What encouragement is there "after you have suffered a little while" (1 Peter 5:10)?

The "But" that opens verse 10 lifts us in the most glorious way out of the murky atmosphere of the world with its persecutions and trials and the power of Satan. We are suddenly transported in thought into the presence of "the God of all grace." Are we conscious of needing grace in an infinite variety of ways? Well, He is the God of all grace. The powers of the world and the devil may be against us, but He has called us to His eternal glory by Christ Jesus, and nothing shall frustrate His purpose. He will permit us to suffer for a little while, but even that He will overrule. He will, as it were, take up the suffering and use it as material which He weaves into the pattern and design of His own choice as regards our characters and lives; and thus make it contributory to the perfecting, the establishing, the strengthening, the settlement of our souls.

Thus, while there are the clearest tokens of identity between what Peter writes and his preachings in the Acts of the Apostles, he too teaches here, as we have already seen, much beyond what was then required or seasonable. This wondrously beautiful summary before us reflects that advance with all due meetness and forcible compression. Not the God of our fathers which glorified His servant Jesus, but "the God of all grace that called you unto his everlasting glory in Christ Jesus." It is not merely the God of the promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but the God of all overcoming love as manifested in Christ Jesus, superior to, not weakness and failure alone, but the hatred of the enemy seemingly successful to the uttermost in the cross, which His grace turned to be the ground of deep and righteous judgment of sin, yea, making them, the believers, now as spotless in His eyes as the Lamb, through His precious blood. Nor this only; for He called us, not to salvation of souls alone, great as this grace is, but to His everlasting glory in Christ. For it is a glory which far exceeds the earthly kingdom, with its thousand years of righteousness reigning, and Satan shut up, and creation rejoicing after its long thraldom of vanity and groan.

The God of all grace, who called saints to His everlasting glory in Christ Jesus, is the best security against all that creature can or cannot do meanwhile; and the more, because as Father He carries on a constant, watchful, and righteous government of His children all through the wilderness (1 Peter 1:13-17). But there is another needed and weighty consideration. As Jews, they might associate with the Christ immunity from suffering and promotion to high honour; but as Christians, their portion is to share His sufferings for righteousness and love and truth. No mistake more common in Christendom than looking for present reward and distinction and ease through the gospel and the church. But it is a hateful lie of Satan. The Corinthian saints slipped easily into this snare, to the apostle Paul's pain and horror (1 Cor. 4:8-14); it was still more natural for such as had been Jews. So the apostle Peter seeks throughout to impress suffering as the necessary path of the Christian, and "after having suffered a little while," as his beloved brother to the Hebrews (Heb. 10:32-39), fortified by not a few even of old (Heb. 11:35-38) but above all by His case who sums up all as our perfect exemplar (Heb. 12:2-3). It is through suffering in faith and patience that we are disciplined and bear fruit to Him who deigns thus to prune the branches of the vine.

And what more emphatic than the cheering declaration to which he that wrote put his seal, as one who had proved it so truly in his own experience that the God of all grace "Himself shall perfect, stablish, strengthen, ground." Could those addressed, could we, lose one of these mighty encouragements? Could we allow them to lack the most definite meaning, or to be heaped together as a faggot deriving its virtue from the binding together of the weak? Are they not each strong and expressive, to give without bands the utmost possible confidence in His all-sufficient love to us? It is much that He will "perfect" those who in themselves lack all, in the sense of a complete furnishing and adjustment. It is more that He will "stablish" those who need to be turned inside out, as Peter once in his self-confidence, to lean on Himself and His word by faith. It is precious that He will "strengthen" those that know themselves as weak as water spilt on the ground, and changeable as the wind. It is if possible more, that on the Rock that never moves He will "ground" those who learn deeply their nothingness, and worse still.

It becomes us to be grave, and to be on our guard. There are some that go about who are arch-deceivers. But we are not alone. "The God of all grace" He knows how to make grace abound toward us. He "has called us to His eternal glory in Christ Jesus" You and I are bound to get there where His glory is. As sinners we came short of it: now we exult in hope of it. Here (ver. 10) we ought to have the word "shall," — "shall Himself make you perfect, stablish, strengthen, settle you." No wonder the apostle breaks out in a note of praise for it! There are similar words in 1 Peter 4:11.

And God is "the God of all grace," calling us "unto His eternal glory." The sufferings then are only brief, and not unwelcome, for the Object of that glory is "Christ Jesus." And meanwhile the sufferings accomplish the precious ends of perfecting establishing, strengthening, and settling the saints, that is, bringing permanent, valuable results. Well does He deserve "glory and dominion."

We turn to Peter. God has called us to eternal glory but, he says, after ye have suffered a while. We may connect that little phrase with the beginning of the verse, He has called us to His eternal glory after we have suffered awhile; but we must connect it with the end of the verse also. Suffering helps to make you perfect, stablish, strengthen, settle you. Why is it, think you, that we often find a sad lack of stability of settlement, of establishment amongst us as believers? I dare say it is that we have managed in this very favoured land of ours to escape so many of the sufferings others have endured. Again and again we see it, that suffering instead of knocking the truth of the gospel out of the young convert most effectually knocks it in, and if you want to find stabilised Christians, strengthened Christians, settled Christians, you will have to discover tested Christians.

There are yet some further words with regard to the trial in which they found themselves. There was an active enemy walking about as a roaring lion, with the open mouth of persecution, as we see by the connection here, seeking to daunt the suffering soul, and thus to cast down from the steadfastness of a faith which must needs persevere through the sufferings; sufferings that are accomplished in all the Lord's people who are in the world. They had only to wait for God to fulfil all His own meaning in this trial — a God of grace who has destined His people for His eternal glory in Christ Jesus, and who may be safely trusted for all the way that leads there. With Him the suffering had its ends, while of necessity it was merely temporary. The effect would be, not what the enemy sought, but the perfecting, stablishing, strengthening, grounding of the soul. If they might seem to sink, they would soon touch the bottom, and find how firmly the Rock was underneath them. A real suffering for Christ could not fail to have this as its answer. The trial tries not the sufferer alone, but Him who has assured us that He will be "a very present help in trouble," and that all things, moreover, shall "work together for good to them that love God." The trial itself, therefore, must work this. We must not look at things as against us, lest we put into them a sting which God would not have there. "To Him," adds the apostle, belong the glory and the might, "unto the ages of ages."

(Vv. 10, 11). Whatever the opposition of the devil, we have “the God of all grace” to sustain us, and “eternal glory” lies before us. The devil may oppose, but grace has called us to glory by Christ Jesus, and no power of Satan can thwart the call of God. Grace will surely end in glory, though in the meantime we may have to suffer for “a while”.

(1 Peter 5:10-11,) "But the God of all grace, who has called us to his eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after that ye have suffered a while, make you perfect, stablish, strengthen, settle you. To him be glory and dominion for ever and ever. Amen." He has called you to glory, and by Christ Jesus, and now after that ye have suffered a little while, He will make you perfect, stablish, strengthen, settle you. It should be "a little while" here, not merely a while. A while might seem of some duration, — he shortens it. You have need of patience "a little while," says Paul (Heb. 10:37); you must suffer "a little while," says Peter.

"Stablish, strengthen, settle." Oh, what a place has the saint got, in the call of God, and not only in the call of God, but in that invigorating power which He makes His people to know all along the way! Himself who has called you shall make you perfect. What have we not in God? Have we not everything which encourages our hearts, strengthens them, comforts them, sustains them? God's purpose, God's call, God's sustaining grace all along the way, bring us at last into His glory.

Sufferings are short. "After that ye have suffered a while" (1 Peter 5:10), or as it is in the Greek, "a little." Our sufferings may be lasting, not everlasting. Persecution is aspera but brevis; though it has a sting to torment, yet it has a wing to fly. "Sorrow and sighing shall flee away" (Isa. 35:10). It is but a while when the saints shall have a writ of ease granted them, they shall weep no more, suffer no more.

To the future, however, as the apostle so immediately directs our gaze, we turn. We learn that to be glorified together with Christ is the portion yet reserved for us. "If so be that we suffer with Him, that we may also be glorified together." Peter, in his epistle, writes in similar strain to what we have here. In a beautiful summary at the close of his First Epistle (1 Peter 5:10), we have "But the God of all grace, who has called us unto His eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after that ye have suffered awhile, make you perfect, establish, strengthen, settle you." Called unto His everlasting glory — there is purpose there, the eternal purpose of God. We are "the called according to His purpose," and glory is the end of that path on which His calling sets our feet. "Whom He did foreknow, He also did predestinate. … Whom He did predestinate them He also called, and whom He called them He also justified, and whom He justified them He also glorified."

Is it not well to remember that it is His eternal glory? His, not only in the sense that He and He alone is the Author of it; but also as being the One whom it primarily concerns, the One who Himself reaps its harvest. In Scripture, glory is in itself an economy, a scheme of things, a system of universal extension, almost, one might say, a dispensation like law or grace, were it not that in itself it is the crown and culmination of all ages and dispensations. God has reaped glory all along, as He has also sown seeds of grace all along. But as in this dispensation of grace He is, so to speak, filling the field with nothing else than grace, so in that future system, may we call it, He is to have not merely gleanings, but an eternal and abundant harvest of glory. "His everlasting glory" that takes us past all dispensations and times, millennial and otherwise. And it is to that, His eternal glory, that the God of all grace has called us, by Christ Jesus. No doubt it is "after that ye have suffered awhile." That is our present portion. To none would this seem more strange perhaps than to one who had formerly been a Jew, and accustomed, according to his Jewish faith, to look for the calling of God to result in blessing, temporal and material, here and now. To Jewish believers Peter writes, and according to the wisdom given unto him, is careful to remind them of what they might expect, and doubtless had experienced, regarding the nature of their pathway through this world. Suffering meantime, and for awhile, they were to know that glory in the future, and glory for ever, was what awaited them.