1 Peter 2:1-10: The House

Introduction

Have you ever built a house?

If you haven’t, you’ve missed an experience.

When Vickie and I lived on the Gulf Coast, we bought our first home. The problem was it was not yet built. We saw houses built by a particular builder and wanted to buy one, but it was already spoken for. However, he said, I have another lot near here, and we could build you a house on that property.

We agreed, and the process began.

Every morning, I would get out of bed and ride a bicycle over the lot to watch the progress. Bulldozers cleared the land, and backhoes dug the foundation. Concrete filled the hole.

It did not look like much then.

But then, the wall framing started, and shape began to emerge. Step by step, the house took place. And the day came when we moved in. We raised our kids in that house and wept when we left it.

People are not the only builders of houses. God built a house as well. Peter remembered the words of Jesus in response to his confession that Jesus was the Son of God.

“And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock, I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” (Matthew 16:18, ESV)

God was building a church, one that would stand any onslaught or assault thrown against it. What would it take to have a house like that?

Peter describes it in today’s lesson.

Discussion

Background

As we make our way through 1 Peter, it is vital to remember Peter’s point driving home. We are pilgrims in this world, strangers in a strange land. Christians in his time faced devastating persecution. They lost homes, jobs, and possessions and faced ridicule and death itself. They smelled its smoke before feeling its fire.

How do you prepare people for the problems of life? How do you encourage in the most discouraging of circumstances?

And, more importantly, what did God put into place to help them withstand the coming terror to maintain faith in a hostile world?

The Preparation

No one builds a house by going to a hardware store, buying some lumber and nails, and just start swinging hammers. For a house to last, it takes some preparation. That is true about the house God builds.

The tragedy of our modern English translations is the way scholars of the past divided chapters and verses. It leaves us believing that new thoughts are beginning when it is really a continuation of an idea.

That’s true in this lesson. Our first three verses continue a thought started at the end of chapter 1.

“Having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth for a sincere brotherly love, love one another earnestly from a pure heart,” (1 Peter 1:22, ESV)

Peter continues to discuss this sincere and earnests love for our brothers and sisters. What do we need to sincerely love others?

First, we must rid ourselves of some attitudes and behaviors.

“So put away all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander.” (1 Peter 2:1, ESV)

Peter tells us what has to happen. We have to take off the dirty clothing of our past and dispose of it.

One year, I went to Nicaragua and found a problem. One day was spent at a clinic in which the dust blew. When I unpacked at home, the jeans had dirt all in the fibers. I washed them, and the dirt had embedded itself and would not come out.

That’s what happens with the attitudes of a sinful life. They don’t come clean with reform. Instead, you just throw the dirty stuff away because there’s no way to clean it up.

What’s standing in the way of sincere love?

Malice. It’s the general term for evil in the ancient world and encompasses the remaining traits Peter discusses.

Hypocrisy is hiding behind that mask of goodness without any desire or intention of doing better. It is fooling others for your own advantage. A salesman doesn’t care about you but acts like your best friend. That’s hypocrisy designed to fool another.

Envy is, as one writer put it, the last sin to die. It is wanting what someone has and, if you cannot have it, you don’t want them to have it.

Peter knew it well. He felt it on the road in Mark 10. James and John beat their fellow disciples to the punch by asking for the prime positions in this coming kingdom. The disciples (including Peter) grumbled because they wanted the prime spots.

Envy always seeks its own way to the hurt and detriment of others. It is a spiritual python that strangles the soul.

Slander is damaging someone with words. It is a sinister and damning gossip done quietly behind someone’s back. If I can malign another, I can have a step upon them.

These are the daggers that kill Christian love and unity. They are the opposite of God’s love for us.

And even though the new birth gives you a fresh start, there are some old ways that Christians take to the trash.

Spiritual life abhors a vacuum. You cannot empty something out without filling it with something better. If not, as the story of the demons says too well, the old will return with a vengeance.

Peter says we need to replace the self-desire with another thirst, another appetite.

“Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up into salvation—” (1 Peter 2:2, ESV)

This is not a growth chart saying that “some Christians who are younger in the faith” need to do this. It is different than the words of Hebrews 6, which draws a contrast between immature and mature.

Here, the comparison is that all Christians should have the appetite of a newborn.

Parents of a new baby understand it well. All the kid wants to do is eat. He cannot wait. When he is hungry, he lets you know. Feed me.

Peter says that we need to long for the pure spiritual milk. If you return to the end of chapter 1, it is clear what the milk is. It is the word of God.

But Peter says something about it.

First, it is pure.

When wheat reached harvest, it would be tossed in the air on a high hill to let the wind blow away the chaff. Pure means wheat without chaff. In God’s word, there is nothing to sidetrack faith. When you read it, you hear not the muttered static of men but the clear signal of God.

Second, Peter calls it “spiritual.”

We might think we know what this means. The Greek word forms our English expression “logic.” This is the logic. The Greeks of the times said this was the divine reason that governs all things.

If you wanted to know the truth of all things, the word does that.

But Peter also says there should be a “longing.” In Psalm 42:1, the Greek version of the Old Testament applies this term to “the deer panting for the water.” It is a thirst that must be satisfied.

In one of my churches, we had a boy with a brain tumor that caused strange behavior. It created an overwhelming thirst. He would drink anything. When nothing suitable was available, he would drink pickle juice. His family had to padlock the refrigerator to prevent him from getting to things.

That’s the same drive we should have. Those whose thirst is slaked by God’s truth love people better. God gets into their lives in such a way they act like him.

The House

Based on this sincere love, God can build his house. In the remainder of this lesson, Peter describes this house and how God constructed it.

We see the “building blocks” of this house.

“As you come to him, a living stone rejected by men but in the sight of God chosen and precious, you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.” (1 Peter 2:4–5, ESV)

The first critical piece is a stone that holds it together.

The Cornerstone

Every building has something to carry the load. Ancient buildings had a particular stone. It was either a stone that formed the base or a stone placed at the top of the arch to keep it from falling.

Peter says there is a “living stone.”

Today, the temple that Jesus went to in Jerusalem is mainly gone, except for a single wall. At the base of that wall is a massive stone of granite, moved hundreds of miles. It is so large, it will not move.

But it’s just granite. God put something else in place.

The Psalmist said:

“The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.” (Psalm 118:22, ESV)

He originally spoke of the stone as the nation of Israel. The world saw it as useless, but God took it to become the cornerstone of his plan.

Then, Jesus quoted the same passage but applied it differently.

“Have you never read in the Scriptures: “‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes’?” (Matthew 21:42, ESV)

Standing in the shadow of the temple building, Jesus took the Psalmist’s verse and replaced the stone with himself. He was there, and the people were seeing God’s grand plan coming together.

This stone is different. Men took a cursory look at Jesus and judged him unworthy to be the Messiah. But God saw it differently. God saw Jesus as of the highest value. Heaven’s valuations are different than man’s.

For many, Jesus stood in the way of their images of power and earthly glory. Peter would say:

“and “A stone of stumbling, and a rock of offense.” They stumble because they disobey the word, as they were destined to do.” (1 Peter 2:8, ESV)

The Jewish leaders and the Greek philosophers saw Jesus as a small stone to be overlooked. But he stood in their path, and they could never get past him. They caught their high-minded ideas and preconceived notions on the truth that Jesus presented.

The world doesn’t think much of Christ. He is, at best, an equal among others. But many, like Thomas Jefferson, thought of him in a mythic way since no one could do miracles. The Jewish leaders tried to crucify him out of existence, and the Romans wanted to persecute him away. Yet, God took Christ himself and put him at the foundation. He built the church on top of that. He saw him as valuable when the world looked at him as weak and insignificant. Heaven’s valuations are different than man’s.

If you take Christ out of the equation, as many people try to do, God’s people simply fall apart.

The Stones

While God laid a stone as a foundation, he was not finished. He only put in place the foundation. On top of that, he is building a different kind of building.

“you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.” (1 Peter 2:5, ESV)

The Christians are the other stones, the living ones.

In every part of the empire, massive religious structures stood. Jerusalem had it Great Temple of Herod the Great, built on the foundation of the temple of Solomon. On Mars Hill, the Parthenon stood with its marble stones forming the backdrop for Paul’s sermon in Acts 17. In Smyrna was the massive and ornate temple to Zeus.

Each was built with stone was chosen to provide a place for the deity to receive adoration.

But Christianity had nothing feeble as marble. Instead, it was flesh and blood, soul and spirit, formed as a living temple created by the God they would serve.

Peter elaborates on the importance of the church through a series of images.

A spiritual house was a structure worth being the residence of the Holy Spirit. The church is filled with the Spirit’s life.

A holy priesthood was devoted to the offering of constant sacrifices to God. The sacrifices of Christians had no hide or hair on them. Instead, they were the praise of their lips and the works of their faith.

A story that came out of Greek history tells of a Spartan king boasting to a visitor about the walls of Sparta. The visitor inspected the city and could see no walls. He was confused. “Where are these walls of which you are so proud?”

The king of Sparta spread his hand over the bodyguards and the troops that served him. “These are the walls of Sparta, every man a brick.”

We form the structure of the grand temple that eclipsed Solomon’s. It was built by Hyrum, but God is the architect and builder of this temple. And as vs. 6 points out, we who believe in Christ have no reason to shrink back because we have a more excellent house resting on a sturdier foundation.

In verse 9, Peter elaborates even further.

“But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.” (1 Peter 2:9, ESV)

God chose them much as he chose Israel. He selected those who believed and obeyed to be his children. No longer was it blood but trust that made a man chosen.

We hear echoes of God’s initial covenant spoken to the Israelites in Deuteronomy 7.

“For you are a people holy to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth. It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the Lord set his love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples, but it is because the Lord loves you and is keeping the oath that he swore to your fathers, that the Lord has brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt.” (Deuteronomy 7:6–8, ESV)

What makes something valuable is who it belonged to.

In 2019, the Lincoln Museum found itself short of money. It seemed like the only way to raise it was to sell things supposed to have belonged to Abraham Lincoln. Among them was the stovepipe hat that he allegedly wore to Ford’s Theater on the night of his assassination. The asking price was 6.5 million dollars. It’s not just a hat but the hat chosen by Lincoln.

The final idea is presented in the 10th verse.

“Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.” (1 Peter 2:10, ESV)

Peter again reaches back to an Old Testament passage he remembered. It comes out in the first chapter of Hosea.

Hosea is a prophet who spoke with many tools. The primary one was symbolic names and acts. God tells him to marry a woman who will sell herself to other men. It will break his heart, but then people will see what God is doing with his wife.

Out of this marriage comes three children. Their names are not typical, even for Jews but symbolic names. They are Jezreel, Lo-Ruhamah, and Lo-Ammi.

You hear the echoes in 1 Peter. We were not a people, but now we are God’s people. Lo-Ammi meant “not my people.” God told wayward Israel they would be cast into captivity and would no longer be God’s people.

Then Peter says, “once you did not receive mercy, but now you have received mercy.” Lo-Ruhamah means “no mercy,” indicating God will show no mercy for the wicked.

Instead, God’s people, these who were on the outside looking in, lived in a state without God’s mercy before salvation came to them. Then, with their conversion, they found the mercy of God.

That is our spiritual heritage. That is our hope. That is our identity.

Conclusion

Peter wants his audience to see their unique position. They are a house built by God on the foundation of God’s own son. Because of God’s great act, our love for both God and each other must hold us together.

But how does that speak to people under pressure? They were facing the worst of persecution--extreme poverty and even death. We still feel the subtle but steady press of secular thought today. Is this practical? It is if you remember two ideas.

Since Christ is the cornerstone, we have stability. No matter the power, it is but a pebble compared to the foundation upon which we rest our lives. Because of Christ, we know what to do. We have the assurance of the future, no matter how hopeful or how bleak. With Christ as the cornerstone, we will not be moved.

But God’s house is held together by interlocking bricks. Each of us is vital to the stability of the church. Love binds together, and the building stands firm. We need each other. God gave us each other because he knew that separately, we were feeble. But together, we are stronger. In the face of the pressure, it is not up to you to stay the course. It is up to us.

On September 8, 1900, a hurricane of immense ferocity slammed into the city of Galveston. At that time, it was the largest city in Texas and headed for greatness. That day, storm winds of over 170 miles per hour and seas of over 13 feet devoured the city. It killed the rich and also 93 children who were orphans.

It seemed nothing would be left standing. But as day dawned, a few were left. One of them is a structure now called The Bishop’s Palace. With debris bowing before it, it stood erect. Its stones provided the strength to endure that storm and so many more.

God built a building that can stand any storm, and we are all part of that glorious construction. Take heart in God’s great blessing.