1 Peter 1

1 Peter 1:1-21

Division 1. (1 Peter 1:1-21.)Christians a new election, sustained by the power of God as sons, for an eternal inheritance. That Peter had distinctly reserved to him the character of the apostle of the circumcision is evident by the epistle to the Galatians, although he shared this apostleship with others; but he was the one identified with this ministry and giving character to it, as we have already seen in the end of the Gospel of John. Peter is, in fact, thus prominent in the commencement of the Acts, although James comes into this place towards the latter part of it; being, no doubt, alone present in Jerusalem at the time of the history. Peter’s connection here with Israel scattered and in foreign lands is evidenced by the way in which he addresses them. It is not needless, perhaps, to remind ourselves how ritualism, with its so-called “voice of the Church,” has perverted the facts. According to it, Peter is the head of the Gentile Church instead of the Jewish; whose place, therefore, must be found somehow at Rome, rather than at Jerusalem. Characteristic enough it is, when we realize the departure from Paul that had already set in before his death, that the true apostle of the Gentiles is almost nowhere in this account.

Certainly the truth he gives is almost entirely obscured by this system, even to justification by faith itself, while the thought of the Church as the body of Christ is obscured and degraded to the lowest conception possible. The Church outside of the New Testament is from the beginning Jewish, sacramental, hierarchical -a Church such as that which in Smyrna the Lord disclaims as not that of His true, called-out ones, but the promiscuous gathering together of a people who are in this character as the mere work of the adversary, Satan’s synagogue. That which is said to be the oldest document that we have in this way, The teaching of the Twelve Apostles," is thoroughly of this character. It is striking in this connection that Peter, -to whom it seems we are to listen as the first infallible head of the Church, -is the very one whom God has chosen to announce two things which destroy the whole of ritualism down to its foundation: that is, in the first place, that new birth is (not by baptism, but) by the word of God, which in the gospel is preached unto us; and, in the second place, that all Christians are “a holy priesthood to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ.” Peter, as we see strikingly maintains his character as the apostle of the circumcision in this epistle of his; but this, of necessity, therefore, takes very much the character of contrast between the Old Testament people of God and the New. Paul is the one who decisively calls the true believers to take their place outside the camp with Christ, who is outside it; but Peter, no less, would remind them that they are, as already said, a new election, and begotten by the resurrection of Christ to the inheritance reserved in heaven for them, such as Israel knew nothing of. The prophets of the Old Testament he declares spoke better than they knew; but we have the joy of having the message, their message, fully told out to us, preached now “with the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven.”

1. Peter writes, as we have seen, to “the sojourners of the dispersion,” the scattered remnant of Israel; the only true remnant now being those who have received their Messiah in the Person of Christ. God has in their case come in to substitute for the old promises, which they have lost in the national rejection of Him, new and higher ones. They are elect as Israel was elect, but now, “according to the foreknowledge of God the Father,” a foreknowledge which implies the certainty of the blessing for them. They are individually thus foreknown, and by One who has taken now distinctly the character of Father, of which His relationship to Israel, as nationally His first-born was but the mere shadow. After all, they had not, as we know, the Spirit Of adoption.

Their relationship implied no security, no soul-salvation, nothing which went with them -except as to the responsibility of it -into that eternity into which they necessarily passed under that shadow of death, which was, in fact, the legal condemnation as well as the natural one -a sentence which, as we know, the law affirmed, but could not lift. But this present remnant were elect “through sanctification of the Spirit unto obedience;” thus there was nothing simply conditional, but all had been secured to them by absolute grace. They were set apart to God, not by external privileges, marking them out from the nations round about, but by the Spirit of God, working in heart and life to form them after the pattern of One who was Himself the One absolutely obedient. They were sanctified unto the obedience of Jesus Christ. It is important for us to realize that the obedience here was not, therefore, the obedience simply of a checked will, such a restraint as the law, for instance, might be -a limit not to be transgressed. It is an obedience which in Him gave the whole life its practical character: “Lo, I come to do Thy will, O God.” That was the sole purpose of His being here at all. Within the bounds of law men might claim a certain liberty of their own. If they did not pass the limit, they were free within it; but here there was no limit; and more, there was no desire for anything which was not obedience itself. God’s will is seen in it to be that which is the perfection of blessing. The path formed by it is a path, therefore, from which none that know it could desire to stray -a path formed by infinite love and wisdom, for us guarded also by almighty power.

What ideal could one have of happiness beyond walking in such a way? The child’s obedience as such is not legal.

It is the obedience of love, while it is not the limited obedience of a servant merely, but an entire, whole-hearted surrender to what is indeed only the desire of a love that embraces all things in it. For us, of necessity, there has to go with this “the sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ.” There is, alas, still that which needs removal from before God, which only the blood of Christ could accomplish. Thus the two things go fittingly together in this place.* To these Peter addresses himself with the desire that grace and peace may be multiplied to them. The sense of what God has done for them lifts his heart up to the One who has done it, “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,” who has begotten them, “according to His great mercy,” to “a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from among the dead.” The death of Christ, of Israel’s Messiah, a death at the hands of the people for whom He came, was their forfeiture of all blessing; it was the end of every claim that they had upon God. His resurrection was, therefore, a begetting again to “a living hope,” a hope abiding in the living Person of Him who has arisen. Earth indeed was closed to them, but there stretched before them the glorious view of a better inheritance, “incorruptible” because “undefiled,” and always abiding in the freshness which so soon passes from the enjoyment of anything here, -this inheritance preserved now in heaven for those themselves preserved, -“guarded by the power of God through faith” on to the complete deliverance awaiting them.

Faith is here seen upon the Godward side of it, not merely upon the human. It is the means by which the power of God keeps them.

Here, evidently, all is in designed contrast with Israel’s portion as they had yet enjoyed it, and in its heavenly character in contrast with any blessing even conditionally promised them. From any point of view, it is rendered absolutely secure; while, on the other hand, the deliverance which was constantly looked for in Israel, the ready hand of God in delivering them from their earthly foes, and even from the many evils which sin has made common in the present life, is, as we may say, conspicuously absent from what the apostle speaks of. It is not, of course, that God’s care over His own can possibly fail in time or in eternity, but that, nevertheless, there is ordained for us, as for Him who has gone before us, (perfect in the same path,) in the world, tribulation, with the joyful certainty, which brings peace to the soul, that He has overcome the world.
2. He now goes on to speak of the contrast which must needs abide between the present time and the blessed end to which they are looking. The joy they have is not lessened, but in some sense heightened even, by the trial -this itself, while being only for a time, having its own necessity in the proving of their faith. This involves, indeed, the trial being felt as trial. Christians are not ordained to float over everything, as it were, without feeling it. It would have no meaning or purpose if this were so.

The trial worketh, as the apostle has told us in Hebrews, “the peaceable fruits of righteousness to those who are exercised thereby.” The exercise, therefore, is necessary; -it may be the being left for a while to wonder, therefore, what the trial means, -sometimes only to learn in it the patience which belongs to those who are under the Father’s hand, and for whom every cup they drain is mixed by a Father’s love. It is not discipline that the apostle speaks of here so much, but rather the opportunity that faith has to show itself, and to find recognition of God in the time when everything will be made manifest -a faith which is, as he observes here, “more precious than the gold that perisheth, even though it be proved by fire.” The fire would not prove that the gold was not gold.

It would only bring that out more certainly; and if it were not gold in the estimation of the Prover, there would be no good in the proving.* God proves, that He may draw from us that which He sees is there, and which He desires to be able to put to our account; and in the joy as well as in the trial faith has to be in constant activity, Christ as the object of the heart being One in whom faith alone finds deliverance from the power of things around; “whom,” says the apostle, “having not seen, ye love; in whom, though now ye see Him not, yet believing, ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory.” “Glorified,” the last word is -already entering into that which is to come. The joy of eternity is the joy of the present, and we receive in due time the end of faith, the soul’s deliverance from all that here assails and afflicts. If we always regarded trials as the apostle teaches us here to regard them, how different oftentimes would they seem to us! The enemy would use them to create distrust of the perfect wisdom or the perfect love which is employed about us, or to fix our minds even unhealthily, it may be, upon ourselves. For, as the apostle’s thorn in the flesh reminds us, even that which is true discipline for us by the way is not necessarily the result of actual failure on our part, although it does show us needs we have, to which the discipline is meant to minister. But self-occupation is never God’s design in it. If we have learnt how God has already proclaimed the hopelessness of the flesh, and given us deliverance from it, the end of self-judgment itself is only to turn us from ourselves, and to occupy us with this one unfailing Object of which the apostle has been speaking -with the brightness and not with the darkness -with the glory of God already revealed to us in the face of Jesus Christ, the light shining more and more upon the road which leads to Himself.
3. We have now the difference between the past and the present time pointed out in another way. The prophets of Israel all prophesied of the blessing that was to come, while being themselves unable to realize more than dimly that of which they spoke, and even the time to which it pointed. They were attracted, sought diligently, and searched out what was in their own writings -so little was that which they wrote measured by their understanding of things; so entirely did the Spirit of Christ carry them beyond anything which might even be the occasion of their prophecies. The answer that they got to their searching was simply the assurance that they were speaking of things which belonged to others, and not to themselves. We can see in such an one as Daniel a plain example of this, where that which was communicated to him was “shut up and sealed till the time of the end.” At the end it would speak, and not lie; and in the time to come he would stand in his lot and enter into the enjoyment of that which as yet he could not in the same sense enjoy, except as being consciously the instrument of the Spirit to give forth these things for others.* How different the condition now, when Christians in common enjoy the blessedness of the Holy Spirit sent down from heaven, and “the sufferings of Christ and the glories to follow” begin to unfold themselves even in the gospel sent abroad amongst men, with the virtue of these things in it!

Even the very angels desire to look into these things, the words showing that even these blessed beings could not know, as the partakers of redemption know, the fulness of what is now the common portion of the saints. How wonderful, then, the blessing that is ours; how sorrowful to think that we should so often, in practice, find so little of all that is here implied! These angels, bending down to look into the things with which we have been brought into such intimate contact -how they reprove us for the slight hold that at the best they have of us!
4. The apostle insists now upon the effect that there is to be of all this upon the practical life. The loins of the mind are to be girt up by the truth, the common figure which speaks of the activity which is called for from us, the result of a mind set upon things unseen. The result is sobriety as to the present. The roseate color passes from the things around as a necessity of the glory revealed and enjoyed -the hope fixed upon the grace to be brought at the revelation of Christ, when all, indeed, will be manifest as grace and nothing else; when the full power of that shall be realized by us. As a consequence, for the present time we are to be as obedient children, a character which has been already enlarged upon for us -not conforming ourselves to the former lusts in the time of ignorance, when the heart, unsatisfied with God, went out after that which only begot further craving, but never satisfied.

We have been called out of all that the light from heaven has revealed in its true character, to be holy, separate from evil, as God Himself is holy. We are to be in fellowship with Him; holy, therefore, in all our behavior, with nothing lax about us, nothing unsuited to the company into which we are brought. 5. There results, therefore, from the fact that we have a Father, that there must be with us the judgment of a Father, who, because He loves and has the deepest personal interest in His children, of necessity has before Him all that they are doing, all that they are occupied with. There is nothing but what is a matter of interest to Him, and as those who are His own they must reflect His character. This is what Jacob learned at Bethel -that if God in His grace has a dwelling-place with men, there must of necessity be the holiness which be comes His dwelling-place. He governs His house.* The government is in grace, as it must be to be that of a Father, and yet it is all the more even to be treated in the most serious manner. Those who would treat grace lightly cannot know it.

We are to pass the time of our “sojourning here in fear,” with the very consciousness of being redeemed, “not with corruptible things, silver or gold, but by the precious blood of Christ.” Redemption is that which shows the value God has set upon us, and “the precious blood of Christ” as the price of redemption, how, indeed, has it shown this! But, then, it speaks of necessity also of a condition out of which we needed to be redeemed.

We have been away from God; we need the bringing back, and to be with Him, therefore, as thus brought back. Here Peter glances at the vain traditions received by Israel from their fathers, and which, while they were the sign of being really away from God, only carried them still further and further away. What, indeed, could all the frivolous and minute ordinances of the Rabbins make known to them of the God who was thus identified with all these narrow restrictions, laying upon men a burden that not any of them could lift? How gloriously has He been revealed in Him through whom now we have learnt, indeed, a God in whom we may trust -One to whom the whole history of the world points, and all God’s dealings in it, now manifest in resurrection from the dead and with a place given Him of God, a blessed place, which identifies God Himself with the salvation and blessing of His people, so that faith and hope might not rest short of Him! How well we remember the aim of Christ continually thus to glorify the Father, speaking words given to Him, doing things appointed for Him, One who could say of Himself: He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father," Himself the visible expression of God, the radiance of His glory. Tradition cannot live in the presence of One thus positively known and enjoyed as a living God for the soul. \

1 Peter 1:22-2

Division 2. (1 Peter 1:22-25; 1 Peter 2:1-10.)New Testament relationships, in place of the Old Testament ones forfeited and broken off. We are still led on by the apostle to contemplate these New Testament relationships which are ours in still fuller contrast with those Old Testament ones now broken off. Between the new covenant and the old, all, as we know, is contrast; and the apostle now goes on to dwell upon that rejection of Christ as the Living Stone, the Foundation of all that abiding nearness to men which a house amongst men implies -a rejection which necessarily set aside the Jewish builders as entirely incompetent. But Israel had failed long before this, and even from the beginning, as their priesthood in one family only constantly bore witness. Instead of being nationally brought near to God, as He would have it and as His very speech with them at mount Sinai bore witness, they had chosen a place of distance from Him, and had to be left, as a consequence, in that place which they had chosen. God has now come in to fulfil all these things in a better and more perfect way.

1. The apostle first of all speaks here of the company into which faith introduces the soul. The only purification of it is “by obedience to the truth,” a truth which disperses the shadows and sets aside all the perversions of the adversary and deceiver. Thus they had come into connection with those who had been begotten by the same truth, “born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible,” by the living and abiding word of God. Here, indeed, was a brotherhood which had never had in Israel -could not as yet have -its proper recognition. The children of God were by the legal system scattered abroad." Even in Israel they were so; while, of course, outside of Israel there were still souls that sought God according to the light they had.

Israel could not gather these. It was itself but a mixture of the true and the false, and thus it could not gather to itself the true out of the false.

There was no power as yet for any proper discrimination. This is the misery of all mixtures, and which the confusion which obtains in Christendom at the present time should make us, indeed, realize. How blessed a company of those drawn together by ardent desire for the same things, by the enjoyment of the same blessings, by their allegiance to the same revelation, to God perfectly revealed as He is now revealed, so as to attract and fill the heart with Himself! Here love can indeed flow out. There is nothing to check it. There is no matter, so far as this character is retained, for selfish strife with one another.

The objects enjoyed are the possession of all alike, and the enjoyment of them by one only enhances, and cannot hinder, the joy of others. Here, then, was indeed an essential difference between the company of Christians and the nation of Israel.

We have gone back indeed, in various degrees, to that old company, as if, after all, we had tasted the new wine but to say, the old is better." We have even taken, in measure at least, the Israelitish community (with, more or less, its ordinances as well) as that which God has designed for His people all the way through. We have introduced a fancied regeneration by baptism to manufacture fictitious children of God, who have none of the reality; and then we have invoked the judgment of charity not to distinguish between the manufactured Christians and the true ones! The effect has necessarily followed; and “because iniquity abounds” in consequence “the love of many,” even among the true children of God, has “grown cold.” There is a lack of communion amongst the people of God; for communion with the world is absolutely incompatible with this. The true birth, -as Peter shows us here, -the true entrance into the family, is by the reception of the living and abiding word of God,* “the word which by the gospel is proclaimed.” There can be no possibility, one would say, of confounding this with any result whatever of an ordinance. Here alone is the secret of that which, as eternal life, abides. Those who receive it belong no more, in this way, to that flesh which “is as grass, and all the glory of it but as the flower of grass.” That which is merely natural withers and its flower falls, “but the word of the Lord abideth forever.” Thank God for Peter’s testimony!

Let those who profess so much obedience to Peter listen to it! They will find here not only an authoritative Word, but that which finds, most of all, its authority in the sweetness of the truth which is proclaimed.

Born again by the gospel good-news, what gladness and happiness does this infer for the life into which we enter!* *Let it be noted what light this verse throws upon the subject of new birth -it is “by the word of God.” That it is a sovereign act of God, by His Spirit, none can question. But this verse forbids us from separating, as has sometimes been done, new birth from faith in the gospel. It has been taught that new birth precedes faith; here we are told that the word of God is the instrument in new birth. “Faith cometh by hearing and hearing by the word of God,” “the word which by the gospel is preached.” Thus while we can distinguish between faith and new birth, we cannot separate them. John 3:3; John 3:16, must ever go together. There is no such anomaly possible as a man born again, but who has not yet believed the gospel. -S.R.
2. The apostle goes on, therefore, to insist upon this word of God, to which we owe everything, as still being the essential need for us, that we may “grow up by it,” as the expression is here, “unto salvation.” It is a strange expression apparently, as we first think of it -a growth unto salvation; but the salvation here is, of course, that final salvation of which he has already spoken, as what is ready to be revealed in its fulness in the last time. There is a salvation which the gospel brings, and with which we begin; but salvation is needed also all along the road; and as long as we are in the body, by that very fact, we need salvation still. “We look for the Lord Jesus Christ as Saviour, who shall change our body of humiliation into the likeness of His own glorious body, according to the working whereby He is able to subdue even all things to Himself.” But still, a growth unto salvation deserves serious consideration. Growth is that which is proper to life. The accretion of matter in a stone, for instance, is not “growth.” Salvation, in the thought which we are getting of it here, is, in fact, more and more known as we grow in the apprehension of the things which are revealed to us, and which separate us more and more, therefore, from everything that is inconsistent with them. Thus, at the outset we are called to lay aside “all malice and all guile, and hypocrisies and envies and all evil-speakings” -things which cannot possibly consist with the enjoyment and pursuit of the truth; and we are always to be, as to the word of God, like babes just born, who crave, as the one thing necessary to them, the milk which God has provided for them.

Here we must remember that we are not in the line of that which Paul says to the Corinthians, where he reproaches them as being such that have need of milk only, in opposition to solid food. The Corinthians were babes indeed, but they were babes when they ought to have been far beyond this.

They were babes because growth was stunted with them through their carnality. A true babe is not “carnal,” and can never be; but here we are to be only in one character like babes, and, indeed, babes “new-born.” Even the Corinthians were not babes “new-born.” That was the evil of it, that they were babes that were not new-born; but we are to be always, “as new-born babes,” just in the simplicity of our craving for that which as milk God has provided for us in His own precious Word, to sustain a growth which is continual in one who is the possessor of eternal life. While we are here, if Christians and in a right condition, we are continually growing. We have to grow up, all of us, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ." Which of us has attained it? In this sense we are, after all, all of us but as babes “new-born;” and in this character God has provided for us, in His word, that which has all the elements proper for nourishment in it, as milk has. The Word, the whole of it, the deepest things in it, is thus pure milk, and only milk.

There is nothing to be rejected; there is only that which enters into the constitution of the Christian -as we may say, becomes really part of himself. How beautiful in that way this figure of milk, and how earnest the craving which is here implied, and which we are exhorted to, for that which can thus minister to all the necessities of our nature!

Let us desire it earnestly, says the apostle, if we have tasted that the Lord is good. Have we tasted this? If so, can we make light of the precious Word, which is indeed the provision which God has made, in His goodness, for our souls?*
3. We come now to that rejection of the Living Stone on the part of Israel, which disqualified them as the builders of God’s spiritual house. It was about those who were prominently builders that the Lord spoke at the time of His last proffer of Himself to them as Israel’s King, as well as of their foreseen rejection of it. In a matter of such fundamental importance it was necessary that God should have provided for His people the assurance of what was coming with regard to those to whom they looked as their spiritual guides. “The house of God” was that which distinguished Israel from all the nations of the earth. It was that dwelling-place of God with man which, although as yet only in type, declared the desire of His heart to be with man abidingly. Thus it was the place of that glory which, though already unseen by man, yet Ezekiel saw, as having lingered with them in love as long as possible, until finally forced out by their abominations.

Yet their house, as we know, was not, after the manner in which the apostle speaks here, a “spiritual house.” It was “a house made with hands,” which could not, therefore, set forth God’s design in the full way in which He desired. Forsaken of God, it became, like a vacant tomb, the witness only of the life which had departed.

Yet God could not give up His thought. Thus, He who came seeking God’s treasure upon earth always proclaimed that house (though in the idea of it, not the then reality) His Father’s house; and it was there that He presented Himself when He came as King to His own, and His own refused Him. It was then entirely their own house (Matthew 23:38) which He had to leave desolate. But God had not given up His thought; and, driven back in His love, He only, according to His constant manner, declared that love, and the purpose of it, in a fuller way than ever. Thus the Lord could say to them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will build it up; but He spake of the temple of His body.” In Him was indeed the perfect Witness of what was in the divine heart, and that for man; and in Him God really possessed a dwelling-place among men that could not be set aside. He was indeed rejected, and as such went back to the Father; nevertheless, the divine thought was not thus frustrated, but as the fruit of His own work the Spirit of God came down upon earth to build a habitation for God which should never cease to be this.

The house was now “a spiritual house.” The Lord had spoken of it to Peter when He said that upon that Rock which Peter had confessed, He would build His assembly; but as yet the thought of a habitation of God could not come fully out. Peter now explains the Lord’s word to him, as we see here, in the clearest way.

He sets aside all possibility of men saying, with any real semblance of truth, that Peter was himself the foundation of what the Lord spoke. It is Christ, he says, who is the Living Stone, the Foundation upon whom alone the living stones (of whom was Peter himself, according to the meaning of his name) are built up. The living stones here are the assurance of the Lord’s promise that the gates of Hades should not prevail against that which He would build. They live in a power of life which cannot be touched of death; and of Himself also was this true, who, if He went down into death, was only to lay there the foundation of all blessing, and to reveal in Himself that which abolished death and brought “life and incorruption to light through the gospel.” Thus, the whole building stands upon this Foundation, which is that from the beginning, “chosen of God” as “precious,” and now in the present time revealing, as the apostle says directly, its preciousness. The house is “a spiritual house,” the fulfilment of the promise by the prophet: “I will dwell in them and walk in them:” the Spirit of God filling and energizing that in which He dwells, so that it is not a mere shrine of the Spirit, but itself a spiritual reality; and this connects, according to the thought which we have already traced in Hebrews (Hebrews 3:1-19), of a “spiritual house,” with a “holy priesthood.” Here we have the activity of those brought near to God in this way. They are revealed as those who, while God manifests Himself in them, have themselves, as one may say, their faces Godward and in their hearts the Spirit of relationship -a holy priesthood, capable, therefore, of this, with spiritual sacrifices now replacing the sacrifices of old, acceptable to God by Him who has made, once for all, that which was the true sacrifice in atonement for sin.

Thus, the altar stands only inside the house now, the antitype of that golden altar which was in Israel’s sanctuary. The brazen altar has had its fulfilment, and has thus disappeared, while the power of that acceptable sacrifice, which abides ever in its value before God, is that by which all spiritual offerings alone become acceptable.

The incense upon the unbloody altar is the witness of One come up out of death, who is before God for us, in whom we stand, and in whom all acceptance is. Here, says the apostle, is the fundamental fulfilment of that scripture, “Behold, I lay in Sion a corner Stone, elect, precious, and he that believeth on Him shall not be ashamed.” But to the prophet was not revealed as yet the wondrous preciousness which belongs in its full value now to those who believe; and here is one of those things in which the prophets of old predicted, as Peter has just said to us, things that went beyond their own intelligence, and which they realized to have respect, in their full meaning, to others than themselves. Alas, to Israel, that Stone which the builders rejected, while it has become, indeed, “the Head of the corner,” yet is but “a Stone of stumbling and a Rock of offence to those who stumble at the Word, being disobedient.” This, too, had been appointed, for it followed of necessity from the very blessedness of that which was in it -grace revealed to a carnal people who had built themselves up in pride of heart against it. It was the necessary result, they being what they were, that they stumbled at the Word through the spirit of disobedience which was in their heart, and there was no help indeed if the very wonder of God’s grace was that which made them stumble.*
The apostle returns from this to contemplate with satisfaction how God nevertheless has carried out His thoughts in a more wonderful way. They were themselves now the partakers of those blessings which God had proffered to Israel of old, but which had so manifestly been without avail for them. “Ye shall be to Me,” He had said, “a kingdom of priests, a holy nation.” It was necessary for them to be the latter in order to be the former. It was only in the white robe which typified the purity required by God that even the typical high priest could draw near to Him; but it was not therefore the nation that drew near. The nation and the priesthood became emphatically distinguished from one another, while the priest himself could no more really draw nigh. There was but the witness of that which was in God’s thoughts, along with the witness that as yet it was not a practical reality. Now God has accomplished this.

Christians have become this holy nation, -not one of the nations of the earth, -and a royal priesthood, more even than was offered to Israel -a people who are not only priests but kings, a people thus for God’s possession, such as He can openly manifest as His and claim by the Spirit indwelling them, a people able to set forth the virtues of Him who has called them out of darkness into His own marvelous light -no earthly one, but the light of His own Presence revealed to those brought nigh. Here are those to whom the words of the prophet could be applied, a people “who once were not a people, but are now the people of God; who once had not obtained mercy, but now have obtained mercy.” This does not, of course, set aside the application of such a promise to Israel themselves in days to come; but God has left in it a largeness which gives room for us also, who were indeed in God’s thoughts before ever the earth was, and in whom God has, more than Israel themselves can ever manifest it, shown the unchanging character of His purpose.