I Peter 1:3-9

Is that not encouraging how much God has done for you? A wonderful goal He set before us, the inheritance that He says that He will give to us. It is just wonderful! What God has given us and promised us is priceless and truly unfathomable. It is hard to understand, hard to comprehend that we could be given these things and He will do these things for us. And so he rightly says here, Peter does, we rejoice in them, and we give Him all the credit and all the glory for our almost unbelievable election and blessing upon blessing.

But Peter does ground us back in reality here, reminding us that in this little while of our human lifetimes, our time of sanctification, we are grieved now and then by the trials of life which test our faith, which test, as I said as we were going through there, whether we have a genuine character. Sometimes those trials are indeed fiery, but their aim is to mature us, perfect us, to test us like a metal, to see if we are pure, whether our faith is indeed genuine, that we are growing in Christlike character that will not waver under duress.

And it is made all the more difficult, he says, because God is invisible to us. We cannot see Him. We know He is there. We can see the results of His work in our lives, but we are human. Seeing is believing, right? It is not actually true in every circumstance, but we are so fixated on our own senses that we often need to have some tangible proof of something before we will do anything about one thing or another.

But God is invisible. We have to take certain things on faith, we have to believe that the Bible is His word, we have to believe that it has been transmitted to us as His Word, as the pure words that He says it is composed of. We have to believe what Jesus says about how we should live, and the things the apostles teach and the prophets as well, that it is the truth. And on and on it goes. There are a lot of things that we have to believe even though we do not see things, feel them, hear them, touch them. Things of God that the people in this world without the Holy Spirit reject because they cannot see them.

So it feels like half the time that we are going through life at least partially blinded because we do not see. But if we are in full union with Him, we rejoice, despite all of this, and glorify Him for the salvation He is working out in our lives. If we are sensitive enough, maybe that is not quite the word, if we are thinking enough, if we are in tune with Him enough, we can see more than we think we can, because we, by the Holy Spirit, see connections and understand things more, better as we go through our lives.

What Peter is kind of telling us is that we go through life with this wonderful calling, all these wonderful promises, with the assurance of God that He will save us, that we can be in that first resurrection, that we can rule with Him, we can inherit all things. But in this physical life, because it is a physical life, because this world is still ruled by Satan, that our days are full of joy and grief. We live with hope, and also the painful realities of life. We enjoy the blessings, and we hate the trials, but they are there, both the good and the bad, the positive and the negative.

But we do this, we keep our chin up, we keep hoping, we keep rejoicing, we continue thanking God for the blessings that He has given us, all in expectation that Christ will return and all these things will come to fruition. We say with John in Revelation 22:20, "Come, Lord Jesus!" But we know that that day is not today, it is not even next year, and truth be told, a lot of us are old, we may die before it happens. So we must fill the time with faith and virtue, growth and fruits, to please the Father and the Son. Yes, Christ is coming, thank God for that! So what do you do in the meantime? That is the question for today.

I Peter 1:6-9

Now please turn over to I Peter 1, verse 6. The apostle Peter realizes that joy is often mingled with grief. Sufferings are God's will for us to purify our faith, and such faith has a great reward because at the return of Jesus Christ, honor and praise will belong to Jesus Christ and us.

The ESV (or the English Standard Version) translates verse 8 a little bit better: "Though you have not seen him [that is, Christ], you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory."