He Praises God for His Great Work of Salvation

In verse 3, the Apostle begins his exhortation to these believers by blessing God, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Peter not only blesses God the Father for his work in the salvation of sinners, but encourages each of us to join him in praising God. If God is the ultimate source of salvation then He alone is to receive all the praise!

It the duty of every believer to know what great things God has done for him and offer Him thanksgiving and worship. “The Lord has done great things for us, and we are glad” (Psalm 126:3). Peter is God-centered in his perspective. He acknowledges that “Every good thing given and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shifting shadow” (James 1:17).

And his Trinitarian perspective is evident here again. God is not a generic god who can be called by any number of names. No, he is the specific God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Above all, he is the God of the Lord Jesus Christ. No other God is God but He who is the Father of Christ. That is why only the God of the Bible is to be blessed and praised and worshiped and glorified. This confession causes Christians to be out of step with this world, which claims that there are a plurality of gods and numerous pathways to God. But every other god is an idol or figment of human imagination, and the service of such gods leads to pervasive social corruption and intellectual darkness.

The Mercy of God

In verse 3, Peter puts his finger on the pulse of grace—he knows that it flows from God’s mercy: “who according to His abundant mercy has begotten us again to a living hope” (I Pet. 1:3b).

Mercy is a moral characteristic of God that presupposes His just wrath and judgment on those who have broken His law. God in His mercy is moved by compassion and pity on those who are the objects of His love. He thereby provides what they cannot provide for themselves—a full, complete salvation.

An example of this mercy is found in the story Jesus told of the servant who owed his King ten thousand talents. He was not able to pay and was to be sold into slavery with his family. But he came and fell down before the King and pleaded with him. And the Bible says, “Then the master of that servant was moved with compassion, released him, and forgave him the debt” (Matt. 18:27).

God is a God of mercy. He revealed Himself to Moses as, “The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abounding in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, by no means clearing the guilty…” (Exodus 34:6–7). His justice must be satisfied, but He is merciful. How can these two be reconciled? The book of Romans tells us how: “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God set forth as a propitiation by His blood, through faith, to demonstrate His righteousness, because in His forbearance God had passed over the sins that were previously committed, to demonstrate at the present time His righteousness, that He might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus” (Rom. 3:23–26). At the cross, “Mercy triumphs over judgment.”

Note again in 1 Peter 1:3 that God’s mercy is abundant. It is not limited by human sin and depravity. We often have weak and faulty views of the measure of God’s mercy. We think that our sins are so great that God cannot forgive them. We think that we have sinned so many times that God surely will not forgive us again. Well, it is true that we should not sin that grace may abound. But it is also true that there are no limits to God’s mercy for those who are in Christ by faith.

For grace has no basis in human merit, it is based upon the merits of Jesus Christ, the Righteous One. When we look at the cross of Christ, we can see how great God’s love is. The cross demonstrates the triumph of grace over sin and judgment because Jesus bore the full penalty for our sin. He paid the debt. He paid it all.

Have you received His mercy? Have you humbled yourself before Him and pleaded for His grace? God is willing to forgive. He gave His most precious gift to satisfy His justice against sinners. Peter says that it was the “precious blood, as of a lamb unblemished and spotless, the blood of Christ” (1:19).

Because of this mercy, the child of God has been redeemed. He no longer belongs to himself but has been bought with a price at great cost to God. He is a debtor to grace, and this is his song, “O to grace how great a debtor, daily I’m constrained to be; let that grace now, like a fetter, bind my wand’ring heart to Thee.”

The New Birth

The result of God’s mercy to us in Christ is the new birth, or regeneration. Peter clearly attributes the source of this new birth to God the Father. He says in verse 3 in reference to the Father, “who according to His abundant mercy has begotten us again to a living hope.”

The Father is the One who causes us to be born again. He sends the Holy Spirit from Christ to change our hearts. We cannot contribute to this birth any more than we did to our natural birth. Here again, the grace of God is exalted and all glory goes to Him alone. But God uses means in this work. He causes us to first hear the Word of God, and then He creates a new heart in us that responds in repentance and faith.

But it is the Holy Spirit who works in the deepest recesses of our hearts. All the blessings of salvation begin when the Holy Spirit “blows” into our hearts and takes out the hearts of stone and replaces them with hearts of flesh. This change is described as being born again. It is set in contrast to our first birth. Jesus said, “That which is born of the flesh is flesh.” But when we are born of the Holy Spirit, that which is begotten is a new spiritual life. We are made alive unto God and now have new desire to live for Him.

This is what distinguishes the Christian from the non-Christian in this world. The first persecution of Cain against Abel was a result of this difference. The person who is born again sees the Kingdom of God, these new realities he could not see before. He is a new creature, old things are passing away and all things are becoming new. This is why Christians live as pilgrims and aliens in the world, because they are born of the Spirit.

A Living Hope

Peter goes on in verse 3 to say that God has caused them to be “born again to a living hope.”

He connects the new birth with the future hope of God’s elect pilgrims. Peter sees the Christian’s life as a race in which the beginning and end are connected. The pilgrim’s journey begins with the new birth and he is sustained by a living hope through the power of God until he reaches the final goal when he obtains the heavenly inheritance.

Salvation is not to be seen as the possession of a life-insurance policy against eternal death, but as an ongoing experience of the grace of God. Peter looks at the Christian life from a bird’s eye perspective and see its end as well as its beginning. He describes it as something that God has done. God is the Savior who not only begins a good work in us but continues it until His great purpose is accomplished.

What doe he mean by “a living hope”? This means that outside of Christ we were “in the world, without hope, and without God” (Eph 2). But when a sinner has been born again, he has new hope that he never experienced before. A new future destiny is placed before him and now lives in his heart. Peter urges believers in verse 13 to “fix your hope completely upon the grace that is to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ.”

The Christian pilgrim does not travel through this world aimlessly. No, he has a clear destination. He is animated by this living hope as that which secures his future enjoyment of all that God has prepared for him. Christian hope stands in stark contrast to the frivolity of this age, on the one hand, and the despair of this age, on the other. The hope of eternal life in a true Christian is a hope that keeps him alive, quickens him, supports him, and conducts him to heaven. Hope invigorates the soul to action, to patience, to fortitude, and perseverance to the end.

The Resurrection of Christ

This hope Peter says in verse 3 is, “through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.”

The believer’s hope is alive—not static—because it is rooted in a living Savior who rose from the dead. Christian hope is not wishful thinking; it is rooted in the solid historical realities of redemption. The new birth and the hope that accompanies it is a result of Jesus’ death and resurrection in our place. He did not die for Himself but for His bride, the Church. And He was not raised for Himself but for our justification. Therefore His resurrection gives us a hope that is alive because it consists of Christ as the anchor of our soul in heaven itself.

Christ’s resurrection is the very basis for our new birth. In Ephesians 2, Paul expresses it this way: “But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up together, and made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that in the ages to come He might show the exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness toward us in Christ Jesus” (Eph. 2:4–7).

The resurrection of Christ is also the basis and guarantee of our bodily resurrection from the dead. The world is often driven by a fear of growing old and dying. But the Christian pilgrim sees beyond death. His hope is Jesus’ blood and righteousness. Christ is the basis of our hope. He is the source of our hope. He is our hope!

So we see that the believer, as God’s elect pilgrim, not only has a different identity but a different origin and destiny than those of this world. As he sees himself in the light of Scripture he will see why he is called to be holy and reflect the image of his Redeemer!

--Rev. Eric Bristley, Grass Valley, CA