Simeon Peter, a servant and apostle of Jesus Christ,
To those who have obtained a faith of equal standing with ours by the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ: May grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge
of God and of Jesus our Lord. His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has granted to us his precious
and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire.
Some years ago, a friend of mine told me his young daughter was staring up at a cake her mom had made and then turned to her father and asked: “Dad, can I have more
cake than I need?” Yesterday we looked at Peter’s word to us that God has given us everything we need for life and godliness. He didn’t say that God has given us everything we want. Many times, children don’t know what they need, but are quite sure
of what they want. We are often the same.
A couple of observations to begin with, neither of which is original with me, but helpful in our understanding of the way the Bible instructs us. First, the
way Peter sets up his teaching is characteristic of what we find throughout Scripture. He begins by reminding us what God has done for us in vv. 3-4. Then, in the following verses, he will go on to tell us what we must do, that is, how we must
respond to God’s gifts and make use of them.
It is God’s work first, then what God expects our response to be in light of His work. We can see this pattern all the way back to Abraham. God makes promises to Abraham
and enters into a relationship with Him and then says, “Now, as for you…” (Genesis 17:1) Paul does the same thing: theology first, ethics always second. God graciously and mercifully redeems us, we then respond and are expected to respond in the pursuit of
good works, virtue, obedience and service to our King. And you’ll find that paradigm literally everywhere you look in the Word of God. God has given his grace to us; therefore, it is ours to live in response to it.
Second, and this is a little trickier, our culture is different from the one in Peter’s day and we are not familiar with the first century. Peter is teaching in the
context of a Greco-Roman culture. In the same way a good teacher today must understand his audience, even his Christian audience, as the product of their culture. He must address them in terms that both catch their attention and make sense to them. He must
make it especially clear that thinking biblically is in sharp contrast to how the culture around us thinks and therefore how many of our neighbors and co-workers think and view life.
For example, commentators point out that the phrase “divine power” is not biblical terminology. In fact, this is the only time this phrase appears in the Bible,
but it was common in the literature of the period and was “a standard term in Greek literature.” So the word “divine;” was much more common in Greek literature than in the Bible. Peter is putting his teaching in terms familiar to his readers but reminding
them that only Jesus Christ fulfills the actual meaning of these terms or ideas. Or more simply: What the whole culture was looking for could only be found in the knowledge of Jesus Christ.
People will look for the meaning of life, or the good life, or as we are more apt to put it; people will look for happiness. And we must remember that people look
for it, according to Ecclesiastes because God made mankind to look for it. Those who seek for purpose are doing what God made them to do. However, the catch is, (this is what the book of Ecclesiastes is about) outside of Jesus Christ they will never find
it…never. That is Peter’s point here.
Peter says that by seeking life in Jesus ,we will be made partakers of the divine nature by which he simply means that we will be changed completely, what we might
call, regeneration, sanctification and glorification, all rolled up into one glorious reality. We will be like God.[1] (I
John 3:2) This is what Jesus meant when he said, “In that day you will know that I am in my Father and you in me and I in you” and “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and he will come to him and make our home with
him.” [John 14:20, 23] There is only one way to find life’s true purpose, to know that we are, what we were made to be, and that is in and by giving ourselves completely to the Lord Jesus Christ.
What people were looking for, unless they have given up and fallen into despair and debauchery having concluded that what makes life good can’t be found, is something
better. We need to know this about our neighbors, about the people that we rub shoulders with at work. We need to know this about another because we often lose our way: Everyone wants a richer, deeper life. We want more power over self and over the forces
that shape our daily lives.
People want to be happier than they are. In various ways they want to be better than they are. They want to feel fulfilled, satisfied, complete, or whole. In
our day people have less concern with moral corruption and the purification of the soul than the Greeks did. Modern methods may tend to be more superficial and require less sacrifice than those recommended by Greek philosophy or the mystery religions of the
first century. But one has only to look up and observe the world around to see how much people want more of life, how conscious they are of how far short this life falls of their hopes and dreams. They seek money and pleasure of course, but for almost all
people, whether they see this clearly themselves or not, these are means to an end, not the ends themselves. They want wholeness, happiness, and fulfillment in life.
This is why Jesus began his Sermon on the Mount with the beatitudes: Blessed are you when…But of course what follows would have been scoffed at, because no one would
think Jesus’ recipe for a happy life was what anyone would be found seeking. But of course, that is just the point, and the one that Peter is pushing us toward. Happiness is found only in following Christ, but following Christ is antithetical to this world
and all that it commends to us.
Peter is clear in verse 5 that the world is filled with corruption because the world is saturated with sin. Sin is our rebellion against God and His ways, to embrace
ourselves and what we think brings fulfillment, happiness and the good life. Peter says that as we become like Christ, as we give way to His agenda and relinquish our own sinned marred agenda, we distance ourselves from this corruption. We become like Him
and that includes our wants, desires, hopes, and expectations. We are no longer pining after those things our culture pines after.
The Psalmist tells us that we become like what we worship. (115:8, 135:18) If we worship the things of this world, we will become like the world. If we worship ourselves,
we have only the prospect of becoming more and more absorbed with our own mortality, base desires and sordid happiness to the exclusion of everyone and everything else. That being true, what do we become like, by giving ourselves to the worship of Christ?
We become like Him. And what is the result of our becoming more and more like Christ? We have changed root and branch and delivered more and more from the corruption of this world. And that, that is the path, the only path to true and everlasting happiness.
Hymn: Jesus, Lover of My Soul
[1] The Eastern Orthodox Church teaches the doctrine
of Theosis from this text. Sadly, the Protestant West, as well as Roman Catholicism has misunderstood our brothers from the East as teaching some kind of deification of humanity; That we would become God in the same way God is God. But that is not what the
EO church is teaching. They are merely referring to the entire work of God’s grace by which we are remade after the image of Christ. This, all of Christendom believes and is what Peter is teaching here.