A Living Hope in the Living Stone
1 peter 1:22-2:8
Main Idea: A living hope in the living stone produces longing hearts and loving siblings.
I. Loving Siblings (1:22-25)
“The love Peter has in view is neither a warm, fuzzy feeling nor friendships around a coffeepot after worship, though love as Peter defines it may involve both. Rather, it refers to righteous relationships with each other that are based on God’s character, which Christian behavior reflects.”
~ Karen Jobes
II. Longing Hearts (2:1-3)
“The word preached to Peter’s readers mediated their experience of God (1:25) and gave them their initial taste of the Lord. But when Peter exhorts them to crave spiritual milk, he is not telling them to crave the word of God, as if commanding them to listen to more sermons or to read more Scripture, as good and even necessary as those activities may be. He is saying that God in Christ alone both conceives and sustains the life of the new birth. They are to crave the Lord God for spiritual nourishment. They have tasted the goodness of the Lord in their conversion, but there is more to be had.”
~ Karen Jobes
III. The Living Stone (2:4-8)
2:4a Christ as Living Stone
2:4b believers as living stones
2:5 believers as spiritual house
2:6a Christ as cornerstone of the house
2:6b believers never to be shamed
2:7a the Cornerstone is honor to believers
2:7b–8a the downfall of those who reject the Living Stone
2:8b stumbling as the destiny of unbelievers
“Christ is laid across the path of humanity on its course into the future. In the encounter with him each person is changed: one for salvation, another for destruction. … One cannot simply step over Jesus to go on about the daily routine and pass him by to build a future. Whoever encounters him is inescapably changed through the encounter: Either one sees and becomes “a living stone,” or one stumbles as a blind person over Christ and comes to ruin, falling short, i.e., of one’s Creator and Redeemer and thereby of one’s destiny.”
~ Leonhard Goppelt, A Commentary on 1 Peter
