Foundation of hope

1 Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ:

To those chosen, living as exiles dispersed abroad in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia, chosen 2 according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through the sanctifying work of the Spirit, to be obedient and to be sprinkled with the blood of Jesus Christ.

May grace and peace be multiplied to you.

1 Peter 1:1-2

The Challenge Before Us

You may be wondering if I was told late yesterday afternoon that I would be preaching this morning and that these two words were the only ones I could handle. But let me assure you this is not the case. The fact that the communion message last week was taken from the same passage but from verses 13 to 19 is proof of that. But now you might be more concerned—five minutes and seven verses. And this morning we’ve got two verses for a thirty-minute sermon.

Well, as you will see, these two verses in the first book of Peter are packed with theology. And some of it might be a bit controversial depending on your view on certain matters of doctrine. But I’m sure that there are some pastors who would be able to preach multiple sermons just on these two verses.

If I have to sum them up, I would say: Foundation of Hope. And that is the title of my sermon this morning.

Contrary to the norm, I’m not going to put forth three or four points because the fact is these verses are so packed that we are just going to work through them and take it piece by piece. But my hope is to show you today that no matter your struggles and no matter the circumstances you find yourself in, the foundation of your hope is the eternal God—three in one.

The Author and His Transformation

Let us begin with verse one: Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ. Stop right there.

The very first word introduces the author of this passage of this letter and his relationship to God through the person of Jesus Christ. Now, for most of us, Peter needs no introduction. He is perhaps the most prominent and relatable and thoroughly human figure in the New Testament. We know him well. We know his zeal, his boldness, and if we are honest, his glaring failures.

Peter was an ordinary man—a fisherman from Galilee, a blue-collar worker, if you will, uneducated by the standards of the modern elite, unlike Paul who was a highly educated man. Yet, he was chosen by Jesus to be a disciple, one of his inner circle with James and John.

Throughout the Gospels, Peter is the one who speaks first and thinks later. He’s the one who stepped out of the boat to walk on water only to sink in fear moments later. He is the one who moments after making that great divinely revealed confession in Matthew 16—”You are the Christ, the Son of the living God”—turned around a few moments later to rebuke the Lord Jesus and then to receive the sharpest correction in Scripture: “Get behind me, Satan” (Matthew 16:23). He is the disciple who boasted, “I would die for Christ,” and then that very same evening with oaths and curses would deny that he knew his Lord.

If we were choosing leaders to establish a global and historic shaping work, human wisdom would have passed Peter by. But our God delights in the weak and foolish things of this world to shame the wise and to show that power belongs to God only.

But we must also address the name that Christ gave to him. In Matthew 16:18, Jesus said, “You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church.” Now, some have mistakenly elevated Peter to a position of supreme and infallible authority, viewing him as the rock of the church. But Peter’s own writing corrects this. He knew he was not the rock.

In chapter two of this very same letter, Peter points away from himself and towards Jesus Christ. He’s quoting from Isaiah when he says, “For it stands in Scripture: See, I lay a stone in Zion, a chosen and honored cornerstone, and the one who believes in him will never be put to shame.” For Peter, Christ is the rock—the Petra, the chief cornerstone. And he, Peter, is merely a petros—a small stone, a piece of rock who along with us is being built up as a spiritual house upon the true and only foundation, which is Jesus Christ.

We see it in this letter and in fact in the second epistle as well—a man deeply humbled by the grace of God. The brash and self-confident fisherman in the Gospels has been melted and refashioned by the Holy Spirit. He’s no longer asserting his own strength.

When he writes to the leaders in the church in chapter 5, he does not pull apostolic rank. He writes, “Therefore, I exhort the elders among you as your fellow elder and witness of the sufferings of Christ” (1 Peter 5:1). And in his second letter, he introduces himself not with a title of grandeur, but instead merely “Simon Peter, a slave and apostle of Jesus Christ” (2 Peter 1:1).

By the unmatched grace of God, this ordinary flawed man—one who once denied that he knew his Lord and Savior—was restored and filled by the Spirit and used mightily to shepherd the early church and in fact to write the very breath of God. As we study his words, we are not listening to a man who succeeded by his own grit. We are listening to an example of God’s sustaining grace. So let us look past the messenger and behold the Savior who transformed him.

The Readers and Their Identity

After identifying himself, Peter addresses his readers. Look at the rest of verse one: To those chosen, living as exiles dispersed abroad in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia.

In the Greek text, both “exiles” and “dispersion” lack the definite article. Unlike other passages in the New Testament such as John 7:35 and James 1:1 where the “dispersion” or “diaspora” refers strictly to ethnic Jews who were in exile, Peter is doing something far deeper here. By omitting the article, he is defining their spiritual character. These believers are not called exiles because of Roman geopolitics, but because of their heavenly citizenship.

As verses three and four immediately show, Peter has eternal realities in view:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Because of his great mercy, he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you.

Peter names five Roman provinces—Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia—covering a vast, rugged region in modern-day Turkey. This was a flock that was made up of a mixture of Jews and Gentile believers. Many of them likely trace their spiritual roots back to the day of Pentecost where visitors from these exact same regions heard Peter preach and they took the good news of the gospel back with them to their homes.

Yet they were now scattered under much more painful circumstances. In the pagan Roman culture where civic life, local trade, and family festivals revolved around idol worship and the imperial cult, these Christians had not withdrawn. They refused to bow down. And because of this they were enduring intense localized hostility. They were suffering the persecution of the tongue, social isolation, verbal slander, and economic boycott. They had become strangers in their own hometowns.

So how did Peter comfort them? He does so by radically redefining their identity. He pairs two words that seem to clash: chosen and exiles. The world looked at them and saw rejected outcasts. Peter looked at them and said, “You are God’s chosen treasures.” Their earthly displacement was actually proof of their heavenly placement.

Peter comforts them by telling them to lift up their eyes beyond their immediate circumstances and to look ahead towards their eternal home. The message of First Peter is that when the world treats you like a stranger, it is because you are an heir to a kingdom that is not of this world.

The Doctrine of Election

Notice the very first word that Peter uses to describe these exiles in verse one: To those chosen. He calls them eklektoi—chosen.

As a Jewish apostle, this word would have tasted like honey to Peter. Throughout the Old Testament, the concept of being chosen belonged exclusively to ethnic Israel. Moses declared in Deuteronomy 7:6, “For you are a holy people belonging to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you to be his own possession out of all the peoples of the face of the earth.” The psalmist echoes this in Psalm 135:4, “For the Lord God has chosen Jacob for himself, Israel as his treasured possession.” And the psalmist celebrated in Psalm 105:43, “He brought his people out with rejoicing, his chosen ones, with shouts of joy.”

For 1500 years, to be chosen meant that you were a physically circumcised descendant of Abraham. But now Peter, writing to a congregation largely composed of Gentiles, calls them the chosen. He is declaring that God’s plan of redemption has expanded from a chosen nation to a chosen family—the church.

This pattern of sovereign choice runs all through the Old Testament. Following the fall, God swept away a corrupt nation but elected Noah and his family to start anew. At the Tower of Babel, as rebellious world builders scattered, God stepped in and sovereignly selected Abraham. For centuries, God protected that nation’s messianic bloodline. Even when the entire hope of redemption hung on a single fragile thread—the infant king Joash hidden in the temple when a murderous queen slaughtered the royal seed—God preserved this line of promise culminating in Christ, who is the ultimate seed.

And now in the new covenant era, God is gathering a family from every tribe and tongue and nation, including those very peoples who were scattered at the Tower of Babel. Scripture is flooded with this truth of sovereign election.

In the Olivet Discourse, Jesus speaks repeatedly of the elect for whose sake the days of tribulation are cut short (Matthew 24:22). In the upper room, he declared, “You did not choose me, but I chose you. I appointed you” (John 15:16). Earlier he said, “I know those who I have chosen” (John 13:18). Christ made it clear that salvation is a work of divine initiation.

In John 6:44 he says, “No man can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him,” and that the Son also gives life to whom he wants (John 5:21).

The apostle Paul takes this thread and weaves it all through New Testament theology. He writes to the Ephesians that God “chose us in him before the foundation of the world” (Ephesians 1:4). To the Thessalonians, he says, “God has chosen you for salvation” (2 Thessalonians 2:4). To Timothy, he says, “God has saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace, which was given to us in Christ Jesus before time began” (2 Timothy 1:9).

And then in Romans 8:29-30, Paul lays out the unbreakable golden chain of redemption showing that those whom God foreknew he predestined, he called, he justified, and he glorified. Our salvation does not rest in our own strength or our fickle fallen wills.

Ultimately, the New Testament reveals that the elect are the Father’s love gift to the Son. The Father gives them, the Son receives them, and the Spirit seals them. In the book of Revelation, John reminds us that our names were written in the Lamb’s book of life before the foundation of the world (Revelation 13:8).

The Three Persons of the Trinity in Salvation

Peter picks this up in verse two when he says: Chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father by the sanctifying work of the Spirit to obey Jesus Christ and be sprinkled with his blood.

Peter’s purpose for writing this letter was to offer hope to a people who were oppressed. He starts out by redefining their identity and grafting them into God’s royal family. He lays out the foundation of their hope by spelling out their election by the only one God—three in one but one God—and each of those persons’ role in salvation.

He begins by stating that these exiles were chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father.

In modern theological debates, “foreknowledge” is often defined merely as foresight—the idea that God looked down the corridors of time and saw who would choose to believe and then elected them based on that anticipated choice. However, to the original readers, this definition would have been entirely foreign and unscriptural.

There are three primary reasons why “foreknowledge” cannot mean mere foresight:

First, it undermines divine sovereignty. If God’s choice was based on man’s choice, then man is sovereign in salvation. But in John 15:16, Christ said, “You did not choose me, but I chose you.”

Second, it allows for human boasting. If God chose us because he foresaw our faith, then our salvation is partly due to our own merit. This contradicts Ephesians 2:8-9: “For you are saved by grace through faith, and this is not from yourselves. It is a God’s gift, not from works, so that no one can boast.”

Third, it assumes a fallen human capability that simply does not exist. Scripture teaches that fallen man is spiritually dead and incapable of seeking God on his own. Romans 3:11 says, “There is no one who understands. There is no one who seeks God.”

Therefore, the Greek word for knowledge—prognōsis—must be understood biblically. In 1 Peter 1:20, Peter uses the verb form of the same word to say that Christ was “foreknown before the foundation of the world.” This does not mean that the Father simply saw that Christ would die. No, it means that the Father predetermined and ordained that Christ would be the Savior.

Furthermore, in the Old Testament, the Hebrew verb “to know”—yada—refers to an intimate electing covenant love. In Exodus 33:17, God says, “I know you by name.” Jeremiah 1:5 says, “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.” In Amos 3:2, God says, “I have known only you out of all the clans of the earth.” This does not mean that God was unaware of other nations, but that he has set his covenant love on Israel alone.

Conversely, in the New Testament, when Jesus speaks to the false teachers in Matthew 7:23, he says, “I never knew you. Depart from me, you lawbreakers.” Of course, he knew who they were, but he did not have a saving covenant relationship with them. In John 10:14, he says, “I know my own and my own know me.”

So when Peter uses the word “foreknowledge,” he was reassuring his readers that God the Father had predetermined to establish an intimate saving covenant relationship with them from eternity past.

Next, Peter writes that this election is made effective by the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit. The Greek word for “sanctifying” is hagiasmos, which means consecrated or set apart for holy use.

The Holy Spirit is the person in the Trinity who applies the Father’s plan to the sinner in time. He does this through regeneration and the washing and renewing of a dead heart. Titus 3:5 says, “He saved us not by works of righteousness that we had done, but according to his mercy through the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit.”

Once regenerated, the believer is indwelt by the Holy Spirit and sealed with the promised Holy Spirit (Ephesians 1:13). In the ancient world, a seal meant ownership, security, and authenticity. So Peter’s readers would have understood this. By stating that they were sanctified by the Spirit who served as their divine guarantee—the down payment that secured their final inheritance—Peter gave them great peace and joy.

Finally, the divine plan of salvation was accomplished by the work of the second person in the triune God, Jesus Christ, through his death and resurrection. Peter points to this work by reminding them what they no doubt heard at Pentecost: to be obedient and to be sprinkled with the blood of Jesus Christ.

The phrase “sprinkled with blood” contains a direct historical allusion to Exodus 24:7-8 at Mount Sinai. After giving the law, Moses read the book of the covenant to the people of Israel and they responded, “We will do and obey all that the Lord has commanded.” Then Moses took the blood, splattered it on the people, and said, “This is the blood of the covenant that the Lord has made with you concerning all these words.”

For Peter’s readers, although they were mostly Gentiles, this Old Testament imagery would have been clear and deeply meaningful. The sprinkling of the blood signified two realities:

First, covenant obedience—the commitment of people to obey God’s word.

Second, covenant security—the binding of people to God under the protection of sacrificial blood.

With this, Peter laid another stone in the foundation of their hope by stating that they were secured in their salvation achieved through the blood of Christ, and that the sprinkling of the blood seals them for all eternity through the Holy Spirit. But it also calls them to obedience. They were not saved by their obedience, of course, but they were absolutely saved unto obedience. The sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit leads to obedience, and obedience matures into spiritual fruit that is visible to everybody.

Practical Fruit of This Foundation

In the remainder of the letter, Peter goes on to explain in more practical terms what this spiritual fruit looks like: the laying down of the lusts that mark their former life, living in brotherly love towards one another, subjection to authority in the workplace and in society, how husbands and wives ought to treat one another, and how church leaders ought to care for and minister to their flock.

But in this opening of the letter, Peter establishes the foundation that all of this is built upon. He reminds them that the holy God—the three in one, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—has intimate knowledge of and interest in each and every one of them individually.

As he later says in 1 Peter 2:9, “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his possession, so that you might proclaim the praises of the one who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.”

The Blessing of Grace and Peace

May Grace and Peace Be Multiplied to You

Peter ends his greeting with a beautiful prayer of blessing: May grace and peace be multiplied to you.

When we look at the original language, there are three practical truths packed into this simple phrase that would have been deeply comforting to the readers of the letter.

First, the prayer is not a passive wish. The verb Peter uses here is a rare form of the Greek that expresses a deep holy desire. He’s actively praying a blessing on them, asking that they would experience these realities in abundance.

Second, it is God who does the multiplication. In the original text, the verb is passive. Often it is called the divine passive. Peter is reminding these struggling believers that they do not have to manufacture grace and peace in their own strength. They cannot grit their teeth and produce peace. It is God himself who must sovereignly pour it out into their lives and multiply it.

Third, they are an inseparable package deal. Peter uses a singular verb for both grace and peace, binding them together. You cannot have the peace of God unless you have received the grace of God. Grace is the root and peace is the fruit. Grace is the cause and peace is the effect.

In effect, Peter’s prayer for these exiles is this: May God himself take his saving grace and his unshakable peace and multiply them abundantly in your hearts, especially when the world around you is in chaos.

Application for Today

So how does this text apply to us today? Well, in a word: directly.

Even though Peter’s letter was written to a large geographical region, through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit he used language that made this applicable to all exiles across all the world and over all of time. All believers in Christ Jesus are exiles and strangers to the world wherever and whenever they lived. Our home, our true home, is not in this world. And our time on earth is short and fleeting.

Just like those exiles in Asia Minor, we also face trials and struggles in our own lives. And sometimes we need to be reminded of these truths.

So let me remind you this morning:

You were chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through the sanctifying work of the Spirit, to be obedient and to be sprinkled with the blood of Jesus Christ.

If you are facing the persecution of the tongue, slandered at work or isolated by your family or mocked for your faith, remember that your security is not defined by the approval of this world. You were foreknown and loved by the Father before the foundation of the world. Let the world reject you—the Father has claimed you.

You are not safe to blend into the pagan culture around us. The Holy Spirit has set you apart. When temptation comes, remember that you are a consecrated vessel sealed for the day of redemption.

You have been sprinkled by the blood of Christ. That blood does not only cover your past, but it also claims your future. You are saved unto obedience. How will your life this week show that you are under the covenant of Christ’s blood?

My sincerest and deepest prayer for you this morning, my brother and sister in Christ, is this: May grace and peace be multiplied to you.

However, if your heart is unsettled this morning and you don’t have peace because you don’t know that the Father has elected you, well, I’ve got glorious news for you. You can know.

In 1 John 5:13 it says, “I have written these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, so that you may know that you have eternal life.”

Do you want to know? Do you want to have peace? You are welcome to come and speak with me after the service. We can talk further and pray together.

Amen.