October 20 – 1 Peter 1:22-2:10

Main Focus: A life built on Jesus requires growth in holiness.


Next week we’ll get into some of Peter’s more pointed counsel for specific situations, but this week we’re continuing with last week’s more general topic of holiness. We’ll continue to see how holiness is a product of Christ’s work within us and is worth striving for due to the connection between holiness and fellowship with God.

The chapter break and quotes in this passage make it a little challenging to follow Peter’s overall point. For an outline, 1:22-2:1 commands us to love one another because we have been born again through God’s enduring word, while 2:2-10 describe being built up in our faith by God’s word and built upon Christ the cornerstone. Remember, chapter breaks and verse numbers were added after the fact to the Bible, and they function merely as good guesses at breaks between certain thoughts. But in this case you might notice that 2:1 (rid yourself of malice) belongs much more with the previous thought (love one another, 1:22) than the following thought (being built on Christ).

Those two sections, 1:22-2:1 and 2:2-10, are both about the role of God’s word in his people; it is the enduring word of God that produces a born-again people (1:23) and the word of God that followers should yearn for in order to “grow up into [our] salvation” (2:2). That’s not typically how we use the word salvation, but don’t worry, Peter isn’t describing salvation as something you progress towards attaining because, in 1:23, he says followers “have been born again”—past tense. “Growing up into salvation” is a synonym for what he describes as being built into a spiritual house; this is all verbiage for growing into the realities and ways of living to which we have been saved in Christ. In short, it’s a call to grow in the holiness that can only be ours if we already belong to God.

2:2-10 has a lot to say about buildings and cornerstones, and those ideas will take some attention to unpack, particularly with folks in your group who have less familiarity with the Bible. Peter quotes from Isaiah 28:16, Psalm 118:22, and Isaiah 8:14 to describe Jesus as the rejected stone that has become the cornerstone, the first stone upon which the rest of a building’s foundation rests and is referenced off. This imagery for Jesus, also seen in the Gospels and Acts, captures the way in which Jesus is ignored by or even offensive to some while being a source of life for others.

That imagery also adds to our understanding of what it might mean for us to be “living stones,” as Peter describes us, built upon Jesus the cornerstone. That imagery, as we’ll discuss, helps us envision how our own lives might rest upon and be referenced off Christ. We’ll also look specifically at the description of God’s people in verses 9-10, which captures how God has created a new people for himself in Christ. This people, collected from different races and ethnicities and backgrounds and time periods, are all made into a new unity. Notice he says we are now a, as in singular, diverse-but-unified race/priesthood/nation/people. FYI, that’s language straight out of Exodus 16:9, so Peter is also subtly touching on the way in which Gentiles and Jews are now together the people of God.

We’ll close by noting how living in the reality of this new identity among God’s people isn’t effortless. Whether you’re thinking about how to be holy, as we’ve discussed these past two weeks, or you’re thinking about how to live in God’s diverse-but-unified family, none of that is easy. We’ll discuss the various challenges we face in this, as well as the way in which God’s grace meets us in those challenges and is perfected in our weakness.

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