Future Glory & Our Father’s Futility

Last week, Peter told us that the substance of the message of the Old Testament is the sufferings and subsequent glories of Jesus. That on it’s own terms, the whole Bible—not just from Matthew on—is about Christ’s coming, saving, rising, and reigning.

Hopefully you saw that this is the case, that we can’t begin to properly understand the message of the New Testament without seeing the tight weave of thousands of long threads from the very first sentences of the Scriptures to the last in one, great, colorful tapestry of Scripture. That you can’t understand the New without the Old or the Old without the New.

And what you find as you tug on those threads and follow them through the Scriptures is that there are passages, moments in history, where hundreds and even thousands of threads from the tapestry of Scripture meet and shoot out again into other parts of the whole.

The book of Exodus is one of those places. In fact, any reader of our text in 1 Peter today is impoverished if he doesn’t have that story in mind.

Exodus is the story of God unleashing his glory by judging evil Egypt and her gods and freeing his people to worship their God in the Promised Land he would give them. The climax of the book comes in chapter 12, when God brings down the final plague of judgment—the death of the firstborn son of every household in Egypt—on the heads of the Egyptians.

In that moment, the two main themes of the book, which could be said to be mega themes not only of Exodus, but the whole Bible, meet: God’s glory in judging his competitors, and God’s redemption of his people.

In chapter 12, God tells his people that the angel of death will spare their firstborn sons if every household takes a spotless, male lamb from their flock, kill it, and spread the blood of the lamb over their doorposts.

They were then to do two really important things: One, they were to feast. To roast the lamb and feast together. But two, they were to be ready for flight to freedom—to do this feasting with their belts fastened, their robes girt for action, their sandals on—ready for their redemption and flight to freedom.

In our text this morning, 1 Peter 1:13–21, Peter takes the bright, black and crimson threads of this story and weaves them into his instruction to us, Jesus’ redeemed people. And so what we’ll find is that there are threads in 1 Peter that pull on that Exodus story as we tug on them.

There are five threads from Exodus specifically that we will follow through our text together:

1. We, too, are on an exodus—an exodus to future glory.

2. We, too are to dress for action, gird up our loins, and fight to set our hope and compass bearing for a new land.

3. We, too, are to flee the futile ways of our enslaved forefathers.

4. We, too, begin our journey by the blood of the blemishless Lamb of God, who makes death pass us over.

5. And we, too, journey towards that hope with strength drawn from feasting on the lamb.

Look with me at 1 Peter 1:13–21,

“Therefore, preparing your minds for action, and being sober-minded, set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance, but as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, since it is written, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.” And if you call on him as Father who judges impartially according to each one's deeds, conduct yourselves with fear throughout the time of your exile, knowing that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot. He was foreknown before the foundation of the world but was made manifest in the last times for the sake of you who through him are believers in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope are in God.”

-1 Peter 1:13–21