tell us a lot about, in the case of the historians, the world that existed when this epistle was composed.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s worth repeating. The New Testament scripture, these 27 writings that make up our canon, were written for us but not to us. The Holy Spirit of God certainly had us and all believers in every generation in mind when He inspired the authors to write what they did. But Peter, Paul, John, and the others, they did have a particular audience in mind when they wrote. In the case of First Peter, who the author is addressing is apparent from the very first verse where it says, To God’s elect, exiles scattered throughout the provinces of Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia. So it’s addressed to Christians living in those Roman provinces and was written about 30 years or so after the time of Jesus.

At the close of a letter and his sign-off, Peter says, She who is in Babylon, chosen together with you, sends you her greetings, and so does my son Mark. According to early Christian sources, Peter and Mark were in Rome at the middle of the decade of the 60s A.D., that is, 64, 65, 66 A.D., when we think this was written. When Peter uses the terms, She who is in Babylon, he means the Christians who are in Rome. What? How do you arrive at that, Paul? Well, Peter is speaking in a little bit of code here, and we’ll see why in a moment.

John also refers to Christians in a similar way in his second epistle and uses Babylon as a code word for Rome when he wrote the Revelation. Why? Well, it was in that decade of the first century, in the middle of that decade specifically, that a serious turning point occurred in the development of Christianity. What happened? Prior to that time, growing Christianity was viewed by the Roman government and society as just a variant of Judaism, a branch of Judaism. Remember, when the Jewish leaders came to Pontius Pilate demanding Jesus be crucified, the Roman governor regarded it as an internal struggle between religious groups, and he didn’t see any reason to get involved.

But that’s certainly not the way the religious Jews saw it. They saw Jesus as a false Messiah and Christianity’s teachings as dangerous heresy. That’s why in Acts we see Paul kicked out of synagogue after synagogue in the cities he and his team visited. After hearing the Christian message about someone named Jesus, who the Christians claimed was the Messiah, and then told he’d ended up on a cross outside of Jerusalem, most Jews rejected them and their message. Paul tried hard to convince them from the Old Testament that this was all a part of God’s plan for the Messiah to die for our sins, but most Jews rejected that as implausible. So there was tension and sometimes even open hostility from the Jews against Christians.

It grew in Rome till at one point the Emperor Claudius expelled all the Jews from the capital city. That was in around 49 to 50 A.D. Since some of the early Christians were Jewish, they were expelled along with the rest because, again, the Romans didn’t yet distinguish between these two groups. When Claudius died in 54 A.D., many Jews and Christians returned to the capital, but the Romans remained very suspicious of both those groups whose religion they didn’t understand. Then something drastic happened in 64. There was a fire of massive proportions in the city.

Ten of fourteen districts in Rome were destroyed. That’s around 70 percent of the city, and there were thousands of deaths as people were trapped and couldn’t escape. No one knows to this day the actual cause of the fire, but many historians believe that the new emperor, Germanicus, known to history as Nero, was actually responsible. Nero had this grand vision of how he wanted to lay out the capital city. The rumors spread in Rome that he was responsible for this tragedy, and it certainly didn’t help that he seemed indifferent while the fires raged on for several days. Maybe you’ve heard the idiom, fiddling while Rome burns.

I still hear that used to this day sometimes, and it comes from this report that Nero sat in a tower of his palace playing the lyre and reciting poetry as he watched the city engulfed in flames. The first-century historian Suetonius created that damning portrait of Nero in his work Lives of the Caesars. Feeling the heat, literally, the young emperor decided to scapegoat the Christians in the city. He blamed them for setting the fires. That’s according to another historian named Tacitus. He actually lived in Rome during this period.

That big lie led to the first state-sponsored persecution of Christians. Judaism had always been a tolerated legal religion in the empire, but Nero decided to make Christianity illegal and Christ followers enemies of the state. Tacitus, who had no sympathy for Christians himself, writes about horrific things that Nero did to early Christians during this period. I don’t feel any need to sensationalize it, so I’m not going to go into details. But in summary, Tacitus wrote, The Christians were subjected to tortures, this breed of humans following a new and cursed superstition. Interestingly, Tacitus is one of the first non-Christian writers to mention Jesus and his death under the procurator Pontius Pilate in Judea.

He lamented the fact in his writings that Christianity, which he called a mischievous superstition, could not be contained in Israel, but had spread even as far as Rome. He described how Christians were rounded up, not only for suspicion of firing the city, but also for what he called hatred of mankind. By that he meant Christians didn’t go along with the flow of Roman society. They didn’t honor the gods. They didn’t regard Caesar as divine. They didn’t participate in the pagan feasts and holidays.

They were seen, therefore, as haters, as kind of antisocial and weird. Isn’t it interesting that as Western society turns more pagan, we could say, we now hear some labeling Christians today as haters again because we don’t participate in or condone the growing ungodly trends in our society. But in any event, as you might imagine, sudden aggressive persecution aimed at Christians during Nero’s reign caused many to flee the city of Rome. They were, in Peter’s words, exiles now scattered among the provinces. Understanding this real-world situation after 64 A.D. enables us to better understand Peter’s first audience. So what we have in 1 Peter is an apostle of Jesus Christ and universally respected first-generation leader writing to Christians who had fled persecution, displaced people who’ve been experiencing extreme stress and real fear.

What could he possibly say to them under those circumstances? God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. I don’t think so. Although that’s become a popular sales pitch for too many Christian pastors and evangelists, at least in my part of the world today. Think about it. Could Peter possibly have been making an appeal like that to someone to become a Christian in the second half of the first century?

For that matter, can that be an honest appeal to the billions today who are living in societies where openly identifying as a Christian will still likely bring some persecution your way? People in places like China or North Korea, or in many Muslim-dominated countries like Pakistan, Somalia, Iran, and others. Much more importantly, is that really even the gospel? God loves you and has given you a wonderful plan for your life. Is that the gospel? I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the New Testament, and I can’t think of a single time Jesus or Paul or Peter or anyone else, for that matter, framed the message of the gospel like that.

Their message was, Repent and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, as Peter put it when preaching in Jerusalem in Acts 3, or Turn to God in repentance and have faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. That’s how Paul put it when he made the gospel appeal, challenging leaders in the church at Ephesus in Acts chapter 20. Repentance, that’s a change of heart and mind. It’s being sorry for your sins and for ignoring and rebelling against God and His ways. Faith, that’s the other side of the coin. Faith is believing into Jesus, that He’s the only one able to save you from the consequences of sin because He atoned for them on the cross.

Real repentance and faith produce a conversion, in Peter’s words, in a person’s life, a transformation, a desire now to follow Christ and His ways. Repent and believe. That’s the real gospel message. Repent and believe. So, sadly, when people hear a counterfeit like God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life, many will respond to that knowing that their life is not that wonderful and hoping God will do better for them. They may even get baptized and come to church for a while, but then a lot of them fall away.

Why is that? Could it be that there was no real conversion, no transformation, no real turnaround in their heart and mind that results from repentance toward God and faith in Jesus Christ? When the wonderful results in their life did not materialize as they hoped, worse, as they’d been led to believe they would, they turn away. I’ve actually had people tell me, I tried Christianity and it didn’t work for me, like the gospel was a claim on a pimple medication commercial, and when they bought the product, their pimples didn’t go away. With all that in mind, I want you to listen to how Peter addresses the early Christians who had scattered from Rome in chapter one. In verses three and four, he says, Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

In His great mercy, He has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil, or fade. This inheritance is being kept in heaven for us. He points them to the hope of the resurrection, to life beyond this life, and to the inheritance God has promised believers in heaven. In verses 6 and 7, he continues, In all this you greatly rejoice, though now only for a little while having to suffer grief in all these trials. These have come to prove the genuineness of your faith, so that you may rejoice in praise and glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. The suffering you’re having to endure is only for a little while, Peter says, meaning it’s limited to this lifetime, I think, and will be swallowed up by rejoicing and glory when Jesus Christ returns.

Then in verses 8 and 9, Though you have not seen Christ, you love him, and even though you don’t see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, for you are receiving the end results of your faith, the salvation of your souls. They have received what God has promised as a result of believing into Christ, that is, the salvation of their souls. Notice he didn’t say the enjoyment of a wonderful life. He could not say that because that was not real, nor is it what the gospel promises. Rather, it promises the salvation of our souls. Then at verse 13 and 14, he continues, Therefore, with minds that are alert and fully sober, set your hope on the grace to be brought about when Jesus Christ is revealed at his coming.

Or as another translation puts it, Prepare your minds for action and exercise self-control. Put all your hope in the gracious salvation that will come to you when Jesus Christ returns. Pin all my hope on what’s going to happen when Jesus is revealed, when he comes back? Fix all my hope on wonderful things that will happen then? Yep. That’s what Peter instructed.

And if that were not clear enough at verse 17 and then 23 and following, he writes, Since you call on a Father who judges each person’s work impartially, live out your time here as foreigners in reverent fear. Live out your time here as foreigners. That’s interesting. He continues, For you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring Word of God. For all people are like grass; their glory is like the flowers of the field. The grass withers, the flowers fall down, but the Word of the Lord endures forever.

And this is the Word that was preached to you. So what is the apostle Peter telling these scattered, persecuted Christians living in very difficult, dangerous circumstances? He’s saying, We’re foreigners in this world. Keep that in mind. Our time here is short. And although sometimes, like at the present, things may be hard and very unfair, this world is not our home.

We’re citizens of heaven. So fix your hope on what’s ahead, the salvation of your souls, the inheritance God has promised you when Jesus returns. This is the Word that was preached to you. That was his encouragement, and that was his challenge. So what is a foreigner? This is what I’ve been thinking about this week.

A foreigner is someone from another country, but who’s presently living in your country. What does Peter mean then when he tells the early Christians to think of themselves as foreigners? And how would that apply to us? Well, if you’re a Christian and, say, a business person, and have decided to never take advantage of anyone, but rather to deliver more and better than you promise, I think you’re a foreigner to much of this world. If you’re a man and a husband and you have decided to be faithful to your wife and to put her needs above your own and rear your children in God’s ways, you’re a foreigner in this world. And if you’re a woman and a wife and you’ve decided to deem the needs of your family and your home as more important than any career, then you’re a foreigner in this world for sure.

If you’re a young person and you have decided to represent Jesus in your public high school or college, to not be ashamed of the gospel, you’re a foreigner in this world. If you’re an employee of a company, whether large or small, and you’ve decided to do your work as unto the Lord, not just the minimum to collect a paycheck, then you’re a foreigner in this world. If you’ve decided that money will not be your god, that there’s more important things in life than accumulating wealth and material stuff, and you freely give of your time and resources to help others and advance God’s interests, then you are certainly a foreigner in this world. And if you come to a fork in the road where it seems to get ahead, you’d have to compromise some of your Christian values, and you decide, No, I won’t do that. I will honor God and His ways, then you are a foreigner in this world. Do you understand?

For me, this is definitely the big idea in 1 Peter chapter 1, and it runs throughout this epistle. When I was reading early church history this week, I ran across some fascinating correspondence that dates to the late first century, or perhaps very early in the second. It was between a Roman provincial governor named Pliny and the Roman Emperor Trajan. Pliny was the governor of Bithynia when this correspondence went back and forth, one of the very provinces where Peter aimed his epistle. Listen to some excerpts. This is Pliny writing to the emperor.

It’s my practice, my lord, to refer all matters to you concerning things I am in doubt over, for who could better give me guidance to my hesitation or inform my ignorance? I have never before participated in the trial of Christians, so I don’t know what offenses are to be investigated or punished and to what extent. In the case of those denounced to me as Christians, I’ve been following this procedure. I interrogate them, and those who confess and say they are Christians, I interrogate a second and third time, threatening them with punishments. Those who persist—I think he meant those who refuse to recant their faith in Christ—I’ve ordered executed, for I had no doubt that whatever the nature of their creed, stubbornness and inflexible obstinacy surely deserve to be punished.

In that pursuit, I tortured two female slaves who were called deaconesses, but I discovered nothing from them but depraved excessive superstitions. I therefore postponed this investigation, for the matter seemed to warrant consulting you, especially because of the numbers involved, for many persons of every age, every rank, and of both sexes are and will be endangered. He meant, if he keeps killing Christians who will not recant, he’s going to have to kill an awful lot of people. He continued, for the contagion of this superstition has spread not only to the cities, but also now to the villages and farms. Then he adds optimistically, But it still seems possible to check it and cure it. This Roman official saw Christianity as a growing disease on the empire that needed cured because so many people were joining it.

He was not sure what they were all about. Were they a political threat? They believed weird superstitions, he said, a reference to the Christian beliefs about Jesus, about his death and resurrection, about life beyond this life for those who would believe in and follow him. He mentioned torturing two female slaves who were Christians, but learning nothing from them except what he described as, again, excessive superstitions. He goes on to describe a man who he interrogated and tortured, but all he could get from that guy was that Christians met early on Sunday mornings to sing hymns to Christ as though he was a god, discuss how they should behave in their situation, and to make pledges of love to one another. Then they ate a meal, he said, and went home.

That doesn’t sound very dangerous to me. Nevertheless, Pliny felt sure the Christian beliefs and practices were too far off the beaten path and potentially dangerous. The pagan Romans were not wrong in seeing the Christians as different from them, as strange, as not fitting into their society’s accepted structures and values. So he was concerned that if this movement kept growing, could it present a threat to the social order of the empire, maybe even the political order? He told Trajan that if accused Christians would recant and prove it by offering sacrifices to the gods and to the image of the emperor, if they would do that and renounce Christ, they would be discharged, that is, let go. But if they were stubborn and refused, he killed them.

After telling the emperor that, Pliny commented, It is said none of them who are really Christians can be forced to do this. Trajan’s reply was pretty brief. He said, in effect, Good job, my dear friend. You’re handling this problem well. I find it fascinating on several levels. First, just that archaeologists have uncovered actual correspondence between these powerful men from that era regarding how to deal with spreading Christianity, and also to read a contemporary account of how early Christians met together on Sundays and what happened when they did.

But by far, what is most fascinating and challenging to me is to hear the governor say that real Christians could not be intimidated or tortured into denying Christ, even under threat of death. Such persons had been transformed by the power and all those what he called superstitions. Such persons had repented of their old life and believed into Jesus as Savior and Lord, and now saw themselves, as Peter had taught them, foreigners in this world whose real home is heaven. I want to believe that I would have been one among those. How about you? This is Paul for Share the Word.

Thanks for joining us, and I invite you to visit sharetheword.org for other podcasts and materials available absolutely free. But let me go back and say that Paul made so many really important points throughout this entire podcast, as he usually does. But the section at around 16 minutes and 22 seconds about what a foreigner is, well, that made me stop and think. I asked, how much of my life truly demonstrates that I am a foreigner in this world? I challenge you, go back to that section and listen closely, and ask yourself the same question about your life and your actions. Does your heart belong to this world or the one to come?

And then ask, who is Jesus to you?