The First Letter of Peter- 5

1 Peter 1:18-21.  This sermon was preached by Pastor Marty Bonner on Sunday, December 14, 2025.

We are continuing today in a section where Peter is describing what it means to be a part of this new spiritual people belonging to Jesus Christ.  So far, Peter has given them three main instructions.  First, fix your hope completely on the grace to be revealed at the Second Coming of Jesus.  Second, be holy as our Lord is holy.  Third, we are to conduct ourselves in the fear of the Lord while we live as pilgrims in this world.

It is this last command that is still in view in verse 18.  Part of what instructs our conduct in fearing the Lord is knowing just how we were and weren’t redeemed.

Let’s look at our passage.

Conduct yourself in fear during the time of your pilgrimage in this world (v. 18-21)

It is easy to think of how our redemption leads to joy and happiness.  However, Peter wants us to contemplate how it leads to a fear of the Lord.

Let me remind us of what the fear of the Lord means.  Anyone who is an enemy of God should be terrified of Him because He is holy and will not put up with our wickedness.  However, God is also merciful and desires to redeem us out of our wickedness and the consequences it brings to us and the people around us.

For the one who believes God, the fear of the Lord is the desire not to be separated from God anymore.  I fear life without the Greatest Good in the universe being favorable to me.  It also is the fear of rejecting the great love that God has given to us in Jesus.  I don’t want to live life without a love that would lay itself down for me even while I was a sinner.

What does Peter mean by telling us that we were redeemed?

Redemption is the action required in order to restore the things that have been lost for a person.  Sin has cost humanity dearly, and it has dearly cost each of us as individuals.  We lost an earthly paradise.  We lost a perfect union with God.  We lost an earth that was designed to cooperate with humanity. 

Even those who lived a life of faith in God would find themselves stuck in the grave (the holding place for human spirits who had died).  Though some people were clearly worse than others, all people were guilty of sin against God without exception.  In fact, the Bible does not hide the fact that the heroes of the faith were not perfect.

This created an impasse where God wants to save those who have trusted in Him despite their failures, and yet, it would be unjust simply to do so.  It would also be a problem for God’s nature.  He is holy.  How could He dwell eternally with sinful people, no matter how good they looked next to others?  He made us to dwell with Him, but we had lost that ability. 

This is where Peter reminds us that God did not redeem us with silver and gold, as is often the case among humans.  When he redeemed Ruth, Boaz had to cover the price of the land that had been sold (or more properly, leased).  Of course, he also married her in order to “raise up” a son for her dead husband whose line was in danger of being extinguished.

However, no amount of money, silver, or gold can remove our sins from us and the guilt that goes along with them.  In order to regain our lost status as the children of God, our lost relationship with God, and our lost dominion over the earth, we needed God to help us because we were in a position of helplessness.

The world today is full of men and women seeking to take dominion of the earth through their wealth (silver and gold).  On top of this, they seek to set themselves up as the gods of this world.  All of this is done in the face of the One True God.

Peter then mentions that we are being redeemed from the “futile way of life inherited from [our] forefathers.”  Thus, redemption is not just what we are getting back.  It is also about the powerless position that we leave behind us.  This is not just about the ultimate powerless position of being stuck in the grave after death but is also about the way of life that Adam and Eve enjoyed in the Garden, a life of fellowship, provision, perfect-imaging, dominion, and freedom.  Instead of these things, we have degenerated into a way of living that was handed down to us by our forefathers.

How can a person be broken free from the prison of futility that they inherited from their forefathers?  The Gentiles had inherited a religious system of worshipping the fallen Elohim as if they were gods.  This system was full of further ways to sin against the creator through sexual immorality, sacrificing humans (even children), and placing created things above the true Creator.  They had also inherited a political system that looked to special men to save this with the help of those weak, pretender gods.  They also inherited a system of social relationships that was built upon who had power and who didn’t.

Even Israel had taken the Law of God and encased it in a multitude of traditions that trapped them in futility (i.e., ways that are powerless to do anything of value).  Without God, we are trapped in a life of wasting away in a bondage that He didn’t make for us.  In fact, gold and silver (wealth) are often at the root of this bondage.

We are in the same position today without Jesus.  Our republic was built upon the foundation of faith in Jesus Christ, but over time, we have created ways of doing economics, politics, business, religion, and relationships, that are not God’s ways.  They are thus futile in the end.  Jesus is redeeming us out of these broken, human-made systems.

How can a person be broken free from their life of futility inherited from their fathers?  They can only do so by the grace of God.

Having spoken about what was not used to redeem us, Peter then points to the reality that God redeemed us with the blood of Jesus Christ, the precious, unblemished, and spotless lamb.

The blood of Jesus is precious because he is the only human who has perfectly imaged the Father and is worthy of receiving all that has been lost by humanity.  It is unblemished because he did not give in to the desires of his flesh, the desires of the world around him, or the temptations of the devil.  Peter is basically letting us know that Jesus is like a perfect, sacrificial lamb, spotless.  His death was a worthy sacrifice that was acceptable to God and made atonement, or a covering, for all our sin.

There is no other person who has ever lived who fits the above description.  The fact that Jesus, who is the perfect, worthy one, who is favored of God, used his life to be a sacrifice instead of conquering and taking over the earth is completely contrary to how most humans think.

This is what John the Baptizer was referencing in John 1:29, “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!”  This is what Isaiah meant in Isaiah 53:7, right after he said that “All of us like sheep have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way…”  Jesus was the one who “like a lamb that is led to slaughter, and like a sheep that is silent before its shearers, so He did not open His mouth.”  Even further back, it is what Abraham meant in Genesis 22:8 when he answered Isaac’s question about where the lamb was for the burnt offering.  “God will provide for Himself the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.”

This miracle child was to be placed on the altar and sacrificed to God.  How could God ask such a thing?  It is clear in the story that God was not going to let Abraham go through it.  Yet, notice Abraham’s answer to his son.  Is Abraham lying to his son?  I don’t think so.  He had a relationship with the God of heaven, and he spoke by faith.  He didn’t know how God was going to do it, but God would keep His word to Abraham through Isaac, even though Isaac may be put to death.  The writer of the Hebrews says that Abraham believed that God would raise Isaac from the dead if He had to do so in order to keep His promise to Abraham.

What Abraham did that day was to be willing to act out something that God the Father was going to do in the future.  It became a template that would help us understand what God was doing later.  Jesus was the Lamb of God that was sacrificed on our behalf in order to cover our sins.

Peter then states that this perfect Lamb of God, Jesus, was foreknown by God before the foundations of the earth were laid.  God knew that there would be a rebellion if he made sentient beings who had free will.  Before He created humans, He already knew that the Eternal Son would have to take on human flesh and do for us what we could not do for ourselves, redeem humanity from its fall into corruption and out of close relationship with the Father.

Why did God wait 1,000s of years before He sent Jesus, as Peter says, “in these last times”?  There is wisdom in God first giving us a choice.  Will you trust Me or do you want to experience the knowledge of what is good and what is evil?  Of course, our choice was that we wanted to know.  The word for knowledge here is not about head knowledge.  It is about the knowledge that comes from experience.  By the time Jesus came, humans had experienced the depths of the folly of that choice.  We would be more open to God’s solution to our problem at that point than if He had sent Jesus down right away.

Over time, if we are listening, we come to see that evil is not just something that is in that person over there, but it is also in me.  It is not something that I can cover by simply being “better” than another person.  In fact, if Jesus had been revealed at the very beginning, then our following sin would have been ever worse.  God’s delay was actually a grace that helped us to understand the necessity of Jesus.

In the face of 1,000s of years of rebellion, God was faithful to give us grace in the man Jesus.  Why does He wait 1,000s of years after the sending of Jesus to bring sin on this planet to an end, fixing all things?  It is the redemptive grace of God.  He is not willing that anyone should perish.  So, He delays the day of judgment.  In the face of all the evil that humans do to us and all the wickedness that fallen angels and demons may produce, we are shown that God can be trusted to overturn it.

Peter ends with the reminder that putting our faith in Jesus is putting our faith in God the Father.  In Jesus, we who were not believers in God, i.e., were not living according to His ways, have become believers in Him.  To embrace Jesus in faith is to believe God the Father.  However, to reject Jesus in unbelief is to reject the Father.

Peter describes God the Father as the One who resurrected Jesus from the dead.  This is not a contradiction to the statement of Jesus that he had power to take up his own life after death.  If you pay attention to the words of Jesus in John 10:18, you will notice that he says, “I have authority to take it up again.  This commandment I have received from My Father.”  Jesus is authorized to take up his life again, i.e., he has been authorized by the Father.  Thus, both are true.  Jesus takes up his own life, but he does so as the perfectly obedient Son.

The plan and operation of the Father has always been through Jesus as the source of life.  This is part of the glory that Peter says the Father gave to Christ.  He was given the glory of being the first to raise from the dead (firstborn from the dead).  He was also given the glory of the only one to sit at the right hand of the Father.  He is also given the glory of the King of kings and the Lord of lords.  He also has the glory of the one who has brought many children of God into glory with him.

Peter then states that our faith and hope are in God the Father completely when we embrace the Son of His love.  It is He that will send the Lord Jesus to take up the kingdoms of the world.  It is also He that will give us the right to be perfected in order to stand at the side of Jesus Christ in His presence.

Knowing all that God has done in order to save us ought to put a reverent fear within our hearts.  How can I rebel against such love?  How can I do anything but bow the knee in awe, asking of the Lord Jesus, “Save me, please!”

Spiritual People 2 audio