“Since you have in obedience to the truth purified your souls for a sincere love of the brethren, fervently love one another from the heart, 23 for you have been born again not of seed which is perishable but imperishable, that is, through the living and enduring word of God. 24 For, “ALL FLESH IS LIKE GRASS, AND ALL ITS GLORY LIKE THE FLOWER OF GRASS. THE GRASS WITHERS, AND THE FLOWER FALLS OFF, 25 BUT THE WORD OF THE LORD ENDURES FOREVER.” And this is the word which was preached to you.”
“Independence Day”, is the name of a movie about an attack on earth by an evil, alien race from another world that brought all the nations of earth together in unity to fight them. I was sitting at work one day next to a coworker and there was a magazine on the counter near us and the cover story was about that movie, which had just been released.
My coworker said, “I think that is what is finally going to happen some day, don’t you?”
Well, I hadn’t seen the movie and only knew that it had something to do with aliens from outer space attacking earth, so I had to ask what she meant by her question.
She said, “Well, I think that eventually there is going to be some major danger to all of earth, whether it will be a large meteor or a world wide epidemic or whatever, and it will draw all the nations of mankind together and there will finally be peace all over the earth.”
That’s not an exact quote; it was years ago and I didn’t memorize her speech but that’s close.
Well, I felt badly that I had to tell her the truth. I knew she only wanted to make light conversation and I knew she didn’t realize she was setting herself up for a philosophical discussion – and certainly not a theological one – but I had to be honest with her.
In brief, the answer was ‘no’. But I had to explain, whether she was ready to hear it or not.
CORRUPTED FLESH/CORRUPTED WORLD
When the first man disobeyed God sin entered into the world and death through sin. The flesh was corrupted and all who have been born since have been born corrupted because they, we, have all inherited that condition from the first man.
The entire creation was affected by the Fall, as we are told in Romans 8:20-21.
“For the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God.”
So we live in a corrupted world, governed by corrupted flesh; that is, men and women who, even at their very best and most honest, are corrupted and unable to think or do anything in a Godly way.
There will never be peace in this world, there will never be unity, until fallen flesh is taken out of the equation; until the world is governed by the One of whom Isaiah said, “The government shall be upon His shoulders”.
When Jesus Christ comes back to reign with His glorified children, only then will there truly be peace on earth and good will among men.
Now there is one place in this corrupted world where there ought to exist the kind of peace and unity that worldly men erroneously think they can someday achieve.
That place is the church of Jesus Christ. Unfortunately some of the worst treatment you will ever witness of people and some of the most ungodly behavior you will ever see demonstrated is in the church.
That is because people try to operate the church according to minds of flesh instead of having the mind of the Spirit.
So often, the church is operated like a business instead of a spiritual entity and when that happens of course the result is going to coincide with the product of any worldly institution.
However, Peter knew that those who had received this new life from above that he had in mind when he said ‘you have been born again’ were now able to relate to one another with a Godly love because of the Spirit of God in them.
It is only by the Spirit of Christ that anyone can exercise faith or true love; only by His Spirit that we have a hope for the future; only by His Spirit that there can be true and lasting unity.
It will never happen in this world until our risen and glorified Savior bursts on the scene and establishes His throne and brings peace with Him.
If I could talk to my ex-coworker now I think I would remind her of the oneness and unity we all felt after September 11, 2001 and ask her to take note of how brief in duration that unity was.
No agreement of peace, no feeling of unity produced by the flesh will ever last for long. Just like the spring flowers that bloom and flourish for a short season, they soon wither and drop their pedals and die. So it is with the flesh, and so it is with all that is built or produced by the flesh.
Now there is an under girding theme in this passage that we will spend the rest of our time focusing on.
Notice that the Word of God, more specifically in this case, the Gospel message, is at the heart of all Peter is saying to them.
1. Obedience to the truth purified them.
2. The imperishable seed of the Word gave them life
3. The abiding and unfailing Word is with them forever.
OBEDIENCE TO THE TRUTH
The scriptures constantly relate saving faith to obedience. They are inseparably linked. Disobedience to God and His Word demonstrates a lack of faith. True faith is always made manifest in obedience to a call or a command of God.
This is true in an on-going relationship with God, and it is even true in beginning that relationship. Although we rightly teach that it is God who calls and justifies and that salvation is by faith only and even that is a gift from God, yet we see that He credits the new believer with having ‘obeyed the truth’ when he or she expresses repentance and belief in Christ.
Even here in the letter we’re studying, Peter mentions this obedience in verse 2 of chapter 1.
Paul references the obedience of saving faith in Romans 1:5 when he says that he had received the grace of apostleship to bring about this ‘obedience of faith’ among the Gentiles.
He mentions it again in Romans 15:18 and 16:26.
In Acts 6:7 Luke writes:
“The word of God kept on spreading; and the number of the disciples continued to increase greatly in Jerusalem, and a great many of the priests were becoming obedient to the faith.”
There are one or two other passages that use this specific language but you get the point.
Peter is here saying (in verse 22) that by their obedience to the truth, which means they heard and believed the Gospel, an immediate result is that their souls have been purified and they have received a supernatural ability now to love one another in sincerity, not in hypocrisy.
That being the reality, he emphasizes the truth with an exhortation to them that they should ‘fervently’ love one another from the heart.
Christians, it is impossible for the unsaved people of the world to love one another with agape love, ‘agape’ meaning unconditional and sacrificial. This love can only be an expression of the Holy Spirit in us, because the love of God was ‘poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us’. (Romans 5:5)
When the world looks at the church what they should see there is the expression of a supernatural love that they do not understand, but it should be apparent to them nonetheless.
Jesus said,
“By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another” John 13:35 and when He said ‘love’, He used the word ‘agape’. Unconditional. Sacrificial.
I’ll leave you to your own thoughts on how often these days the world witnesses that kind of testimony among us.
BORN OF IMPERISHABLE SEED
“For”. Peter says, ‘for’. In other words, this is why we can be expected to exercise this fervent love for the brethren; ‘for’, or ‘because’, you have been born again, not of seed which is perishable but imperishable…
In scripture the word ‘seed’ represents the source of life. One good example of this is 1 John 3:9.
“No one who is born of God practices sin, because His seed abides in him; and he cannot sin, because he is born of God.”
I should clarify here that John isn’t saying that a Christian cannot sin or never sins. He is saying that the Christian cannot continue in habitual and unrepentant sin because God’s life abides in him.
Now the seed of the flesh is perishable. We know that. People die and everything made or produced by the flesh eventually decays.
Peter is reminding them and us that our new birth is by a different kind of ‘seed’, it is a source of life that is spiritual and cannot decay, cannot die, cannot perish.
It is the Living Word of God which, when it came to us by the Holy Spirit we received life.
In the flesh we had two parents. So it is with spiritual birth.
The Holy Spirit and the Word come for our regeneration and by the obedience of faith we enter into this new, imperishable life, and we’re sort of like superheroes being born.
I have a shirt with Mighty Mouse on the front of it because when I was a small child he was the first cartoon superhero. Well we’ve seen the movies that have come out in recent years about Spider-Man and Batman and Superman and the X-Men and Daredevil, and each of these movies has portrayed how these various individuals received their powers and their identity as superheroes.
So one day when I was wearing that Mighty Mouse shirt Lynn referred to these movies and asked, ‘So how did Mighty Mouse become mighty?’
And y’know what? I knew the answer!
As a regular mouse he was accidentally closed up in a box of vitamins in a vitamin warehouse, and the only way he could get out was to eat his way through all the vitamins. By the time he got out he had eaten so many vitamins he was strong enough to punch his way through the warehouse wall and get out and Mighty Mouse was born.
Well, our new birth endowed us with certain powers. We can communicate with the Living God through prayer, we can comprehend spiritual truth by the revelation of the Holy Spirit in us, and we can love with a supernatural, agape love. And one day, when we are complete, we’re going to fly home and receive the rest of our abilities.
But there is one other thing we have the power to do now that we did not have from our fleshly birth. Our second birth has given us the power to tell and to live out the good news of Jesus Christ.
THE LIVING AND ABIDING WORD
This good news, says Peter, is living and abiding.
If you had been reading through the New Testament and had just come to these verses in 1 Peter you might remember having just read something like it in James 1:18 where he said:
“In the exercise of His will He brought us forth by the word of truth, so that we might be, as it were, the first fruits among His creatures.”
In saying God ‘brought us forth’ he is saying the same thing Peter said when he used the phrase, ‘caused us to be born again’. Notice that James also says that this was done ‘by the word of truth’. In other words, the gospel message.
So here is the picture.
God, using the imperishable ‘seed’ of the good news of Jesus Christ which we call the gospel, caused us to be born again; brought us forth. His Holy Spirit used the Word, and not just the Word of God in general but a specific Word, which is the message of the death and resurrection of Christ, and by it brought about in us the obedience of faith and we were saved.
Having been given this new life from above we were empowered to love as Christ loved us, and so Peter now is both justified and duty-bound to exhort us to love one another fervently and from the heart.
We are also assured that this new life we have been called to is imperishable because the source of it is both Living and Abiding and that is the Word that was preached to us.
Now I see something else in this that, although it is not specifically stated here by Peter, is implied in two ways. One is his reference to the fact that this living and abiding Word was preached and the implication that the preaching of it resulted ultimately in their hearing and believing in obedient faith.
The second way I see this something implied is in the fact that Peter quoted Isaiah 40:6-8, and if we actually go to those verses in Isaiah and read them in context we’ll get to where I’m going.
CALL IT OUT
“A voice says, “Call out.” Then he answered, “What shall I call out?” All flesh is grass, and all its loveliness is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades, when the breath of the LORD blows upon it; surely the people are grass. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God stands forever.” Isaiah 40:6-8
The voice is God’s, telling Isaiah to ‘call out’; some translations say ‘cry out’. It is a message God wants heralded in a loud and clear way to His people for their encouragement.
Take note of the compassionate grace of God here Who, having had to allow His people to be taken into exile because of their stubborn refusal to listen to His warnings, and for their rejection of His prophets, still gives them assurance that His promises to care for them will not fail. His Word abides forever.
Peter understood this and as he writes to a church under persecution and facing persecution he borrows Isaiah’s words to solidify the things he’s been telling them about their own permanent and secure position with God and the imperishable treasures laid up for them in Heaven.
Now if God chose, He could wait silently for His rebellious people to down the entire cup of their suffering without any encouragement at all, and at the end fulfill His promises and bring His remnant back to the land and make them a nation once more.
If God chose, He could let this world spin on, seemingly neglected and ignored and let His people share in the sufferings of Christ with no further word of hope given, until the day He fulfills His promise to rapture His church.
But God, among all the other attributes He possesses and demonstrates, is an Encourager. So He instructs His prophet to cry out assurance. He commands His Apostle to preach encouragement.
And here’s where I was going with what I called a two-point implication; in the spirit of this ‘fervent’ love with which He commands us to love one another, because we can and no one outside of Christ can, I believe His message to us in this is that we should ‘call it out’ to one another. ‘Cry’ it out even with a sense of both confidence and a certain urgency; that the living and abiding Word of God stands forever, and what He has said shall surely come to pass for you and for me.
I believe He wants us to ‘preach’ to one another this Word that was preached to them; specifically, the gospel message in its entirety.
“But”, you may ask with raised eyebrow, “if we’re already saved, why preach the gospel to one another?”
Well, first of all, I put these words, ‘call’, ‘cry’ and ‘preach’ in quotation marks because I think they go beyond the literal idea of speaking out. I believe our lives and our manifest love toward one another ought to be what constantly preaches the message of a Christ who died, who rose, who ascended into Heaven bodily from a mountain in Judea, whose Word stands forever.
Because Christians, things are going to get a lot worse before they get better. We need to encourage one another with the truth of God’s abiding Word freely and often because a time is coming when we are going to find ourselves in circumstances in which our flesh will want to drag us down into a mire of doubt.
Events that we’ve all been witnessing in recent months through the television and in the newspapers and news magazines have been like watching a wall go up, brick by brick.
There is expressed hatred for Christians and the Jews as a nation that is unabashed and unchecked.
Then groups that the non-Christian world sees as representative of the church even though they are not add fuel to the flame by acting in decidedly un-Christian ways, inviting even more criticism.
The church, which for the past couple of decades has been viewed as largely ineffective and unnecessary in the social order of things, is being looked at more and more as not only no help, but part of the problem in light of society’s ills.
People with enough celebrity or financial clout to easily get themselves into public limelight are using those advantages to publicly mock and slander Christians and no one is telling them they are wrong except the very people they won’t listen to anyway.
Both the political and social condition of our country, as well as the increasingly bad attitude toward Christ’s people, is so closely paralleling the final years of the Roman Empire, Christians, we cannot afford to ignore it. We cannot close our eyes and hope it will go away.
We all need to be very certain and very assured in our heart of hearts that we are born again with imperishable seed through obedience to the living and abiding Word of God, and know that though the flesh falls off like a dying flower, the Word of the Lord concerning us stands like a Rock.
There needs to be an habitual practice of agape love that the world can actually witness among us, and our lives individually and our lives toward one another should ‘cry out’ the gospel…the Word of the Lord that leads to the obedience of faith.
Because all flesh is like the grass and the flower of the field and this world will soon burn up with an intense heat. But the Word of the Lord stands forever.
“And this is the Word which was preached to you.”
