October 6 – 1 Peter 1:1-12

Main Focus: Hope in our salvation—both immediate hope in salvation now and future hope in the return of Christ—enables us to endure suffering.

Starting this week, we’ll be spending eight weeks going verse-by-verse through the letter of 1 Peter. This week we’re going to get into most of the book’s themes, focusing specifically on the steadfast hope Christ gives his followers.

You’ll notice as we read through 1 Peter that the letter is less like one of Paul’s—highly structured—and more like one of John’s—a little more cyclical and free-flowing. In particular, you’ll see that Peter doesn’t talk about one subject after another but repeatedly comes back to certain themes. Our passage this week, 1 Peter 1:1-12, serves as a sort of introduction to many of the themes that will keep coming up in the book: hope, holiness, suffering, living as exiles, and Old Testament connections. In the coming weeks we’ll revisit all these.

In discussion this week we’ll start by exercising our Bible reading skills. Anytime you start a passage you should consider who is writing, who they’re writing to, why they’re writing, etc. Here Peter says he’s writing to the “elect exiles” (ESV) and this phrase sums up the whole letter (the CSB renders the same phrase “those chosen, living as exiles”). By ‘elect’ he means God’s chosen people, a biblical term for those who have been predestined in Christ for salvation and called by him (1 Pet 2:9; see also Eph 1:3-10). With ‘exiles’ Peter is applying a term metaphorically that he’ll pick back up in 2:11, identifying Christians as those who live on earth as sojourners who have their citizenship in heaven (Phil 3:20). Those two themes, living as God’s people and being in the world but not of the world, will predominate throughout the letter.

So that’s who he’s writing to, but why? Again, he talks about suffering throughout the letter, and he seems to be writing to encourage followers of Jesus to remain faithful to their Savior despite the “fiery trial” of suffering (1 Pet 4:12). He calls them to hope in Jesus, which will be the focus of the rest of our discussion. Note that we’ll largely miss discussing verses 10-12, but to put it in brief, these verses are a connection between the Old Testament promises and their fulfillment in Christ. This can add to our hope, knowing that Christ’s suffering and our own are a part of God’s plan from beginning to end.

As we discuss this hope, we’ll ask for what the follower of Jesus hopes. Peter here describes a “living hope” into which we’ve been born again and that we hold onto looking ahead towards its revelation “in the last time,” i.e. Christ’s return. That hope is inherently bent towards the future, awaiting eternity with Christ which is the “goal” of our faith (1:9). But it’s also a present hope that enables us to endure suffering and be filled with joy. Hope in our eternal salvation with Christ is meant to sustain us in the hardships of the Christian life, helping us not just survive but thrive despite our struggle.

Continuing that last point, we’ll take time to reflect on the ways in which salvation does and does not fill us with joy. We’ll discuss the times we’re most likely to hold onto this hope or most likely to doubt it, and we need to be honest about this. Such a struggle is common among Christians, and we even find language to vocalize this struggle in the Bible—we’ll quote Psalm 51 in the question below to ask how we need God to “restore..the joy of [his] salvation.”

We’ll end with how to be hopeful in hardship. Keep in mind, Peter is focused primarily on suffering for the sake of Christ, being spoken against or even punished for our faith (2:12; 2:20). So that’s the main focus, but since suffering in general tends to squash our hope, I think we can discuss hardships more broadly speaking. Given the prior discussion questions we should be able to go past platitudes about suffering here—“just let go and let God”; “I know God’s got a plan”—and instead see how, in Christ, we’re given a hopeful inheritance that can never be lost (1:4), that was secured for us by a sovereign God who is powerful enough to preserve us to the end. Simply put, our hope can stay unshaken because Christ is unshakeable, and that is really good news.

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