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.