Concerning which salvation prophets, who have prophesied of the grace towards you, sought out and searched out;
Peter has just spoken about a salvation that comes through faith. Now he looks back at the prophets of Israel: they wrote about that same salvation, then had to search their own words to find it.
The salvation the prophets announced was not a vague hope. It was tied to one person, and it was never a reward for works.
"Salvation" was identified with the coming and work of the Messiah. Believers understood little, if anything, of how it would happen. But they had no doubt about the saving grace that would then be shown. They looked forward to the coming day as the goal of their hopes, when the Messiah would establish salvation fully and for ever. How clearly it is "grace," and not of works that human nature could boast in. Salvation is not a matter of birthright, nor of personal merit, but of grace.
God spoke through the prophets, but they still did not grasp all they had said. Their searching shows where the words came from.
Their prophesying did not remove the need or the value of careful research; it stimulated it. The honour of prophesying did not spare the men who held it. They still had to seek and search earnestly to understand what they were given to predict out of the fullness that is in God... No incidental fact proves more clearly that prophecy was not of man's will, nor a clever human guess, but of God. He spoke or wrote by His servant in the Spirit. The prophet still had to sift it carefully to understand what he had spoken from God. Salvation was a rich blessing from God. It went beyond all they already held in privilege, and it was bound up with the Messiah's day, which God alone let prophets foresee. But they still had to weigh and examine what they prophesied deeply, to make it truly their own.
Two pictures of the Messiah sat side by side in their own writings. God did not clear up the puzzle. He told them something else instead.
The prophets sought and searched into these writings — into the very writings, it seems, that they had themselves written under the control of the Spirit of God... They wanted to reconcile the apparently contradictory pictures of a Messiah whose path to the glory ran through suffering... God, in His wisdom, kept the true meaning of these things from them; but in His goodness He told them that they had been privileged to minister to a generation still to come.
The wording marks a real gap. The prophets wrote before the cross, and so before this salvation.
As to the salvation of souls, not even the prophets in the Old Testament could say they were saved. By the power of the Spirit of God they wrote in advance about such a salvation. But they enquired and searched hard into the full meaning of their own writings, and into the salvation still to be revealed — the grace that was to come to believers in the present age. They too will be in heaven, by grace through faith and on the ground of the sacrifice of Christ. Yet they did not then know the salvation of their souls, because Christ had not yet died to bring that salvation about. This is a truth that could not have been taught before His death.
The gap also shows in how the Spirit worked in each age.
Believers today all share this deliverance of the soul. For the prophets of the past age it was still a matter of enquiry. It is called "the grace that should come to you" — that is, it had not come in the previous age... Then predicted by the Spirit; now reported by the Spirit.
The ESV reads that phrase as "the grace that was to be yours."
Their limited grasp of their own words leaves the reader with a reason for thanks.
How little, it seems, the Old Testament prophets understood their own prophecies! How much we are indebted to the Spirit who now reveals a Christ already come!
The salvation named here spans three moments. Only the last is still future.
The prophets foretold this coming glory in days past. The Holy Spirit preaches it in the present day. It will be fully accomplished in the day of glory yet to come.
- Searched — the prophets studied their own inspired words. That need to search proves the words came from God, not from themselves.
- Grace — the salvation they wrote of was tied to the Messiah's coming and work. It never rested on works.
- Delayed — Peter calls it grace still to come. The prophets could not call their souls saved before Christ died.
- For you — God hid the meaning from them, but told them they served a later generation. Readers now hold what the prophets only reached for.
- Three stages — foretold by the prophets, preached now by the Holy Spirit, and fully given at the revelation of Jesus Christ.
searching what, or what manner of time, the Spirit of Christ which [was] in them pointed out, testifying before of the sufferings which [belonged] to Christ, and the glories after these.
The prophets who wrote Israel's Scriptures did not fully understand their own writing. Peter says a Spirit was at work in them who knew what they did not. That Spirit marked out two things in a fixed order: suffering first, then glory.
Peter's title for the Spirit is surprising. When the prophets wrote, the Son had not yet come as the Christ.
A mind was at work far beyond that of prophets, yet at work intimately in them; "the Spirit of Christ." The phrase is even more striking because the Son did not become the Christ until long afterwards. But what He was revealing pointed forward to that wonderful fact, and testified of Him beforehand in that character.
One writer draws a further conclusion about who spoke through the prophets.
Christ had not yet been revealed in the age gone by. Even so, the Spirit in the prophets, speaking through them, could be called "the Spirit of Christ." So Christ was the Speaker by His Spirit even in Old Testament days.
Prophecy did not start with the men who spoke it. They had to study their own writing.
The prophets served, but the source of their prophecies, spoken or written, was the Spirit. The Spirit in them testified through them. He was so truly the source of their words that they had to search their own sentences with care and ask what they meant. They found that the full meaning was beyond the grasp of the age they lived in.
Their ignorance, one writer argues, shows who the real author was.
No prophet knew the full extent or depth of his own inspired messages. This proved that God wrote through them far better than if they had known everything. Jeremiah or Isaiah, Daniel or Habakkuk may not have understood; the Holy Spirit knew it all from the beginning. So what they wrote went far beyond their own understanding, and made plain the mind of the One who used them.
The prophets searched for the person and the time the Spirit pointed to. The same writer notes what their visions did not show.
Apart from special revelations, the vision of coming deliverance given to them did not separate the time between the sufferings of Christ and the glories that should follow. Perhaps we may safely say that none of them seems to have known beforehand that a long gap would come between the two events. Yet now that the gap has come, we can bring passages from the prophets to prove it.
The wording is exact. One writer builds a point on the difference between two small words.
Notice that the language used is unusually precise. The sufferings are said to be not merely "of" Christ, but "for" Him. They did not just happen to Him as a fact; they were appointed to Him. Just as the grace was towards you, so the sufferings were towards Christ.
The order is not accidental. One writer ties it to the state of the world Christ came into.
The moral order is completely according to God: first He must suffer. So we read in 1 Peter 1:11 of the sufferings of Christ and the glories that should follow. It must be so in a sinful world, for one who seeks not his own glory but God's, and the real and eternal good of man. It would be impossible to take the Kingdom while man is in a state of sin and rebellion.
Peter writes "glories" in the plural. That raises the question of where believers stand now.
The saints addressed, like all other Christians, stand between the sufferings that came to Christ and the glories that should follow. If not the whole glory, certainly the greater part of those revealed "glories" is still to come. The magnificent scenes of the last days plainly wait for His coming from the heavens. Then He will take the earth and the whole universe under His direct and visible rule.
That gap is not empty, and Peter's next verse names what fills it.
There are three steps here. First, the Spirit of Christ in the prophets testified beforehand of the sufferings of Christ and of the glories that should follow. Next, these things are now reported to us by the Holy Spirit sent down from heaven, that is, after Christ was glorified. Then we are to be ready for action. We are to hope to the end for the grace that will be brought to us at the revelation of Jesus Christ. We stand between the sufferings and the glories.
- Between. The verse sets two fixed points: sufferings, then glories. Believers today live in the space between them.
- Speaker. Peter calls the Spirit who moved the prophets the Spirit of Christ. The Spirit spoke of the Son under a name He would bear only long afterwards.
- Searching. The prophets studied their own words and found the meaning ran past them. That is the strongest proof that God, not they, was the author.
- Appointed. Christ did not merely undergo the sufferings. They were appointed to Him.
- Order. Glory could not come first in a sinful world. Suffering had to come before the Kingdom, and the greater part of the glories still waits for His coming.