1 Peter 5:10-14
We come to the end of Peter’s first letter. It has taken us a while to get here, and there is good and bad in that. It is good to take out time and think about what God is saying through Peter, but it can be bad because we forget what was said at the beginning of the letter.
In the closing of this letter, Peter is going to take our minds back to the beginning of what he said. Just as a refresher, here is what Peter commands the listeners to do. Peter is going to attempt to do just that here at the end. He will do that by revisiting the six major themes of this letter. As a reminder, here are the six themes identified at the beginning of this study.
- God’s grace in salvation
- God’s sovereignty
- God’s glory
- Union with Christ
- Suffering (including the necessity of it)
- God creating a holy people
Grace is the first theme that Peter is going to summarize here. What is grace? Grace represents anything that comes from God to human beings. We often think of grace as all the good things we get from God that we don’t deserve, but we also need to understand that the suffering we endure is also God’s grace because it serves to bring us closer to Him.
In this letter, Peter addressed “saving grace” in chapter 1. Through Christ, we find salvation in the present, and then when Jesus returns, we will realize this in its fullness. Peter has also addressed the grace of blessings that God bestows on us and the favor that God gives to those who are humble. Everything a believer needs is found in Christ Jesus.
The next theme Peter is going to remind us of is God’s sovereignty. It is God who called you to his eternal glory in Christ. How this calling works is one of the divine mysteries, and it is wise not to be too dogmatic about it. What matters is that God is sovereign and He is in control. How a person comes to Christ is of no importance; what matters is that they do, and once they do, their salvation is secure because it comes from God.
The third theme is in this phrase as well. Through God’s sovereignty, it brings eternal glory to Him. Glory represents all the honor, all the praise, and all the worship that is God’s now and forever. Only God deserves this glory. We get to participate in it for all of eternity because of Jesus.
The fourth theme is summarized by the words “in Christ.” This reminds us that we have a union with Jesus. Jesus is what unites us to both Himself and to the larger community of believers we call the church. We are the living stones united with the Cornerstone in chapter 2 to form one temple. In chapter 3, we do good deeds in Christ. Then in chapter 4, we participate in the sufferings of Christ. Now at the end, we are united with Christ in the glory that is to come.
The fifth theme was suffering, and Peter reminds us that all this happens “after you have suffered a little while.” This reminds us that we are strangers in this land, a land where we don’t really belong. As a result, we are going to experience suffering because Christ experienced suffering. We don’t seek it out, but at the same time, we don’t try to avoid it by doing what we think will end it quickly. We trust God has a plan and a purpose.
The last theme is of God creating a holy people. This is seen in the statement that Christ will Himself restore the believer. The word restore means to fix something that is broken. Because of sin, we are all broken, and it is only Christ’s suffering on the cross that can fix us. We are not holy because of anything we do, but because God declares His people to be holy. We are holy because He is holy. It is Christ who establishes us, strengthens us, and supports us during our suffering. Therefore, we must respond in an appropriate manner.
Peter then ends the letter with the statement, “To him be dominion forever. Amen.” I know there are a few more verses, but those are dealing with the distribution of the letter, and we will get to them in a moment. Here, Peter uses the word dominion. The NIV says “power,” and the KJV says “dominion and power.”
The point of this is to demonstrate that God is sovereign over all things. Everything that the Lord created is part of His dominion. He rules over everything, and there is nothing that He does not rule over. This is more than just a statement of fact, but is meant to be a word of encouragement.
In verse 12, we are introduced to a person named Silvanus, or Silas. This is probably the same person who travelled with Paul. When Peter says that it was through Silvanus that he wrote this letter, it could be that Silvanus is the one who actually put pen to paper, so to speak. Most authors employed someone to write the words they spoke. Whether Peter did or did not is not important, because they are still Peter’s words, inspired by the Holy Spirit.
What this more likely means, however, is that it is Silvanus who is delivering the letter to the church. Peter is letting the church know, in case someone doesn’t know who Silvanus is, that Peter considers him to be a faithful brother. Peter is putting his apostolic approval on Silvanus. It is also a polite way of saying, “listen to him as you would listen to me.” Peter then explains why he has written, which can be summed up in “Stand firm in the true grace of God!”
The ”She” is verse 13 is probably the Church. The fact that “she” is in Babylon just reminds all of us that we are strangers in a strange, and often hostile, land. He then sends a greeting from Mark, who is probably John Mark, the author of Mark’s Gospel. If this is true, and most scholars think so, then we understand how John Mark got the information to compose his Gospel account.
Peter closes with the command to greet each other with a kiss that might or might not be literal. We don’t have to kiss one another today, but it means to show intimacy and affection to other believers.