More Precious Than Gold: 1 Peter 1:3-5

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God's power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.
1 Peter 1:3-5

 Peter begins his first epistle with a theme that will encourage, strengthen, build-up, and reinforce your Christian faith. Peter writes to the elect exiles of the dispersion (v. 1): Jewish Christian men and women who were undoubtedly relying and struggling to rely on a future hope. In the first verse, Peter addresses them as exiles. They were Jews that had seemingly been torn away from their promised land and their once-thought perpetual inheritance. Undoubtedly, they were struggling to come to terms with their exile. They were questioning their hope in an eternal inheritance. They were sojourners, exiled from a land that God had promised would be their inheritance forever (Gen. 13:14-15). Their faith was being tested. They were struggling to find hope when all seemed hopeless. They were struggling to find joy when all seemed so bleak. They were focused on their temporal and national inheritance as Jews, but Peter intends to open their eyes to a much better inheritance, a more wonderful promise, a greater hope, and unsurpassed joy.

In these first opening verses of Peter's epistle, he seems to be drawing the exiled Jews away from their aspirations to return to the Promised Land as a Jewish nation, and instead, he calls them to recognize an expanded nation of God's elect and a new Promised Land. Throughout the first chapter of 1 Peter, Peter seems to grab us by the collars of our shirts and demand we stop thinking of the here and now as our inheritance. Verses three through five particularly encourage us to think of a new inheritance; a better inheritance than this world has to offer. In verse six, Peter mentions that we are going to struggle with hardship and trials as benefactors of God's mercy and grace, but the apostle calms and comforts our fears by relating that it is only "for a little while."

He outlines our immense and glorious inheritance as benefactors of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and then he goes forth to tell us that this wonderful blessing will cause us grief  and many trials, but only for a season. He describes how the trials and tribulations we struggle with serve a similar purpose to the fire and testing that gold requires in order to purify it to a state without defects (v. 7).  Peter simultaneously uses our perception of gold to relate to us how precious our sanctification is but at the same time he adapts and transforms our perception of gold so that we see our faith and the object of our faith as something far more precious than gold. Using it as a precious metal in order to convey to us how precious we are in the sight of God and how trials and struggles serve to sanctify us into the purest image of our Lord and Savior, Peter utilizes our worldly perception of gold. But at the same time, he points out that although we are tested by fire like precious gold, our genuine faith in Christ our Lord is far more precious than gold. I hope to write more about this in another part when I focus more on verses six through nine.

As you read through the chapter, resting upon the grace of God and the illumination of the Holy Spirit, your perception of what is "precious" should alter. Peter is calling us to think beyond our earthly inheritance, our earthly prosperity, and to dwell upon the riches that each of God's elect possesses through Jesus Christ. Throughout the chapter, we can see Peter pulling us out of this world, pulling us out of our sad and miserable lives, and pulling us out of our worldly perceptions in order to consider the great riches and inheritance we have obtained through God's merciful gift of salvation. It is as if Peter is asking the exiles and those resting in Christ to be exiled from the world and our perceptions of it for a moment that we might at the very least try to grasp what little we can comprehend of a future glory with God as His people, dwelling in His presence, adorned with the righteousness and holiness of the sacrificial lamb, Christ our Lord, forever and forever more!

As John Calvin so clearly articulates it:

[The] main object of this epistle is to raise us above the world, in order that we may be prepared and encouraged to sustain the spiritual contests of our warfare. For this end, the knowledge of God’s benefits avails much; for, when their value appears to us, all other things will be deemed worthless, especially when we consider what Christ and his blessings are; for everything without him is but dross. For this reason he highly extols the wonderful grace of God in Christ, that is, that we may not deem it much to give up the world in order that we may enjoy the invaluable treasure of a future life; and also that we may not be broken down by present troubles, but patiently endure them, being satisfied with eternal happiness.

 To begin with, Peter calls us to consider our salvation in Christ. In order to show us just how truly precious our salvation is, he begins by laying forth our merit to this great gift. Peter writes, "According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead" (v. 3). We partake of an "imperishable, undefiled, and unfading" inheritance through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead according to his (God's) great mercy. We, whose thoughts and deeds are wicked through and through from our conception, have obtained the unobtainable. We have obtained perfect communion with God the Father, having been merited with the Son's fulfillment of the Law by the gracious gift of faith established and strengthened by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. We have earned the greatest gift ever only according to God's great mercy, and not by merit of our own.

For those who struggle to rest and rely upon God for salvation, and who desire to contribute in some way to their justification through works, Peter quickly quiet's their claim to salvation in Christ Jesus. He indirectly tells us that those who work for a portion of the inheritance can lay no claim to the inheritance. It is not obtained by your "good" works, but rather, it has been obtained by Christ's good work and we share in it only according to God's great mercy. Even more, it is not just mercy that makes us partakers of salvation, but it is God's great mercy. The word can also be rendered "abundant". To further diminish man's claim to salvation through works, Peter emphasizes that we obtain our salvation through great, abundant, and surpassing mercy on God's part. It requires great mercy to partake of this salvation, so what do your piddly little acts of selfish and devised kindness merit? Nothing.

The fact that we partake of salvation according to God's great mercy makes it all the more precious to us. Although Peter is calling us to imagine things greater than our imaginations corrupted by this temporal world can comprehend, he uses images and symbols in order to peak our comprehension of the majesty and glory of the incomprehensible. Think of the greatest possession you could have in this world. Whether it would be money, love, property, belongings, power, or anything of like manner. How much more valuable would that thing be if it was freely given to you, due to no consequence of your own? Now take that thing and multiply it by infinity. Try to contemplate all of the greatest possessions your spiritual mind could desire, multiply it by infinity, and then by infinity again, and relish the fact that all of this is yours according to God's great mercy. It is a free gift. You not only did not deserve it, but the only thing you did deserve was an infinitely more horrendous, terrible, and destructive inheritance of eternal judgment. But according to God's great mercy, you will enjoy an imperishable, undefiled, and unfading inheritance because of your salvation in Jesus Christ. Surely, that is far more precious than gold!

Our inheritance is also more precious than gold as Peter's exposition describes it as "imperishable, undefiled, and unfading." An inheritance is, "the portion or heritage which one receives by virtue of birth or by special gift" (Marvin Vincent). The inheritance at hand is Christ's, the Son of God. The son of a business tycoon inherits the riches of his father. The son of a great inventor and innovator inherits the fruits of his father's labors. The son of the king inherits the kingdom. Those are nice inheritances, but they are perishable and corruptible. The son can easily squander and mismanage his inheritance (as we so vividly see in the parable of the prodigal son). The inheritance can be diminished to nothing if the inheritor does not attend to it wisely. But Peter is speaking of an imperishable, undefiled, and unfading inheritance. This is the inheritance of God Almighty. Our God is imperishable, undefiled, incorruptible, and unfading. It should not surprise us that the inheritance He wills to His Son, Jesus, is the same.

How precious is this inheritance that you may lay claim to it through Christ Jesus? Have you ever truly imagined that you are a partaker of God's inheritance? Have you ever thought about what it means to partake of this inheritance through Christ? Even now,  you may try and try again to wrap your feeble mind on the idea, but the glory of this truth is incomprehensible. Your mind cannot conceive of it's glory and awesomeness. But by faith, you can attend to this truth as it is set before you in the Scriptures. You can rest assured that as sure as Peter tells you that an imperishable, undefiled, and unfading inheritance is being held for you in heaven in the Holy Word of God, that this incomprehensible truth is just that: true! You might not be able to wrap your mind around how glorious and wonderful this inheritance is, but you can grasp onto it by faith, knowing that it is by far more precious than gold or any riches that this terrible world has to offer.

As noted above, your inheritance from God the Father is being held for you in heaven (v. 4). The word "held" is also translated "kept" or "reserved". As Marvin Vincent points out, the verb is a perfect participle, "indicating the inheritance as one reserved through God's care for his own from the beginning down to the present." As Charles Spurgeon writes, "Before God made the heavens and the earth, and laid the pillars of the firmament in their golden sockets, he set his love upon me; upon the breast of the great high priest he wrote my name, and in his everlasting book it stands, never to be erased -- 'elect according to the foreknowledge of God.'" From the beginning, your inheritance has been guarded by God the Father. As sure as you were elect according to the foreknowledge of God, your inheritance was secured and defended by God the Father. What wonders! Surely, it must be more precious than gold if God would care to defend, secure, protect, and guard it for me long before I, a mere man, was born. To use a worldly example to further convey the incomprehensible glory of this truth again, imagine Fort Knox and how impenetrable it must be in order to protect our nation's wealth. Now imagine what defense is necessary to protect and secure the inheritance of God Almighty. It takes nothing less than God Himself to protect it, and he does and has been protecting it on your behalf long before the foundations of this world were even laid.

Finally, as God spares nothing in order to defend your inheritance, you must now reflect on how precious you are in the sight of God! You are surely much more precious than gold! An inheritance is nothing if there is no one to inherit it. God defends and guards your inheritance, and He has done so from the beginning down to the present. God does not defend it so well hoping that if you stand the test of time and survive then it will be there for you as a prize for your perseverance. No, God defends and guards your inheritance because you are sure to inherit it. He guarantees it by His great and awesome power! Peter further enumerates what God's keeping of our Heavenly inheritance means to our earthly existence in verse five. By God's power, we are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time! We are being guarded on earth, like our inheritance is guarded in heaven, for the revelation of our great inheritance in the last time! We are being guarded by God's power so that we will see our salvation! Faith guards us in the here and now so that we will one day be given that great and wondrous salvation, that imperishable, undefiled, and unfading inheritance that God has set aside for us from before the foundations of the earth were laid!

Knowing that God guards and protects us by His great power on earth so that we will inherit that which He guards and protects in heaven is encouraging and uplifting to the most discouraged and beaten down soul. Many of us have heard about the perseverance of the saints, but the Apostle Peter presents the topic from a more encouraging and profound manner: the preservation of the saints. By faith we persevere, but as feeble and lacking as our faith tends to be at times of trial and tribulation, God's great power is always with us, guarding and protecting us in such a manner that no earthly or cosmic danger could overcome us, making sure that we will survive to the great day to see our salvation revealed to us as an imperishable, undefiled, and unfading inheritance!

In the descriptive, poetic, and joyful words of Charles Spurgeon:

"This perhaps will be one of the greatest cordials to a Christian in heaviness, that he is not kept by his own power, but by the power of God, and that he is not left in his own keeping, but he is kept by the Most High. Ah! what should you and I do in the day when darkness gathers round our faith, if we had to keep ourselves! I can never understand what an Arminian does, when he gets into sickness, sorrow, and affliction; from what well he draws his comfort, I know not; but I know whence I draw mine. It is this. 'When flesh and heart faileth, God is the strength of my life, and my portion for ever.' 'I know whom I have believed, and I am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day.' But take away that doctrine of the Saviour’s keeping his people, and where is my hope? What is there in the gospel worth my preaching, or worth your receiving? I know that he hath said, 'I give unto my sheep eternal life. and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand.' What, Lord, but suppose they should grow faint — that they should begin to murmur in their affliction. Shall they not perish then? No, they shall never perish. But suppose the pain should grow so hot that their faith should fail: shall they not perish then? No, 'they shall not perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand.' But suppose their sense should seem to wander, and some should try to pervert them from the faith: shall they not be perverted? No; 'they shall never perish,' But suppose in some hour of their extremity hell and the world and their own fears should all beset them, and they should have no power to stand — no power whatever to resist the fierce onslaughts of the enemy, shall they not perish then? No, they are 'kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation, ready to be revealed, and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand.' Ah! this is the doctrine, the cheering assurance 'wherein we greatly rejoice, though now for a season, if needs be, we are in heaviness through manifold  temptations.'” (From Charles Spurgeon's sermon on 1 Peter 1:6 titled "The Christian's Heaviness and Rejoicing" in The New Park Street Pulpit)

In closing, it is of the utmost importance that we reflect upon why we are much more precious than gold in God's eyes. It is not because we are good people. It is certainly not because He sees that we have something worth while to contribute to Him. As the scriptures read, "We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment" (Isaiah 64:6). One would not expect to bring polluted garments to an earthly king and expect to receive the kingdom and all its riches, so why would we expect to appear before the King of Kings with the foulest, most vile, polluted rags and expect Him to value them and appreciate them as much more precious than gold, earning us claim to the great inheritance? This is why we rely upon Christ and His atonement. The very Son of God became man, took on our flesh, took on our weaknesses, our feeble minds, and our destructible flesh, and fulfilled the Law of God perfectly. There was not a single jot or tittle that He did not fully accomplish. He was above reproach, above the punishment of the law (death), and yet He was betrayed by one of His own disciples, suffered under Pontius Pilate, and was crucified on the cross. As Paul tells us, "You, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross" (Colossians 2:13-14).

Our sins and our debt were nailed on the cross in the person of Jesus Christ. He bore them to His greatest torment. The Son of God that was in perfect communion with God the Father for all eternity was forsaken on the cross on your behalf. He died, and so did your sinful nature through His perfect sacrifice to become the propitiation for your sins. He was buried and descended into the lower regions of the earth (Eph. 4:9). He rose again, and so did you through Him (1 Peter 1:3)! Christ has accomplished the work on our behalf. He has died and been resurrected to life, and we also have died and been born again through His resurrection!

We obtain Christ's redemptive work through God's great mercy (v. 3), according to the foreknowledge of God the Father (v.2) and in the sanctification of the Holy Spirit (v. 2). Here at the outset of Peter's epistle, we see God's redemptive work on our behalf expressed through each of the three persons of the trinity! We see that we certainly serve, obey, and trust in a magnificent and merciful triune God who loved, loves, and will forever love those that He has called His own! The promise of a glorious salvation and an imperishable, undefiled, and unfading inheritance is for God's people and God's people alone. They are more precious to Him than anything else, for they are as precious to Him as His only begotten Son,. The Father did not spare even His only begotten Son in order to provide atonement for our sins and iniquities. We are precious to God the Father through, and only through, the obedience, righteousness, holiness, and glory of Christ our Lord and Savior. If you are relying upon Christ and His redemptive work on the cross for the forgiveness of your sins, then you can rest assured that the inheritance and salvation that God is keeping and guarding you for and for you is yours as you walk by faith, always comforted and guided by the Holy Spirit! What a glorious beginning to such a wonderful epistle!

So now you must consider your salvation. Is it more precious to you than gold? Think about the way you live, the way you approach your earthly life, and how you view God day in and day out. Think about what worries you, what causes your trust in God to diminish, and what you are searching for in this short season of earthly life you sojourn through. We find comfort in all the wrong places too often. We seek financial stability, relationship stability, job security, and a sense of accomplishment in order to feel valuable and meaningful in this life. However, when God takes our sandy foundation, washes it out beneath our feet, and exposes us to the dangers of our idolatry and shortsightedness, we too often feel betrayed, forgotten, forsaken, and abandoned by God. But as Peter will go on to tell us, God is testing our faith in Him through our trials, throwing us through fire after fire until we finally learn what is most precious to us. We will forget time and time again what glories await us after this life, we will seek to build our foundation on the sand rather than the rock, but by God's perseverance and preservation we will one day sing as the psalmist:

"The law of the LORD is perfect, reviving the soul; the testimony of the LORD is sure, making wise the simple; the precepts of the LORD are right, rejoicing the heart; the commandment of the LORD is pure, enlightening the eyes; the fear of the LORD is clean, enduring forever; the rules of the LORD are true, and righteous altogether. More to be desired are they than gold, even much fine gold; sweeter also than honey and drippings of the honeycomb. Moreover, by them is your servant warned; in keeping them there is great reward." Psalm 19:7-11