knowing that ye have been redeemed, not by corruptible [things, as] silver or gold, from your vain conversation handed down from [your] fathers,
Peter has just told these believers to live in reverent fear as strangers here. Now he gives the reason: they already know what their freedom cost, and what it freed them from — an inherited way of religion, handed down and empty.
Peter's call to reverent fear can sound like worry about whether you are truly saved. The reason he gives here rules that out.
The fear that the saints were urged to live in during their stay here is as far as possible from doubt about their souls and distrust of God's grace. Those two go together. They may even be two sides of the same unbelief — the unbelief that leaves Christ out as the gospel reveals Him. The words that follow shut such dread out completely. They rest the fear Peter teaches on a comforting and settled fact: they have been redeemed. And they were redeemed by what is most precious to God of all things, and most effective for sinners.
The mention of money is not random. These readers came from people whose redemption really did cost silver and gold.
They knew, and so do we, that we are redeemed with the precious blood of Christ. Their fathers had been redeemed with silver and gold — a redemption in picture form, carried out under Jewish law. Sometimes they gave actual money, as in Exodus 30:11-16 and Numbers 3:44-51. Sometimes redemption came by sacrifice, as in Exodus 13:13-15. Even then silver and gold played a part, since they were needed to buy the animal for the sacrifice. Silver and gold are the least corruptible of metals, yet they are corruptible. The price of our redemption was incorruptible and precious.
The life left behind was not obvious vice. It was religion.
Notice this. Redemption has many wonderful results, and one named here is that the saints were redeemed from their empty course, or way of life, handed down from their fathers. It is hard to imagine words that fit more exactly. They do not describe Gentile idol worshippers. They describe the Jews since the Maccabees (Jewish leaders from the centuries before Christ), holding tight to tradition passed from father to son.
The problem was the source of their obedience.
The Jewish way of life had sunk into a matter of mere tradition received from their fathers. This was obvious in Isaiah's day (Isaiah 29:13), and the Lord Jesus pressed the charge home on them, quoting Isaiah's words, in Mark 7:6-13. Even the right things they did, they did not because God had commanded them, but because tradition ordered them. So their way of life had become corrupt and deeply offensive to God. Our Gentile way of life was pure darkness and lawlessness, and equally corrupt.
One contrast carries the whole verse: the Father, and the fathers.
There is a contrast here. On one side is the Father these converted Jews called on. On the other is the whole empty round of traditional ways passed down by their fathers. We are redeemed from religion that makes a fine outward show, as well as from what is immoral and corrupt… They were now calling on a Father who shows no favouritism. So their way of life, while they walk through this world as strangers, should be marked by fear. Not because they did not know their redemption, but because they did.
Older translations call the old life "vain conversation." The word covered far more than talk, and being freed from it makes a demand.
There you have vain conversation, which is connected with fleshly religion. We must not take it as merely the talk of the lips. I think Peter uses it in a much wider way than that. What is the first thing he says? You have been brought right out of that system of religion which suits man as he naturally is. You have been redeemed to God with the precious blood of Christ. So the first thing the soul grasps here is this: you are out of the old state. You are delivered from that vain conversation… What we have to do is shake ourselves clear of everything religious that does not suit God.
For the first readers, that break cost them the worship they grew up in. It gave them something better.
That which gave them peace would destroy every old association. They had learned how precious the blood is by finding forgiveness of sins through it. Now they had to learn that it is just as precious because by it they were redeemed from the futile ways inherited from their fathers. They would have access as worshippers to heaven itself — and as a holy priesthood too, there to worship the Father in spirit and truth.
- Known — the verse rests on certainty, not hope. The fear Peter urges grows out of a redemption you already have, never out of doubt about it.
- Not bought — silver and gold once ransomed Israel. Even the least corruptible metals decay, so the price of our redemption had to be incorruptible.
- Not only from sin — what is left behind is a way of life: inherited, religious, empty. Isaiah condemned it, and so did the Lord Himself.
- Fathers to Father — tradition handed down was the old trust. The redeemed now call on the Father instead, and that exchange is the heart of the verse.
- Break clean — knowing the cost, shake yourself free of any religion that does not suit God, however long it has run in the family.
but by precious blood, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot, [the blood] of Christ,
Peter tells his readers what their rescue cost. Not money, but blood — the blood of a sacrifice. Two questions follow. Why does he call this blood precious? And why must the Lamb be flawless?
Peter's contrast is not random. Both metals already carried a settled meaning in Israel's worship:
There were two symbols of redemption in the Old Testament. At every census of Israel, God required each man to give a ransom for his soul. This ransom money was a half silver shekel, and it was "to make atonement for their souls" (Ex. 30:11-16)... Silver and gold, the two most precious metals, both stood as a figure of redemption. Peter alludes to this... He contrasts the blood of Christ with silver and gold. In God's eyes that blood has infinite value, because it comes from the whole truth of the person of Christ. And the point he wants us to notice is this: God's claims on His children match the preciousness of the blood that redeemed them.
So what gives this blood its value?
The precious blood of Christ is the foundation of redemption, and the means of it too. Only one thing measures its value: the infinite worth of His Person, as God perfectly judges it.
Peter sets this blood against things that decay. Another writer shows what that means for us:
That precious blood is the price of our redemption. Silver and gold decay and change in value; this blood does not. It stays in all its own preciousness. So the redemption it secures is eternal, and our relationship with the blessed God is sure for ever. But at what a cost! ... He laid down that precious, spotless life in death.
The words "like that of a lamb" point back to sacrifices these readers knew by heart. One writer names more than one:
The reference is plain in the words "like that of a lamb without blemish or spot." It may well point to the Passover lamb we have spoken of. They also had the morning burnt offering. And perhaps above all, there was the evening lamb, offered between the evenings, day after day.
The two terms are not just repetition. Each has its own root in the Old Testament and its own meaning:
Look at the Old Testament pictures Peter clearly has in mind. The first time "without blemish" comes up with a sacrifice is in Exodus 12. It involves that our Lord was perfect in sinless, subject, obedient Manhood... It is not until we reach Numbers 19 that we find the second word Peter uses here, "without spot"... We looked these words up some time ago. Without blemish means without a defect: nothing is missing. Without spot seems to have more to do with what is external, like a splash of paint on someone.
That flawless life raises a question: did His obedience itself pay for sin? One writer answers, and also names the kind of rescue this verse describes:
1 Peter 1:19 speaks more in the sense of redemption — of a ransom that takes us out of the hands of the enemy. Christ's obedience during His life worked toward the perfection of the sacrifice. That obedience did not pay for sin, but it was fully acceptable to God. What mattered was the acceptability of His Person, which His work required. But that obedience did not pay for sin.
Peter ties this price to how his readers now live. Notice what Christ bought them out of, and that their fear rests on certainty, not doubt:
We are redeemed from religion that is only a good outward show, as well as from what is immoral and depraved... They were now calling on a Father who judges each one without partiality. So their conduct should be marked by fear while they walk through this world as strangers. Not because they did not know their redemption, but because they did — and that redemption did not come by perishable things like silver and gold, which suited their old walk. That old walk was empty in other ways, and emptiest of all in its traditional religion. From all of it they knew themselves redeemed by the precious blood of Christ.
- Price, not metal. Silver and gold were Israel's own pictures of ransom. Peter names them only to rule them out.
- Price set by the Person. One thing measures the blood's value: the infinite worth of the One whose blood it is, as God judges it.
- Price that cannot fall. Unlike metals, it never deteriorates or shifts in value — so the redemption it buys is eternal.
- Price paid by a flawless Lamb. "Without blemish" means nothing missing; "without spot" means nothing staining from outside. His obedient life made the sacrifice acceptable. But that obedience was not what paid for sin.
- Price that reshapes the bought. Ransomed out of the enemy's hands and out of an empty inherited religion, the redeemed walk as strangers in reverent fear. That fear comes from knowing redemption, not from doubting it.
foreknown indeed before [the] foundation of [the] world, but who has been manifested at the end of times for your sakes,
God's plan to redeem was not a rescue improvised after things went wrong. Peter reaches back behind creation itself. The Lamb whose blood bought his readers was already in God's mind before the world existed. Then He came into view at a set moment in time — and He came for them.
The verse steadies believers who might think the gospel is something recent:
The apostle now takes up a comforting truth that steadies the believer. The gospel may have been new to them. But it was all settled in God's mind and counsel before man fell — yes, before creation. Redemption was no afterthought to repair the damage. Of course the Lord God implied it in the sentence He passed on the serpent in paradise, and every sacrifice afterwards pictured it.
Another writer draws out what this says about God when evil entered His creation:
If the "Lamb without blemish and without spot" was "foreordained before the foundation of the world," then redemption must certainly have been in God's mind that far back. The Blessed One did not have to pause and invent a plan to repair the terrible evil the enemy had brought into His fair creation. No, He had only to bring out the truth about the spotless Lamb from the unexplored treasury of His precious counsels.
Next to a law centuries old, the gospel could look like the newcomer. This verse turns that around:
It was no new thought. Though only newly brought out, it was in fact the oldest of all purposes. Did they boast about their law? The apostle can answer that Christianity was in God's mind before the foundation of the world. It is the present blessed revelation of grace in Christ. Therefore there could be no comparison on that score, not even for a Jew.
The verse says "before" the foundation of the world, not "from" it. One writer holds that the difference matters:
"From" the world's founding does not carry the same meaning as "before" it. Let us respect and learn from the very words of God… A Christian finds it easy to understand that Christ was foreknown before time began. But how wonderful the grace that God chose us for such an association, and for such a purpose! He was known before creation, since He had a glory of His own above it. We by grace are the objects of God's counsel, and His work matched it. So we may enjoy everything where He is, and with Him.
One writer links that earlier date to who is being blessed:
The introduction of the Lamb of God was no afterthought with God. He was pre-ordained before the foundation of the world. Why before the foundation of the world? Because the blessing of the heavenly saints — the church — was thought of before the foundation of the world.
Being foreknown was not enough; the Lamb also had to appear. The moment was chosen, not random:
"Foreknown" could not be enough. Christ was "manifested" in due time, and the due time was "at the close of the times." God's patience had been long. He dealt with man in many ways, governing him, to see if in some way there might be fruit from man that He could accept. The fall happened in one man, but it belonged to the whole race. And the sample of that race under God's special care proved the tree worthless.
He came to do more than redeem. He also showed us who God is:
The Lamb of God was ordained in eternity, but manifested in time… and that not only as the Redeemer but as the Revealer. God was perfectly revealed in Him, so that it is by Him that we believe in God. We do not come to believe in God through the wonders of creation, or through the law given by Moses, or through visions of angels. We believe through Christ — once dead, now risen and in glory.
The eternal plan ends up addressing the reader directly:
This Lamb — the Lamb of God — has been entirely of God's providing. He was foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifested in these last times for you. God had thought of His people from all eternity, and had told out all His heart for them in the gift of His beloved Son.
- Before — the Lamb was foreknown before creation, so redemption was never a repair job God improvised after the fall.
- Older — the plan came before the world, so the gospel is not the newcomer. It is the oldest purpose God has, older than the law men boasted in.
- Higher — "before" the foundation is not the same as "from" it. That earlier word marks out heavenly blessing, and grace puts believers inside it.
- Then — God made Him manifest at the end of the times, once His long testing had proved that man produced no fruit He could accept.
- Yours — the whole line of eternal counsel ends in two small words: "for you." There God tells out His whole heart in the gift of His Son.
who by him do believe on God, who has raised him from among [the] dead and given him glory, that your faith and hope should be in God.
Peter has been writing about Christ, the Lamb who bore our sins. Now he tells his readers where that leaves them. They are not only forgiven; they are brought to trust God Himself. The verse turns on three things. Our believing comes through Christ. God raised Him and gave Him glory. And the result is faith and hope resting in God.
The phrase "through him" rules out every other route to God. It points to one.
God had appointed the Lamb in His own purpose before the world was made. But He was revealed in the last days for believers. And here believers are presented as they truly are: they believe in God through Jesus — through this Lamb. They do not believe because of creation. Creation does testify to His glory, but it gives the conscience no rest, and it says nothing of a place in heaven. They do not believe because of providence. Providence directs all things, yet it still leaves God's government in deep darkness. Nor do they believe because of the way God revealed Himself on Mount Sinai, under the name Jehovah, with the terror that goes with a broken law. We believe through Jesus, the Lamb of God. And notice: it does not say we believe in Him, but "through Him" in God.
Notice where faith looks. It does not look at the believer's own state. It looks at something God did outside of him.
Faith does not rest on my being risen. It rests on Christ having been raised. That difference matters a great deal. Many a sincere soul keeps turning inward, trying to find out whether it is risen. But that is not the faith that God Himself works. … My confidence is this: God raised Christ from the dead, when Christ was there for me.
Peter's readers were in a hard situation. The verse answers a practical question for them: what is this God like?
Through Him, through Christ the lamb, they now believed in God. And that is the point made here: what God did they believe in? How did they know that they could trust Him, especially in their difficult situation? The answer lies in the verse quoted above: They believed in a God who raised Christ from the dead and gave Him glory. He had not left Christ in the grave. By raising Him from the dead, He had put on record that Christ had all His good pleasure. On top of that, He rewarded Him richly and "gave him glory".
How can we know God is for us? One writer answers with two facts and one question: where are our sins now?
The resurrection of Christ from among the dead, and the glory given to Him on high, are God's mighty and clear evidence. They prove that He is for the believer completely and for ever. If anything could have made this doubtful, it was our sins. But they were laid on another — yes, God laid on Christ the iniquity of us all. Christ bore our sins in His body on the tree. Where are they now? After making purification for sins, He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high. Not one sin did God leave on the believer; not one did Christ carry into heaven.
The same writer draws out what this removes from the believer's mind: Christ's resurrection "is to give him faith and hope toward God, delivered from all fear of judgment."
Faith and hope are not two words for the same thing. One looks at now. The other looks ahead.
For He shows us the very heart of God, and through Him faith and hope in God become fully real. Faith is present confidence of heart in His faithfulness. Hope is the precious expectation of future glory in His presence.
Peter puts our faith and hope in God Himself, not in anything else. One writer says that is why such faith cannot fail. He also thinks it is rarer than we assume.
What a blessed rest in Himself has God presented for our faith and hope! And surely nothing less than having them in God Himself will do. Everything outside of God changes and is uncertain. But He does not change. Faith and hope that rest in Him cannot fail or come to an end. I do think, in our own day, there is very little of faith and hope in God.
- Through Him — not creation, not providence, not Sinai. Christ is the one road by which a conscience comes to rest in God.
- In God — Christ is the means; God Himself is the object. Faith goes through Christ and rests in God.
- Raised — faith looks at what God did to Christ, not at what the believer feels has happened in himself.
- Given glory — the Son's reward is God's open proof that the sin question is closed. God left no sin on the believer, and Christ carried none into heaven.
- So that — here is the aim. Confidence now in God's faithfulness. Expectation of glory with Him later. Both rest on the One who never changes.
Having purified your souls by obedience to the truth to unfeigned brotherly love, love one another out of a pure heart fervently;
Peter turns here from what God has done in his readers to what it produces among them. The verse ties two things together: a soul made clean, and love for other Christians with no pretence.
The apostle does not ask his readers to get their souls clean. He writes as though the matter is settled, and builds his appeal on that.
This is not a wish or a prayer that they might be purified. It is taken as a settled fact, as surely as they were faithful. Peter is not being casual here, and he is not allowing the least licence. The one thing to add is that they were still passing through a desert world, exposed to an enemy who never sleeps. So they depended on their unseen God and Father, and He never fails such people. But the call to love one another plainly rests on the assurance that they had already purified their souls. That brings a responsibility: to keep living in line with this state of purity, and to judge themselves when they fail.
The phrase sounds like effort. Kelly ties it instead to faith, and to a truth set before a person from outside.
In Acts 15:8-9 faith is named as the means at work within them. Our verse says even more: it was by the Jews' "obeying the truth" that was set before them from outside. "Obedience to the truth" is only another and fuller way of saying their faith. To have a solid and divine character, there must be submission to the truth.
The law had its washings of water. What happened to these believers was of a different order.
The truth of the Gospel had brought their souls into submission and obedience by the power of the Spirit. This had done a mighty work of purification. The purifications of the law were "various washings" of water (Heb. 9:10), and they were only outward. This was a purification of the soul, a moral renewal with love as its outcome. Love belongs to the new nature just as hatred belongs to the old.
Why should a clean soul produce love? Trace sin down to its root and the link becomes plain.
It is wonderful how the purifying of the soul and love go together. We may take hold of truth, but in man's hands it is always held imperfectly and badly put together. "Obeying the truth through the Spirit" is quite another thing. Selfishness lies at the bottom of sin. The opposite of selfishness is love, and divine love purifies us from the selfishness of sin.
In the original, "brotherly love" is a single word. Translators have struggled to carry its warmth into English.
Scripture makes a difference between "love" and "brotherly love." The original uses two distinct words for them. Love is "agape," and brotherly love is one word, "philadelphia." "Philadelphia" is more like friendly love… It includes kindness, but it is love — love in the form it takes among brothers and sisters. Perhaps the best rendering is Kelly's: "brotherly affection."
Peter adds one word to guard it: "sincere" in the ESV, "unfeigned" in older translations. People can act out affection they do not feel. That word rules it out.
So the Spirit guards against empty forms or words. He calls the brotherly affection their souls were purified for "unfeigned." Pretending to a good you do not really feel is hateful to God, and unworthy of His child. So it is worth treasuring the sense of His presence, which keeps us from hypocrisy here as everywhere else.
The last clause raises the standard again. The hard cases, not the easy ones, test a pure heart.
And the last word forbids anything cool or assumed:
A pure heart involves motives that are genuine and without mixture; but "fervently" is added, implying a positive warmth and sincerity that leaves nothing to be merely taken for granted.
- Purified. The cleansing is treated as done, not requested — and everything Peter asks next rests on that fact.
- By obeying. "Obedience to the truth" is faith's fuller name: the truth set before a person, and that person submitting to it.
- Inward. Not the outward washings of the law, but a soul-purification, with love as its natural outcome.
- Unto love. Selfishness lies at the bottom of sin. Divine love purifies us from it, and love for others comes out instead.
- Unfeigned. Pretended affection is hateful to God. Real love reaches the undeserving, just as God loved us when there was nothing to love.
being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by [the] living and abiding word of God.
Peter has just told his readers to love one another. Here he gives the reason. They have a second birth, and its source is not the perishable kind behind their first birth. So what is this seed? What does the word do? And why does "living and abiding" matter for the person born from it?
The language of birth is not a figure for improvement. One writer takes it at full strength:
It is really the bringing into existence of a new being. When you were born into this world, a being was born into it that had not existed before. If you are born again, you are born a second time; born of God, you are a child of God now, which you were not before.
So what exactly is new? One writer starts by setting aside a common description of it:
Some describe the new birth as a change worked in a man by the Spirit through the word of God on his faculties, so that they no longer serve self and Satan but serve Him. But that describes the effect rather than the cause. Scripture is abundant and clear that God gives a life to the believer. Christ is this life, as the old life is from Adam fallen. That life acts through our faculties on objects revealed by God, objects far beyond those of natural life.
Peter's first readers had a proud family line, and this phrase strikes at it. Older translations render "perishable" and "imperishable" as "corruptible" and "incorruptible":
Israel boasted in their natural family line, but this was corruptible seed. New birth is of incorruptible seed, the word of God — a seed filled with life, pure, vital, and eternal, abiding forever. Of course God is the source of it, yet the believer obeys it in the very fact of being born again by it: he is a child of obedience.
The contrast also settles what this birth secures. Natural descent brought blessings that could run out:
The believer is not born of the flesh to enjoy temporary rights and blessings, as a Jew was. He is born of an incorruptible seed, a principle of life as unchangeable as the word of God Himself.
Peter pictures the new birth as sowing. The picture shows who acts first:
Here the New Birth is like a seed falling into the ground. The seed has life in it. The power of life in the seed lays hold in the soil. The soil does not lay hold on the seed. The word of God in the power of the Spirit lays hold of the man.
Why does the word carry such power?
The word is the revelation of what is in God, in His nature and character, His love, His ways, in short all that He communicates. And this is what God uses to quicken.
Those two words describe the child as well as the seed:
That which is born partakes of the nature and character of that which gives its birth. "That which is born of the Spirit is spirit." It is equally true that what is born of incorruptible seed is incorruptible. And what is born by the living and abiding Word of God is living and abiding. That enduring Word of the Lord has reached us in the gospel message we have believed.
Peter is drawing on the prophet Isaiah, who levels every human distinction:
The Jew was grass, the Gentile was grass — all flesh was grass. And "the grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever." Nothing on earth abides but the word of God. It is living and abiding... What comfort, to know we are the children of what is living, incorruptible, and abiding!
The verse begins with "since." The new birth is the ground of Peter's call to love:
They are our brothers. So let us love one another earnestly from a pure heart. But this rests on another principle, vital at its core. It is a new nature that acts in this love.
- Source — Birth, not repair. A being exists now that did not exist before, and God gives it a life the old one from Adam never had.
- Seed — What Peter rules out is as pointed as what he affirms. Natural descent is perishable seed, and no family line survives the sowing.
- Means — The word carries life into a person as a seed carries it into soil. The seed lays hold of the ground, not the ground of the seed.
- Nature — A child takes after its source. A living and abiding word gives a living and abiding life.
- Result — All flesh is grass, and only God's word abides. Children of that word love one another out of the new nature it gave them.