The King

1 Peter 1:20-21

Immanuel – 4/25/21

Riots, divisive politics, all the maddening effects of a pandemic, injustice, abortion, culture wars, the erosion of Biblical values, the societal ostracizing of Christians, and on and on. How easy it would be for Christians to feel beleaguered - like the tide will soon rise above over our heads.

But there is a stronger, current, and greater hope in this hostile world. Above the politics, above the pandemic, above the culture – enthroned in righteousness – sits the King of kings and the Lord of lords; and He is gathering all these hostilities to make out of them His footstool. No matter the circumstances, our faith and hope firmly rest in Jesus Christ!

Purpose

God existed in perfect love, but was invisible.

Jesus glorified God by manifesting Him.

God glorifies Jesus with a kingdom and a people and a name.

Jesus must be our Lord!

Read 1 Peter 1:17-21

Invisible and Foreknown

When we began 1 Peter we considered the word “foreknowledge” and how it related to the elect. Listen again to verses 1 and 2: To those who are elect exiles according to the foreknowledge of God. Foreknowledge, when used in this sense, is about a relational knowledge that existed before the present moment.

In other words, in eternity past God has loved the elect. And if you are the elect, then God knew you and loved you before He laid the foundations of the world. So, those He foreknew, He also elected for salvation.

Paul says a very similar thing:

Even as He chose us in [Christ] before the foundations of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before Him. In love He predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of His will. -Ephesians 1:4-5

This salvific foreknowledge is not because of anything special within you, but simply because God has chosen to lavish His love upon you. And the way that He lavishes His love upon you is to adopt you and unite you with Christ.

But there is a major difference between that foreknowledge, and the foreknowledge in our passage today.

Read vs 20

God chose to foreknow us even though there was in-and-of ourselves nothing that was worthy of His great love. But it could not be more different with Jesus! Jesus is so worthy, so valuable, so precious, that the Father simply couldn’t do anything other than love Him; deeply and powerfully! His Son is His very heartbeat!

Behold, my Servant, whom I uphold, my Chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my Spirit upon Him; He will bring forth justice to the nations. -Isaiah 42:1

How glorious the Father’s love for the Son! And here in Isaiah, hundreds of years before He received the name Jesus, He is called God’s Servant. You see, God’s foreknowledge of Jesus doesn’t just have to do with an eternal love, but an everlasting obedience to the Father. The eternal foreknowledge of God is expressed in a plan, the unfurling of the will of God throughout history.

According to this plan the Son was heading towards perfect, pure, self-sacrificial obedience; where He exacted the Father’s will most profoundly on Golgotha. The Father, in death-defeating love, would raise His crucified Son and give Him the greatest glories He had to offer. More on that in a bit.

But you can see that God the Father and God the Son have held nothing back in their love for one another. They have exerted all their power and wisdom to demonstrate just how great is their love.

The Holy Spirit does the same, though that is outside of our text today.

The greatest human love that ever existed between parent and child is a flickering match next to the relational supernova that is Jesus and His Father. Their love for one another, and the Holy Spirit, is the big band our of which all else exists. There is not greater conceivable force than trinitarian love; and that force is streaming into our passage today.

The Father loved the Son in the hidden epochs of eternity past, and all that happened there is invisible to our eyes, beyond the reach of our minds. Who can ascend into Heaven and there observe the love saturated majesty of Father, Son, and Spirit?

Son Glorified Father

No one can ascend into Heaven! One from Heaven must descend and reveal them!

No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, He has made Him known. -John 1:18

Who can know the perfection of God? Only God can fully know. And so God, who was at the Father’s side, descended from Haven and has made Him known; has made Him manifest.

[Christ] is the image of the invisible God. For in Him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through Him to reconcile all things, whether on earth or heaven, making peace by the blood of the cross. -Colossians 1:15,19-20

[Jesus] is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of His nature, and He upholds the universe by the word of His power. -Hebrews 1:3

Jesus has manifested the invisible God before our eyes. He manifested the Father as a suckling baby wrapped in swaddling clothes. He manifested the Father as He broke break and fed 5,000, as He touched the untouchable, as He wept for His friend. He manifested the Father as He was silent against accusation and as the nails of injustice were driven through His blameless hands. And all this for the sake of the elect, as 1 Peter 1:20 says.

Doesn’t this just reveal how humble and personal our God is, that He would leave glory and endure terrible suffering in order to make Himself fully known! He lives to express Himself in all of His fullness; and in all of His fullness He is perfectly good and perfectly humble and perfectly loving!

And this expression is for the elect, so we would believe!

Read vs 21

God made Himself manifest in Jesus Christ so that we would believe in God. But that does not simply mean that we would believe that God exists. It means that we would believe in God as God is; in all of His kindness and goodness and faithfulness and justice and power and so on. Jesus manifested God so that we would believe in God as He truly is.

All that Jesus said and did was so that we would see the Father, as the Father is, and love Him, and rivet our faith upon Him, and find in Him an unshakable and living hope – no matter how hostile the world may be!

This is why Jesus came. Just as He prayed:

“I have manifested your name to the people whom you gave me out of the world. Yours they were, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. Now they know that everything that you have given me is from you. For I have given them the words that you gave me, and they have received them and have come to know in the truth that I came from you; and they have believed that you have sent me.” -John 17:6-8

Oh, let us praise God for sending the Son and making Himself known! Oh, believe that He is not a God far off and unapproachable, but He became one of us that we might know Him! But, as God the Son was manifested in Jesus of Nazareth, there was even more going on; and it relates to the glory spoken of in verse 21.

Jesus knew that after He has perfectly manifested God upon the earth, God would bring Him great glory. Again, from Jesus’ prayer in John 17.

“Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you, since you have given Him authority over all flesh, to give eternal life to all whom you have given Him. And this is eternal life, that they may know you the only true god, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do. And now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed. -John 17:1-5

Remember, Jesus prayed this only hours before He was crucified. The cross and the grave were still before Him. This is a prayer of faith. He is trusting that after He becomes the scorn of the universe, the Father will turn once more to His beloved Son and raise Him and give Him great glory.

And how it pleased the Father to answer His Son’s prayer!

Father Glorifies Son

But to best understand how the Father answered Jesus’ prayer, we need to take note of the time stamp located in verse 20: in the last time. Peter is saying that God became flesh in the last time. So, what do we have here? Why does Peter include this phrase and how does it relate to the glory of the Son? Oh there is a whole mountain of Scripture and theology beneath these four words, of which we will just scratch the surface.

Peter is here referring to the eschaton: the things of the last times. The study of the eschaton is called eschatology and we are about to dive into some exciting eschatology.

All over its pages, the Old Testament points towards a time that is coming; a time of great restoration, a time of terrible judgement, a time of the coming of the King and His kingdom. These will all come during the prophesied eschaton. More than anything else, the eschaton is the time in which the Father brings glory to His Son.

The first thing to understand about eschatology is that it is not just about the final day of history, the last judgement of humanity, and those events which immediately precede it. In fact, if that is the approach you took, then you would miss so much of what the Bible is communicating; and the power of verse 20 would be greatly diminished.

Read vs 20

For Peter to claim that God the Son was made manifest in the last times is to claim that the King has come, and with Him has come a great and glorious kingdom. It is to claim that Peter, the elect exiles to which he writes, and the readers of this letter today, are all living within the eschaton.

And I think this becomes abundantly clear when we look back to what was prophesied about in the last times.

“Behold, the last days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and He shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. In His days Judah will be saved, and Israel will dwell securely. And this is the name by which He will be called: ‘The Lord is our righteousness.’” -Jeremiah 23:5-6

Indeed, the Lord is our righteousness. He became our sin, and by faith He becomes our righteousness! Additionally, as Galatians 3:7 states, all who have faith in Jesus Christ are the sons of Abraham. That means we, by faith, are a part of Israel. How securely we dwell in our Savior and Lord! And when Christ ascended into Heaven, He ascended to the right hand of the Father and was seated upon a great throne. In glory He sits as the King of kings! The eschatological words of Jeremiah have been fulfilled in Jesus!

A few times now I have mentioned this glory that was given to Jesus. As the Scriptures foretold, it was glory given to the Messiah, by the Father, in the last times. Perhaps more powerfully than any other prophet, Daniel spoke of the glory that the Father would give the Son.

I saw in the night visions, and behold, with the clouds of heaven there came One like a son of man, and He came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before Him. And to Him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve Him; His dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and His kingdom one that shall not be destroyed. -Daniel 7:13-14

So how has the Father glorified the Son? The Father has given the Son dominion and glory and a kingdom. The Father has given the Son a vast people from every tribe, tongue, and nation; and this people is called the Bride: the Church.

And in a very real sense, the Church is the living kingdom of God, the living glory of the Son. That is what we have been caught up into; and Peter will take us there in chapter 2.

For there is one more great glory that the Father has given to the Son.

Being found in human form, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore, God has highly exalted Him and bestowed on Him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in haven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of the Father. -Philippians 2:8-11

What is the name that is above every name? Lord. The Ancient of Days has given Jesus this name: Lord. At this name will bow the angels and demons, the cherubim and seraphim, the 24 elders: and all nations, tribes, and people. With one voice all will declare that Jesus Christ, the manifestation of the invisible God, is Lord! The eschaton is upon us!

But doesn’t it seem, as we look around and survey our world, that there are far more defiant fists raised than knees bowed? So we need another category, another term: inaugurated eschatology. This is the “already not yet” principle that is critical for us to understand Scripture.

Already I am saved by faith in Jesus Christ. But I am not yet saved completely, for that comes when Christ returns and delivers me from this body of flesh. Already, not yet. Already is Christ the King; not yet have all His enemies been subdued. Already the kingdom is in our midst; not yet has it come in fulness.

The already eschaton became true when Christ was manifest for our sake. The not yet eschaton will come when He returns in glory. This is a critical understanding called inaugurated eschatology.

In a different kind of way, Jesus spoke of this principle as something starting small and getting bigger and bigger until it is everywhere.

“The kingdom of heaven is like leaven that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, till it was all leavened.” -Matthew 13:33

So here in the depths of verses 20 and 21, eternity stands before us. We glimpse divine foreknowledge in eternity past and we see things that will continue into our eternal future. When you step back and look at it like this, you see all creation is one giant scroll upon which God is revealing His perfect plan for the Father to glorify the Son, and Son to glorify Father, and the Spirit to glorify both.

Look once more at the very end of verse 21; so that your faith and hope are in God.

We must believe in God as God is, knowing Him truly as manifested in Jesus. And with this knowledge comes a particular and imperative response. We must call Him Lord!

Jesus is Lord!

If Jesus is Lord, if the leaven of the eschaton is upon us, then we must bow our knee! Far better to bow our knee now that with the demons on the day of judgment.

And how is it that we bow our knee before judgement?

“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.” -Mark 1:15

Repent and believe! Or as Peter wrote in verse 21, believe in God so that your faith and hope are in Him.

As the musician John Lucan writes:

Crown Him in your mourning

And crown Him in your laughter

And crown Him when all turns dark

Crown Him when you bury

And crown Him when you marry

And crown Him when your faith finds a spark

Crown Him for He is faithful

And crown Him for He’s worthy

And crown Him for He is good

Crown Him for His promises

Cut through the blindness

Of children that have barely understood

The beauty has come

And the beauty has yet to come

Oh let us crown the King of kings with our every moment, and seat Him upon the thrones of our hearts! With a response like this, the purpose for which Christ was made manifest comes alive within you. With a response like this, the kingdom of God has burst into your heart and Jesus becomes the Lord of your life! And one life at a time, the leaven spread.

And Jesus, our King and Lord has given us – as members of His kingdom – a great and glorious task.

“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” -Matthew 28:18-20

His kingdom is in our midst, and we are the leaven; go therefore and make disciples! Through us – His Church – the kingdom is advancing. People from every nation, tribe, and tongue will bow their knees because of our testimony. And as countless missions pass each day from this life, how urgently we should be going and proclaiming that the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel!

Jesus sits enthroned. He has made the Father known. He has shared in our sufferings so that we can share in His glory! Repent and believe!