Text: 1 Peter 4:12-19
Date: September 26, 2021
Event: The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost, Year B
1 Peter 4:12-19 (EHV)
Dear friends, do not be surprised by the fiery trial that is happening among you to test you, as if something strange were happening to you. 13Instead rejoice whenever you are sharing in the sufferings of Christ, so that you may rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed.
14If you are insulted in connection with the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the Spirit of glory and of God rests on you. 15Make sure that none of you suffers as a murderer, a thief, a criminal, or as a meddler. 16But if you suffer for being a Christian, do not be ashamed, but praise God in connection with this name. 17For the time has come for judgment to begin with the household of God. Now if it begins with us, what will be the end for those who disobey the gospel of God? 18And if it is hard for the righteous to be saved, where will the ungodly sinner end up? 19So let those who suffer according to the will of God entrust their souls to their faithful Creator while doing what is good.
Praise God for Suffering…?
We are conditioned to want things to get better, and even expect things to get better. Make progress, fix bugs, proofread a document, rewrite that rough draft, collaborate to share ideas. In fact, most of human history is based on the idea that we’re doing things better than the people who came before us.
This can produce a sort of bias that we, right now, are smarter and overall better than those who lived a generation or centuries before us. It’s a form of generationalism (although that can also be the reverse that we think we are better than anyone younger than us as well). Are we smarter than the ancient Egyptians or Greeks? Do we have a better grasp of reality than the people of the middle ages? In some ways, probably, but we could probably identify places where those who came before us had better ideas, habits, and mindsets than we generally do today.
The idea that things are progressing and getting better as time goes on is appealing, but we can recognize that it’s highly subjective. Is a modern, clean city with safe travel and many good, productive jobs better than the forrest it replaced? You could probably get a lot of strong opinions on both sides of that issue. But the idea or hope that things are getting better is not exactly borne out by the world around us.
Take a book outside, set it on the grass, and leave it there. Is it a better book in 2 hours? 2 days? 2 months? 2 years? Unless it’s well protected somehow, that book is going to start to rot. It will eventually get to the point where it is unusable and any information that it held is lost. Or take a broken plate. Let it sit for 2000 years. What will it be after those 2 millennia? Still a broken plate, but perhaps more fragile than it was when it started.
We know the reason for this general downward trend, right? It’s sin. The world was not created with death and decay as part of its blueprint, but when our first parents sinned, it fundamentally changed everything. All of creation now suffers under this burden of wasting away, each moment taking a step farther away from God’s original design. We can take some steps to mitigate this. We can be careful stewards of the world around us, use but not abuse the places we live. But still, things are going to go from bad to worse. Fires, earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, disease, and all sorts of other disastrous things infect our world.
But all of that is outside of us. When we direct our thoughts inward to our own lives, we want to see things getting better. Sure, we recognize the negative changes that getting older might bring with our health or mobility or responsibilities. But generally, we think that things are going to get better next week than they were this week. We work hard at it, to improve our situations as much as is in our control, work hard for our families who depend on us, and just generally try strengthen weak places in our lives. But we might also think that things are going to be better because of some of the promises God has made. For instance, the classic promise that our Catechism students memorize each year from Psalm 50, “Call on me in the day of distress. I will deliver you, and you will honor me” (v. 15). God is going to take the distress in our life and make it good, right?
Well, that’s a nice thought but I don’t think that’s exactly what God has in mind with that promise. As we consider our Second Lesson this morning and its relationship to Jesus’ words in our Gospel, we begin to get a picture that God doesn’t promise us (and perhaps, doesn’t even want us to have) a life without difficulty. Consider what Peter wrote to his readers in his first letter in the New Testament, “Dear friends, do not be surprised by the fiery trial that is happening among you to test you, as if something strange were happening to you.” Not just trouble, but fiery trial, was besieging the life of these Christians. And Peter said this should not be surprising; this was not strange.
We know some of what that fiery trial was. Peter was living in the time of severe persecution from the Roman Empire. Christianity was illegal and as a result Christians were suffering and dying for their faith. It was horrible, but again, Peter is clear that they should not be surprised. Biblical Christianity is always counter-cultural, no matter what time or place it exists in.
It may be easy for us to get a martyr complex, though. We do well to recognize that as Christians in our nation, we do not suffer in the same way that Peter and his fellow Christians did at the latter part of the apostolic era. We do not suffer in the same way that many, many Christians today suffer for their faith, even to death. We do well to realize that our physical and emotional discomforts we face for being a Christian are hardly worth comparing to the suffering that many across the world and certainly in history have suffered for Christ.
But, that doesn’t mean we don’t bear crosses. That doesn’t mean that we don’t suffer for our faith. That doesn’t mean suffering, hardship, and heartache for reasons beside our faith are absent. In fact, we do bear crosses, we do have suffering in our life. Jesus promised as much. Peter pointed out the obvious to his readers. But what do we do with that suffering? How do we think of it? How do we endure it?
When it comes to suffering for being a Christian, if we are insulted “in connection with the name of Christ,” Peter says, “You are blessed.” But why? What good does suffering hold? Why am I blessed if I suffer for Jesus’ name? That seems so contradictory! Peter goes on: because the Spirit of glory and of God rests on you.
Suffering because of Jesus means that you are clearly wearing his family name in your life. If people insult you or hate you because you believe that Jesus lived, died, and rose to save you from your sins, that is to your credit. It means you are living as counter-cultural. It means that your life lived in thanksgiving to God is evident to all and for some, it is not what they want to see or hear.
But Peter goes on to say that not all suffering is sanctified. Make sure that none of you suffers as a murderer, a thief, a criminal, or as a meddler. If I suffer because of my own sin, that is not to anyone’s glory or blessing, not mine and certainly not God’s. We should be clear that it’s not suffering if people outside of the church refuse to live like you think they should live. They do not have the gospel, they do not know Jesus, therefore at that moment it is impossible for them to live lives of thanksgiving to God for what he’s done. If people are upset with me because I’ve been obnoxious to them about how they live or don’t live, that’s not really suffering for Jesus; that’s suffering because I’ve been a fool.
But if I have made every effort to live at peace with others around me and through no fault of my own, people are adversarial against me, then what? Well, it’s not exactly inspiring to hear, but there’s not much to be done about it. Rather than trying to avoid such suffering or assuming that God has somehow made a mistake when it comes to your life because suffering has attached itself to your life like some sort of parasite, take Peter’s advice: So let those who suffer according to the will of God entrust their souls to their faithful Creator while doing what is good. What does it mean for us to “entrust [our] souls to [our] faithful Creator while doing what is good”?
First of all it means not sinning to try to end the problem. That means not sinning in compromise to do and say what God clearly says is wrong. It also means not sinning to end the problem by seeking vengeance. If we entrust this suffering to our Creator, we know that he is able to do what is right. If what is right is some sort of chastisement or retribution for the person causing us to suffer, that for God to determine, not us. Leave it in his hands. He will do what is right with any given situation or person. And because he always has people’s eternal well-being in mind, it is likely that his desire is polar opposite to our gut reaction. While we may want to lash out to try to end the suffering, his goal may be for us to have patient endurance in that suffering, which may become part of the story of that person coming to faith in Jesus as their Savior later in life.
But there’s another way and reason that we entrust our souls to our Creator. In the midst of suffering, things seem dark. It may feel like there’s no solution to our problems, no relief from what is ailing us. It may be true that we can do nothing to end the suffering, end the bad things that happen to us. But we are not, in those moments, without hope. Because no matter how brutal our trials and sufferings are here and now, we know that our eternal life, our souls, are safe with our Creator and Savior. Even when we are suffering because of our own sinful attitudes and actions, there is forgiveness for those in Jesus’ life and death for us. No matter how bad things look or feel here, eternity is secure because Jesus has made it secure, and his work for us is perfect.
Peter wrote to these Christians in part because he did not want them giving up on their faith to seek out temporal, earthly calm. He didn’t want them exchanging eternal security for temporary peace. The same concerns are alive for us. We do not want to give up our faith to escape some momentary suffering.
What does that suffering in your life not mean? It does not mean that God has forgotten about you. It does not mean that God is unfaithful to his promises. It does not mean that you are outside of God’s family.
What does that suffering in your life mean? It means that Jesus was telling the truth when he said that believing in him would mean taking up your cross and following him. It means that we are part of God’s family, as we are in many ways sharing in the sufferings of Christ that he endured when he paid for our sins. It means that this suffering, while difficult, is also temporary. Even if it’s something we’ll have to endure for the whole of our natural lives, at the end of our lives it will be gone. At that time, because of Jesus’ perfect life and his innocent death on the cross for us that paid for all of our sins, we will be with our God in heaven in perfection forever, just as he originally designed things to be at the beginning.
Things will continue to get worse in this life, not better. We will endure suffering and hardship and difficulty as we and the world around us ages. But there will be a reversal to all of that at the Last Day. God will call us from this world of sin and bring us to be safe with him for eternity. Suffering in this life reminds us of these facts and points us to the far greater blessings that are coming. Should we really praise God for suffering? Yes. And God give us the strength to praise you for this. Amen.
