100-Proof Hope

There are some sections of Scripture where the right thing to do is to get way up in the air and look down over the broad panorama as a surveyor would, sketching out the landscape.

There are definitely things that you can only be seen from that surveyor’s prospective. It’s hard to plot the course of a river through a great mountain range from the riverbank. But there are things you just can’t see from that height. There are sections of Scripture that demand the archaeologist’s approach.

I used to work with a woman who actually went on to become an archaeologist in the Middle East. She might spend three days with a paintbrush dusting away a few millimeters of dirt at a time to reveal a few pottery shards from people who left them 3,500 years prior. No handful of dirt goes on examined. The team she works with sifts the dirt from a site through screens of increasing fineness until they’re sure they’re not throwing away any artifact with the dirt.

In working through the Bible, both approaches are helpful and necessary—the surveyor and the archaeologist, the wide angle lens to see mountain ranges and the microscope to see the minutia. But some texts just beg not to be passed over too quickly. Some texts beg that we would take up every verb and adjective and noun and participle in hand with the attention and care of the archaeologist.

The next handful of verses in this letter of Peter’s are like that. There are densely packed layers of grace and hope that we shouldn’t fly through. So this morning, we will sift through 1 Peter 1:3–5 like an archaeologist.

“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