I thought this was a great verse this morning, verse 4...it starts off my acknowledging that God has granted us His own promises. Now, it doesn’t elaborate on this, so I just have to kind of think to myself, “What are God’s promises to us?”. Well, for one, His presence...He promises His presence. He also promises His saving Grace, as well has His return, which is a big part of Peter’s letters that we’ve been reading. For the most part, those are the real promises of God. So, turning to to rest of the verse, it goes on... “so that through them you may become gpartakers of the divine nature, hhaving escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire”. This is great - we are promised presence and Grace from God, and His eventual return, and through those promises we can partake in the divine nature. It appears what Peter is doing is contrasting what many Greeks had believed, which was that they could actually become gods, and what God ascribes to be true, that you can partake in some of God’s nature and blessing through your faith and trust in Him. But my favorite part is the last part, where it says “having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire”. The reason I love that is become it is a great reminder...the reason we have pain, the reason we struggle and we suffer, the reason for hunger and for death and for war and for famine and all of the other tragedies and indecencies of this world is the same thing...our sinful nature. That’s why good things happen to bad people - because of sinful nature. Peter isn’t getting into a deep apologetics discussion here, but this one subtle comment is really powerful.
At any rate, now we get to the part I keyed off of yesterday, verses 5-7. In these verses, Peter uses what is known as sorites, which is a literary style that is like a staircase...this leads to this leads to this leads to this, and so on. As we read these verses, we can see this clearly, and this would have been a familiar philosophical style of his audience as well.
2 Peter 1:5-9 ESV
“For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love. For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
So, for me, here is what I am thinking as I read these verses. That I need to first supplement my faith (which is my understanding and my knowledge about God) with virtue - virtue in this context really means excellence in our terms. But what is excellence? Well, it is knowledge paired with self-control, which leads to steadfastness and then to godliness (so now I am living a life consistently moving forward in being more like God), and then I will show brotherly affection and then pure love. So, ultimately, when I am living a life that is based on love, I am living as I have been called. And then he goes on to say that if we are living out these qualities, this keeps us from being held back from knowing God more fully. Or, said from the opposite vantage point...to the extent that we aren’t living out these qualities in our life, we will struggle to understand God.
Ultimately, I think what Peter is getting at here is that we can study God and we can understand God on paper, but to KNOW God, to truly EXPERIENCE God, we have to live more like Christ. We can’t know God unless we try to walk in Jesus’ shoes. That’s strong.