Kootenai Church Morning Worship

Well, we're starting at the beginning of 2 Peter. Last week we kind of got an overview of the entire book of 2 Peter. And it is sometimes tempting when you start an Epistle to sort of jump past the introduction to the book and sort of blast past that thinking, OK, so there's a couple of names and a brief greeting, let's get on to the meat of the Epistle. But we don't want to do that because New Testament books have loaded in them all kinds of significance even in the opening words and phrases of the book. This is a loaded book.
I was having this conversation with Dave Rich this last week, and he said something that I thought was profound. And of course, in reflecting upon it, I believe it's true. He said 2 Peter is a dense book. And by dense he doesn't mean like the neighborhood kid—“That's sure a dense kid”—but dense like every phrase, every word, every sentence is pregnant with meaning and loaded with significance that just drips off the pages. It is as if Peter, and he did, knew that his end was coming. It wouldn't be long before he'd be putting off his earthly tent, and he wanted to load as much content as he could into this Epistle.
And so we're going to be looking just today at the opening phrases here in verses 1–2. And I want to give you a little bit of an outline of chapter 1 before we jump into it, simply because we want to have some idea of where this Epistle is going. And I kind of gave you a brief outline of that with all three chapters last week. I want to do that with chapter 1 here just so you can see sort of what is the central idea of chapter 1.
This book is known as one of the two books in the New Testament that deals exclusively with false teachers, the book of Jude being the other one. You have 2 Peter and you have Jude. And we talked last week about the similarities between those two books and the overlap between them. Those two books, really the point of writing each one of them was to deal with false teachers inside of the church. What is interesting is that Peter doesn't even get around to mentioning what is the heart of his concern until chapter 1, verse 2. It's in chapter 2, verse 1, that Peter says, “False prophets also arose among the people, just as there will also be false teachers among you, who will secretly introduce destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them, bringing swift destruction upon themselves.” That's the first mention of false teachers. And that is Peter's motivating concern for even writing the book. Chapter 2 and chapter 3 deal with that issue of false teachers. And chapter 1, there's no mention of that explicitly. Not until you get to chapter 2 does he finally get to the point of why he is writing.
But in chapter 1 we have him express or describe our common salvation, our sanctification, our security in Christ and the Scriptures. And so I want to give you sort of a brief outline of chapter 1. In verses 1–2 is the greeting that we're going to be looking at today. In verses 3–4, Peter describes the sufficiency of saving grace. Right, by His precious and magnificent promises He has given to us everything that pertains to life and godliness through the knowledge of Christ. This is the sufficiency of saving grace. Then in verses 5–9, Peter describes the sufficiency of sanctifying grace. Be all the more diligent to pursue holiness and these virtues, knowing that if you do, you will never stumble and abundant entrance will be supplied to you into the kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ. That's verses 5–9. In verses 10–11, Peter describes the sufficiency of securing grace. Make your calling and election sure. There is a securing grace that God has given to those who are in Christ. And then in verses 12–21, Peter describes the sufficiency of Scripture. Sufficiency of saving grace, sufficiency of sanctifying grace, sufficiency of securing grace, and then the sufficiency of Scripture.
Now, why that emphasis? Why does Peter begin with that before he even gets to the subject of false teachers? The reason for that is very simple. The modus operandi of every false teacher is always the same. It is to convince you, Christian, that what God has provided for you in Christ, in your salvation, in His spirit, and in Scripture is not enough. You need something more. Every false teacher on the planet will give you that same phrase. Every false teacher that exists has that philosophy. They all deny, either explicitly or implicitly, the sufficiency of our Savior, of the Scriptures, and of our salvation. They all want you to think that there is something more.
And here's the key. Satan has a list of a hundred things that he will suggest to you that you need other than what God has already provided. And here's what it sounds like. The Bible is good as far as it goes, but we also need X, Y, or Z. We also need the scientific methods, the guys in the white coats. We also need Christian princes. We also need private revelation. We also need another book. We also need a modern prophet. We also need a pope. Scripture's good as far as it goes, but we also need all these other things. Or it sounds like this. Jesus is necessary, but He's not all that is necessary. You have to have Jesus plus X, Y, or Z. Grace is necessary, but grace is not sufficient. God's grace saves us up to a point, but God's not going to do that without human effort, without human contribution, without human involvement in some way. So yes, faith is necessary, but let's not forget the role that works play in our salvation. God's sovereign work in salvation is a good start, but man has to do his part as well. We have to contribute what God has called us to contribute to our salvation. That is what it sounds like. And with each of those ideas, you could suggest a hundred different things that Satan would put out there as something that we need other than what we have in Christ.
So here is what Peter is saying to us. What you have been given in your salvation through Christ, what has been provided for you for your sanctification, for your security, and in Scripture, it is sufficient. It's enough. You have everything you need for life and for godliness. Not knowing this and not understanding this and not trusting in this is the mother of a thousand heresies. It all comes back to sufficiency. I have said before and I will say probably until the day that I die that there is not a single false doctrine, not a single error, not a single issue that faces the church today that does not come back in some way either implicitly or explicitly to be a denial of the sufficiency of one of these things: the Savior, the Scriptures, or our salvation. So if Peter is going to guard and protect his people from the damnable errors of false teachers and heretics, then he must begin with this reminder of the sufficiency that we have in our Savior, in the salvation we have been granted, and in the Scripture.
So that's an overview of chapter 1. In verses 1–2, we have the greeting, which has its standard elements of a greeting—author, audience, as well as a brief blessing. And today we're looking at verses 1–2. And verses 3–4 has the sufficiency of our salvation. So verses 1–2 are going to describe to us the source of our salvation, and then verses 3–4 are going to give us the sufficiency of our salvation. Today we're looking at the source of our salvation.
So there are three features in our verse. Verse 1: “Simeon Peter, a slave and apostle of Jesus Christ, to those who have received the same kind of faith as ours, by the righteousness of our God and Savior, Jesus Christ.” And then verse 2 has a blessing: “Grace and peace be multiplied to you in the full knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord.” So verses 1–2 contain the author, the readers, as well as a brief blessing. The author—how does Peter describe himself? The readers—how does Peter describe those who were reading this Epistle? And then what does he wish for them?
So let's look first at the author. There are three things that Peter gives here that describe him. “Simeon Peter, a slave and apostle.” That's how he describes himself. Simeon Peter, slave, and apostle. It is interesting that he uses the form Simeon. And by the way, if you're not using the LSB, or I think it's the ESV, then you're reading Simon there instead of Simeon, right? That is because in the vast majority—I shouldn't say in the vast majority—in many manuscripts, it is “Simon Peter.” In earlier manuscripts, it's “Simeon Peter.” So the LSB takes the earlier manuscript reading of “Simeon Peter” and not “Simon Peter” because it is believed by the LSB and the ESV translators that those are the more reliable manuscripts.
And why is this a big issue? Why would I even mention this? It seems like just a typo, right? Somebody dropped an e at the beginning of the book and has Simeon instead of Simon. It is because this is one of those little details in the book which indicate that it was Peter who wrote this and not an imposter. The name Simeon is the more Semitic or older form of the name Simon. It is only used one other time in the New Testament of this same apostle, Simon, in Acts 15:14 at the Jerusalem Council where there he is referred to as Simeon. It is the older, more Semitic name. It was a less common, less used name of Simon than Simon Peter was. To call himself Simeon Peter has this mark of authenticity, and here's why: If you were a forger who wanted to forge a book and have it be accepted as authoritative and apostolic by people who read it, you would never use an obscure, lesser known, lesser used name for Peter than Simon Peter. You would have called yourself Simon Peter instead of Simeon Peter. But here's this one little mark at the beginning of the book that indicates something of its authenticity. Peter uses that of himself, Simeon Peter.
Second, he calls himself a slave. The ESV, the NIV, and the King James translate it as “servant,” the NASB and the New King James as “bondservant,” and the LSB is the only modern translation that refers to it as “slave.” And this, by the way, is one of the reasons that I mentioned several weeks ago that I’ve switched to the LSB from the NASB. There's no sense going from the NASB to the ESV when it's still going to render things like this as “servant.” I think there's a little bit of me—OK, a lot of me—that's a bit of a conspiracy theorist. I think that there has been a conspiracy to avoid the term slave in the New Testament. And it's the word for slave. It's doulos. It doesn't describe somebody who is an employee. It doesn’t describe somebody who is a servant with hours and a compensation package. This doesn't describe somebody who showed up at 9 a.m. and left at 5 p.m. and had a one-hour lunch break provided by the employer and two fifteen-minute breaks, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. It doesn't describe that type of a servant at all. It describes one who is a slave.
William Barclay, in his commentary on 2 Peter, has a helpful description of slavery in the first century. There's nothing graphic about this, so if you're a little bit queasy, don't worry, I'm not going there, but he does describe how slaves were treated in the ancient times, in the ancient world. And he says this:
To call the Christian the doulos of God means that he is inalienably possessed by God. In the ancient world a master possessed his slaves in the same sense as he possessed his tools. A servant can change his master; but a slave cannot. To call the Christian the doulos of God means that he is unqualifiedly at the disposal of God. In the ancient world the master could do what he liked with his slave; he even had the power of life and death over him. To call the Christian the doulos of God means that he owes an unquestioning obedience to God. A master's command was the slave's only law in ancient times. . . . To call the Christian the doulos of God means that he must be constantly in the service of God. In the ancient world the slave had literally no time of his own, no holidays, no leisure. All his time belonged to his master.
Now that sounds like chattel slavery, doesn't it? It sounds a bit different than being a servant or even a bondservant, like you might be an employee and have a contract. But here he calls himself a slave. A slave was one who had no rights, he was treated as property, he occupied the lowest social class, and that is the word that Peter uses.
It's not an accident that he uses this word because Paul, James, and Jude all use the exact same word to describe themselves—bondservant, slave, doulos. They did this because a Christian is a purchased commodity. First Peter 1:18–19: “Knowing you were not redeemed [or purchased, bought back] with corruptible things like silver or gold from your futile conduct inherited from your forefathers, but with precious blood, as of a lamb unblemished and spotless, the blood of Christ.” You have been bought, dear Christian, by the blood of Christ. God purchased the church with His own blood, Acts 20:28 says.
And Peter describes all believers as slaves in 1 Peter 2:16 when he says, “Act as free people, and do not use your freedom as a covering for evil, but use it as slaves of God.” What does Peter mean when he says act as free people? He means at one time you were slaves of sin, and now that you have been set free from sin, act as a slave, but don't use your freedom that you have to serve sin or as a covering for sin again, but instead use the freedom that you have been given from sin as a slave of God. So all believers are slaves because all of us have been purchased.
So that means that everything I've just described to you about slaves in the ancient world, that is all packed into this word. We have been made free in regard to sin in our former manner of life, and we are to use that freedom to serve as slaves of Christ. That's Paul's point in Romans 6. He says once you were slaves of sin, and what benefit did you derive from being a slave to sin? What was your payment? The wages of sin is death. That's what you got. So what benefit did you have by yielding your life as a slave to sin? Paul says in Romans 6 that you, having been purchased by God, are now a slave of righteousness. Therefore, go on yielding your members as instruments of righteousness so that you will become the slaves of righteousness.
Everyone serves a master. Every action that we take is in service to one thing or another. But all of us are serving a master—either Satan, self, and sin, or we are slaves to Christ, one of those two. So every word we speak serves one of those two masters, every deed we do serves one of those two masters. We either do it in obedience to Christ, or we do it in obedience to sin.
It is noteworthy that this designation, which signifies the lowest possible class of society—it was a title of humiliation, a title of scorn, it was a demeaning designation to be called a doulos. But as strange as it may seem, the greatest of men took this title to themselves in Scripture. And the greatest of men in Scripture are called slaves of God. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are called slaves of Yahweh. Moses was a slave of God. Joshua is called a slave—Samuel, David. In the New Testament, Peter, James, Jude, and Paul all refer to themselves as slaves of God. Those are some of the greatest men in redemptive history who are called slaves of God.
But what made them great is not that they took the title. What made them great is that they actually lived and behaved like slaves of Yahweh. That's what made them great. Taking the title doesn't make you a slave. It doesn't make you great just because—it's easy to call yourself a slave of God, isn't it? It's easy to call yourself a slave. That's easy. I could wear a T-shirt that says “Doulos of Christ” or “Doulos of Christus,” right on my chest. I could put that on my business card. We could hang it over the front of the church—“Enter the douloses of Christ.” We could all walk around, shake hands with one another, refer to each other as a doulos of Christ. Easiest thing in the world to do. But what's really hard is to serve as a slave of Christ and to say no to our sin, no to our self-centeredness, no to our self-aggrandizement, and say yes to Christ and be obedient. That's different. Calling yourself a slave is easy. Obeying as a slave, that is tricky.
The church today, in our age and in our country, needs slaves of Christ. We need to make slavery great again. Now that's a clip. Somebody's going to clip that. You say, “That's a take.” It certainly is a hot take, isn't it? But you know what I mean by that. We need to make slavery to Christ great again. But instead, self-improvement is one of the catchwords of the church in our day. Self aggrandizement, self-interest, self-serving, self-seeking, self-defense. We live in a culture that elevates the self, and what people do to you becomes the defining reality of your mind, of your thinking. Victimology is all about the glorification of self. I have been oppressed. I have been offended. I have been hurt. I have been hard done by. I haven't had this. I wish I had that. She did this. He did that. It's all about the self.
And what never enters into our minds instinctively is that we have been bought with a price, the precious blood of Christ. And therefore, if we are to be great in the kingdom of God, we must become slaves of Christ, servants of all. A slave is one who has been bought with a price, and if you and I grasp what we have been purchased out of, eternal damnation and destruction, and what we have been purchased unto, eternal glory and joy, we will gladly bow the knee and own the title slave of Christ, rendering to Him affectionate, humble obedience.
And could there be, by the way, any greater master? You could be a slave of Farmer Jones down the road. That's no big deal. If you were a slave of the President of the United States, that might be a little bit more dignified or noble than being a slave of Farmer Jones down the road. But to be a slave of the One who created the worlds out of nothing, who spoke the universe into existence, and who died on a cross to redeem unworthy sinners, that is the greatest slavery of all. That's how Peter describes himself, a doulos.
And lastly, as an apostle. This was the highest office in the church. What's interesting to me is that Peter chooses the lowest level of culture and society, of the social strata, and the highest possible office in the church was that of apostle. And he sees no contradiction in taking to him both of those titles. I think it is because Peter understood servant leadership. The term apostle here simply means a messenger or a missionary, one sent by another as their representative, one who was called or commissioned to go on behalf of another. That's the straightforward, simple understanding of what an apostle was—a delegate, an ambassador, an envoy, an emissary.
And in the New Testament, that word apostle is used in two different ways. It is used in its simple, straightforward, normal meaning of being one sent on behalf of another. And in that case, it could refer to somebody like Titus or Timothy or an emissary or one sent out by an apostle or even one sent out by a church. And it's used that way in 2 Corinthians 8:23: “As for Titus, he is my partner and fellow worker among you;
as for our brothers, they are messengers [that's the word apostles, apostoloi] of the churches, a glory to Christ.”
Paul uses it in Philippians 2:25: “I regarded it necessary to send to you Epaphroditus, my brother and fellow worker and fellow soldier, who is also your [apostle] and minister to my need.” It's translated as “messenger,” but it's the same word, apostle. The church in Philippi had sent Epaphroditus to Paul on their behalf to bring with him an offering and then to serve Paul as a representative of the church. So Epaphroditus was an apostle of the church. So you have apostles sent out by men and by churches in the New Testament.
But then you have apostle used in a different sense. And I like to refer to this as the capital-A Apostles. And there were only thirteen of them. There were the twelve, eleven without Judas, and then Matthias is added to that. And then there's the Apostle Paul, who was also called an Apostle in a capital-A sense. Those are the ones who were directly commissioned by Christ. They were His representatives, His Apostles. Christ sent them. They were eyewitnesses of His majesty, which Peter reminds the readers of later on in chapter 1. They had the ability to work miracles because they were Apostles of Christ. So they spoke with Christ's authority and with the ability to authenticate His message by the miracles that they performed. They represented Jesus Christ personally. They were the foundation of the church, Ephesians 2:20 says. And their teaching today is what we follow through the inspired writings that they have left to us in the New Testament canon.
You don't even have to go outside of 2 Peter to see how he refers to some of these other Apostles. Look at 2 Peter 3. Look at chapter 3, verse 2. He says that “you should remember the words spoken beforehand by the holy prophets and the commandment of the Lord and Savior spoken by your apostles.” There he's referring to revelation that God had given in the Old Testament, the holy prophets and the apostles, the commandment of Jesus Christ spoken by your apostles. Later in chapter 3, verses 15–16, he makes reference to Paul: “Our beloved brother Paul, according to the wisdom given him, wrote to you, as also in all his letters, speaking in them of these things, in which are some things hard to understand, which the untaught and unstable distort, as they do also the rest of the Scriptures, to their own destruction.” And there the Apostle Peter is equating the writings, the teachings contained in those writings of the Apostle Paul, as Scripture. The untaught and the unstable distort Paul's writings just like they do all the rest of the Scriptures.
Now, speaking of false teachers, there are no Apostles today. There's a whole group of evangelical Christianity that wants to claim that title to themselves. And what they do is they say there's people in the New Testament who are not one of the twelve who are also called apostles. That's right, they are called apostles of the churches. They're sent ones or messengers. But then there are the Apostles of Christ who had unique authority, unique ability, and a unique role in the history of the church. The church is built upon the foundation of the Apostles and the prophets, Ephesians 2 says. And so we're not building on that today. There are no Apostles today.
These people who claim to be Apostles today claim to have apostolic authority. They claim to have the ability to receive private revelation that is on par with Holy Scripture. And they claim that they have the ability to perform miracles. And they perform lying signs and wonders. And every last one of them is a liar and a fraud, and they should not be believed. We don't have Apostles today like Paul and Peter, etc. because we don't need Apostles today like Paul and Peter, etc. Because we have everything apostolic delivered to us in Scripture in the New Testament. There is no need for that office anymore. Now the role of the church is to teach and to preach that which has been handed down to us.
That's the author. He describes himself as Simeon Peter, a slave and an Apostle. Now look at how Peter describes his audience. He describes his audience, identifies them, in terms of two things, their faith and their righteousness. We'll focus on these two things this way. They have a faith that is received and they have a faith that is righteous. Look at verse 1: Simon—“Simeon Peter, a slave and apostle of Jesus Christ.” I slipped back into Simon Peter because there's only two places in all the New Testament where it's called Simeon, here and one other place. So if I sometimes do that, my apologies to you. “Simeon Peter, a slave and apostle of Jesus Christ, to those who have received the same kind of faith as ours, by the righteousness of our God and Savior, Jesus Christ.” They have a received faith and they have a righteous faith.
Now in order to appreciate what Peter is saying here, we have to understand what he is talking about when he says faith. What is he talking about when he says faith? There's two ways that that could be understood. I would suggest to you that one of these ways doesn't make any sense, so it must be understood the second way. It could be understood either objectively—faith, that is—it could be understood either objectively, of an objective faith, or of a subjective faith.
Objectively, when you speak of objective faith, we're talking about the content of the Christian faith, the doctrines handed down to us by the Apostles. So we're talking about what might be summarized in creeds or confessions. It's apostolic doctrine. It is the systematic teaching of the Apostles, the doctrines that compose the faith. That's how Jude uses the word in Jude 3: “Beloved, while I was making every effort to write you about our common salvation, I felt the necessity to write to you exhorting that you contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all handed down to the saints.” There, Jude is referring to a body of apostolic doctrine, a faith, a content of faith that was handed down from the Apostles to them. And Jude is asking us to contend for the faith. So when we speak about the faith, we're using it in the sense of the Christian faith, that body of doctrine that we affirm and that we believe, that unites us in Christ, those things that when affirmed and when believed bring salvation and eternal life, and those things when denied or rejected bring damnation. That's the faith.
Subjectively, we use the term faith to refer to trust or confidence or belief, or we might say the Christian's ability to believe the gospel. “For by grace you have been saved through faith” (Eph. 2:8). Not that you have been saved through the faith, as if somebody handed you a doctrinal statement and you grabbed ahold of it and said, “Now I'm saved because I've received the faith.” But when we talk about faith in that way, we're talking about a personal confidence, trust, placing our belief in something that is true, hearing something that is true and then grabbing on to that through our heart's belief and submission to it. That's what we're talking about with faith, to trust or to believe something that is true, and not a superficial belief, but the casting of one's hope and confidence in that thing. So that's subjective faith.
So when Peter says the faith has been received, that you have received a like, precious faith, is he talking about the objective faith, that other people have handed to you a body of doctrine? Or is he talking about the subjective faith, that you have received the ability to believe and it is of the same kind of faith that we have received? I would submit to you that what Peter is describing here is not the objective faith but subjective faith—that is, the ability to believe.
There's no article in the verse (the). He doesn't say he received “the faith.” He says you have received a faith of the same kind as ours. The faith that saved the Apostles is the same faith that saved these believers. It wouldn't make sense to say that they had received the same kind of faith and then to be referring to a body of doctrine. There is only one faith. So it doesn't make sense to say, “Oh, you've received a body of doctrine just like we have received a body of doctrine. You've received a canon of beliefs just like we have received a similar kind of canon of beliefs.” Instead, Peter is speaking here of a subjective faith, the ability and the willingness, the belief itself. What brings us into salvation privileges is not doctrines, it is our trust and belief in and confidence in the work and the Person of Christ.
He says you have received it. The word received here describes something that was received by lot, a gift that was granted to somebody by lot. It's actually used of the soldiers who cast lots for the clothing of Jesus, meaning that through the casting of the lots, they received, by the casting of lots, something that was given to them. Used in a context like this, it means a gift that is received or something that is granted by grace. The implication of this is straightforward and simple. The faith to believe the gospel is not the product of human will. It is not the product of human work. It is not the product of human effort. Believing and saving faith does not come from within the resources of the sinful, fallen human heart. It is something that God grants to those whom He has chosen in Christ from before the foundation of the world.
You say, “Are there any other passages in Scripture that would describe this?” Yeah, there are. Ephesians 2:8, which I already quoted: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this not of yourselves, it [faith] is the gift of God; not of works, so that no one may boast” (Eph. 2:8–9). If God did everything for your salvation and then said, “Now, wretched, miserable, hopeless, depraved, fallen sinner, you must exercise faith out of the recesses of your dark, hardened, dead, and corrupted heart. So good luck.” And then if you, as a hopeless, fallen, wretched, dark, hard-hearted sinner, were able to conjure up faith within you enough to believe and be saved, how much salvation credit would God get as opposed to how much salvation credit you got? You would be sharing the glory, would you not? “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this [the faith] not of yourselves, it [the faith] is the gift of God; not of works, so that no one may boast” (Eph. 2:8–9).
Paul says to the Philippians in chapter 1, verse 29, “For to you it has been granted [gifted] for Christ's sake, not only to believe in Him, but also to suffer for His sake.” Your believing in Christ was granted to you by the grace of God. It was gifted to you.
Acts 5:31, Acts 11:18, and 2 Timothy 2:25 describe repentance as gifts that are granted by God, so that both the repentance and the faith, which are the two wings that fly us to the Savior, both of those are gifts granted to people, to the believer, by God. It is a gift that God gives to us. Repentance is a gift from God, faith is a gift from God. This is the response to the gospel, and they must be gifts from God because nothing lies in the power of the fallen, corrupt human nature to believe or to turn from sin. Leopards cannot change their spots. We cannot change our hearts. No act of a stony heart can believe upon the gospel. God must do something to the stony-hearted sinner to make them not only willing to believe but able to believe the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Why is that? Because we are slaves to sin. We cannot muster the faith. We do not set ourselves free from our slave master. We're slaves to sin, slaves to Satan, slaves to self, and slaves to the world. We have more chains hanging off us than a well-paid NFL player. We are so bound in our sin and in the darkness of night that we cannot set ourselves free. And even if you gave to the sinner the key to set themselves free, the sinner wouldn't desire that because we love sin. We cherish sin. The sinful, wretched sinner does not want to be free from sin. He enjoys sin.
Something must happen to the heart and the nature and the soul of a person, the slave of sin, before he will be set free from that. He has no ability nor willingness nor desire because as Ephesians 2:1–3 says,
1 You were dead in your trespasses and sins,
2 in which you formally walked according to the course of this world, according to the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience,
3 among whom we all also formally conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, doing the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest. (LSB)
Dead. Before Christ, you were not terminally ill, you were not sick, you were not limping along, you were not partially crippled, you weren't walking on spiritual crutches. You were dead. Four days dead. Lazarus-in-the-tomb dead. So if you are alive today, you owe that only and solely to the grace of God in Jesus Christ, who granted you both repentance and faith.
Salvation is a work of God. He chooses, He draws, He sends His Son to pay the full penalty for those whom He chooses and draws, He sends the Spirit to regenerate those whom He chooses and draws and expunges their sin on the Person of Christ, and then He saves them, He secures them, He grants you the faith, He grants you the repentance, and then He secures you everlastingly and takes you to eternal glory and promises that He will not lose a single one. So from the first, eternity past, to the future, to the last, eternity future, all of salvation is of the Lord. That is the universal testimony of Scripture. Salvation is of the Lord. Not just the possibility of salvation, but actual redemption comes by the grace of God through Jesus Christ and Him alone. Fallen and enslaved human will cannot produce saving faith because your soul is dead apart from God's regenerating work. Faith is a divine gift granted by God to His elect along with repentance so that the child owes both his repentance as well as his faith to the grace of Christ. And we can take credit for nothing of salvation.
You say, “Jim, if that's true, then wherein lies human responsibility?” If you reject the message of the gospel of Jesus Christ, God is not responsible for that. You are. And if you embrace by faith the saving message of the gospel of Jesus Christ, you get no glory for that. God does. So you will get all the credit for your rebellion, and God gets all the credit for your regeneration and redemption. That is how that works. This teaching, that God is sovereign in salvation, does not in any way nullify the responsibility of man. It is both true that God is completely sovereign in salvation and that fallen man is completely responsible to repent and to obey the gospel.
R. C. Sproul said this:
Just like the Apostle Paul, so the Apostle Peter defines faith not as something that originates and is exercised by an unregenerate human heart, but as something the believer receives passively. If you have faith in Jesus Christ, you did not conjure it up. When you first heard the gospel and responded favorably to it, perhaps you thought that you decided to believe in Jesus, but saving faith is not the result of a human decision. It is a divine gift.
Now, if that is hard for you to swallow, I just ask you, “What saith the text?” You have received a faith of the very same kind as us, Peter said. It is a received gift. That word of the same kind is a word that was used to describe something equal to or equivalent in kind or holding equal privileges. Barclay says in his commentary that the word was particularly used in connection with foreigners who would be given equal citizenship in a city with the natives. So a foreigner comes in and they're granted a citizenship. They're not given a second-class citizenship with the natives of that city. They would be given a citizenship that was of the same kind, equal in value, equal in responsibility, equal in stature with all of the equal honors that would go with the citizenship that a native would have. So it was of the same kind.
Now when Peter says, “The same kind as ours,” who is the “ours” that he is talking about? Some have suggested that what Peter is describing here is he's saying, “As a Jew, we have been granted a faith to believe, and I want you Gentiles to know that you also have been given the same kind of faith as us Jews have been given to embrace and to believe the gospel.” The problem with that is that it does not seem anywhere in 2 Peter that the issue in this book is the difference between ethnicities, Jews and Gentiles. There's no conflict here. So I don't think that that's what Peter is describing.
Instead, I would be of the opinion with other commentators who believe that what Peter is describing here is that you non-Apostles have been given the same kind of faith as the Apostles. He's already described himself as an Apostle, and lest they think that he is putting himself on some level above them in terms of the gift of faith that he had received, he is reminding them, “You have been given a faith that is just like the faith that we Apostles have received.” The faith that saved Peter is of the same nature as the faith that saved you. God had to grant to Peter the faith to believe and God had to grant to you the faith to believe. It's the same kind of faith. It is a divine gift.
So Peter isn't saved by a faith that he conjured up out of his heart any more than you are. And you're not saved by some faith that you invent any more than Peter was. We are saved by the same faith. Therefore, there are no second-class citizens in God's household. We have the same honor, the same adoption, the same regeneration, all the same spiritual blessings that are ours, granted to us in Christ Jesus. All of them accrue to us two thousand years after Peter of the same nature and kind as Peter enjoyed on the basis of his faith. That is not to say that there are no differing roles or responsibilities or positions or authority within the church or within Christianity, but it is to say that the faith that saves us is the same kind of faith that Peter had that saved him as well.
This would be a necessary reminder to them for two reasons. First, because of Peter's imminent death. His passing is imminent. He knows this (2 Pet. 1:14). And this is what Peter's point is, that the passing of the Apostles does not mean that there is a class of super-saints that's passed on and now what's left is just us common Joe Blow saints that have a different kind of faith than the Apostles had. Peter wants us to know as the Apostles are passing from the scene that those men were saved with the same kind of faith that saves us as believers. And therefore, we have something in common even with the Apostles. And in fact, we have something in common with every believer who has ever lived and ever will live—that is, that we are saved by the same divine gift of faith.
Second, it was a necessary reminder in light of the false teachers who were coming up because they would arise and they would beguile and they would deceive the Christians into believing that they, the false teachers, had some special ability, some special faith, some special anointing, some special indwelling of the Holy Spirit, some special ability to believe that gives them some special insight or special power or special revelation or any of that. Peter is just simply saying, “You are saved by the same grace, you are given the same faith, you are granted the same repentance, you are redeemed by the same gift as the Apostles.” Do not be deceived into thinking that you need leaders with some special insight into salvation that is hidden from the rest of us. That is Gnosticism. And here you have Peter chipping away at what was an early form of Gnosticism, the belief that there are Christians out there who have special insight and if we can just get in under them and follow their leadership and get their sort of special goggles that they use to look at everything and see the hidden messages, we would have that insight as well. Peter is saying, “No, the faith that saves me is the same faith that saves you.” You don't need anything beyond that. The same faith that was able to save Peter is able to save you. So it is a received faith.
Second, it's a righteous faith. Look at verse 1, the end of it: “By the righteousness of our God and Savior, Jesus Christ.” That is to say that we are saved according to the righteousness of Christ. It is in keeping with or it is according to God's righteousness that He grants you faith. God saves sinners through the righteousness of Christ. Righteousness is imputed to the believing sinner at the moment of faith. Now we have no righteousness. We have nothing by which we can stand before God and claim any kind of merit or something that we deserve to enter into His presence or to receive His grace or mercy or goodness. We have no deeds that we have done that merit any favor whatsoever. We have done nothing worthy of grace, nothing worthy of His goodness, and it is just for God to bring grace and salvation to the sinner by the righteousness of another. When the life of Christ is credited to you and the death of Christ is credited to your account, that is what we call imputation. And imputation is at the heart of the Christian gospel.
This is the difference between Protestantism and Rome. Rome believes that grace is infused, injected into you, and that that grace must be nurtured and worked for your justification and for your sanctification. Protestantism believes that grace, that righteousness, is not infused into you but that it is imputed to you and it is credited to your account. So God can be just to the guilty sinner when He imputes the righteousness of His Son to that guilty sinner because Christ has died for them. God can give faith and salvation to us because it is righteous for Him to do so to those for whom Christ has paid the penalty for their sin. So God can save the believing sinner, and it is not unrighteous for Him to do that.
It would be unrighteous for God to save us on any other basis other than the death of Christ and the righteousness of Christ. If God were to wink at sin, if He were to ignore sin, if He were to pass over sin and just say, “Oh, boys will be boys. Let them do what they're going to do. I'm going to bring everybody in,” that would be unrighteous. But when the Son of God has stepped into time and lived a perfect life, the life we're required to live, and then died on a cross to take the penalty for our sin, and since my sin has been covered by the death of Christ and all of His suffering has been credited to my account, as if I suffered that, so that the wrath of God is removed from my head, it is according to the righteousness of God in Christ that He would credit me the righteousness of Christ. He can do so. He can be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus, Paul says in Romans 3, because Christ has paid the price for his sin. And therefore God can forgive the guilty sinner without ever compromising His justice because justice has been satisfied.
So you have been granted a grace according to the righteousness of God. It is not unrighteous for God to grant grace to some and not grace to others. It is not unrighteous for God to forgive the sin of some and not others. It is in keeping with His righteousness that He would grant the gift of repentance and faith to those for whom Christ has died because Christ has lived in their place and Christ has died in their place and Christ rose again in their place. And therefore God is completely just to forgive their sin and grant them repentance and faith so that in believing they may be credited the righteousness of Jesus Christ. That is how our faith is a received faith.
Now you see that in verse 1, at the very end of it, he says, “Of our God and Savior, Jesus Christ.” If it sounds to you there like Peter is calling Jesus God, it's because he is. We have been granted this according to the righteousness of our God and Savior, Jesus Christ. God and Savior both describe Christ. Now in the next verse, which we'll look at next week obviously, Peter is going to distinguish between the Persons of the Trinity. But in this verse, he is equating Christ with God. He uses the same—it's called a Granville Sharp construction, if you're a Greek geek and you like this stuff. The Granville Sharp construction. It's the same one used in Titus 2:13 where Paul says to Titus, “[We are] looking for the blessed hope and the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ.” He is the Christian's God and Savior. The righteousness imputed to us is the righteousness of God Himself.
How righteous do you need to be to stand in the presence of God when you die? Any guess? You need to be as righteous as God is righteous. How are you doing? Have you ever told a lie? Have you ever stolen anything? Have you ever lusted in your heart? Ever dishonored your parents? Ever taken the name of God in vain? If that's the case, even one of those, you have no righteousness. None. And you need to be as righteous as God is righteous to stand in His presence. That's bad news. But I have good news for you. There is One who lived a perfect life and who was infinitely righteous. It was God Himself, the Lord Jesus Christ, God in human flesh. And on the basis of your repentance and faith, you can be made righteous in Him. Not because of anything that you have done but because of what Christ has done on behalf of guilty sinners. And God commands you this day, if you have not already, to repent—that is, to turn from your sin—and to place your faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. If you will not do that, you will stand before Him dressed in the robes of your own self-righteousness, and it will not be a pretty day.
But for those of us in Christ who have been clothed with the righteousness of Christ, it is our joy and our delight to adore Him and to worship Him and to gladly claim the title of slaves of Christ because of what He has done. If you're in Him, you have been clothed with the Son's perfect righteousness. So God sees you not as a guilty sinner, He sees you as righteous as Christ is righteous. And because that righteousness belongs to another, it can never be marred by you, it can never be diminished by you, it can never be improved by you. You simply are clothed in it as a gift of God's grace. And for that, we praise Him.