2015-09-13 - Trusting in the Lord - The Stone is Alive

September 13, 2015

Trusting in the Lord

The Stone is Alive

1 Peter 2:4-10

(Advance Slide #1)

Introduction

(Advance Slide #2)

I will never be a great gardener...one big reason is that I lack patience.

• Have you ever been digging, preparing soil only to run into rocks?
• This has happened to me before, I was planting a baby tree.
• I kept pulling rock after rock and then I realized that if I kept this up was going to take me a long time.
• Also, I was going to have to do something with all the rocks.

This splendid passage in which the word ‘stone’ occurs six times in five verses, with a ‘rock’ thrown in for good measure.

• For us, stones are simply a nuisance...they get in the way.

(Advance Slide #3)

Text

4 As you come to him, a living stone rejected by men but in the sight of God chosen and precious, 5 you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. 6 For it stands in Scripture: “Behold, I am laying in Zion a stone, a cornerstone chosen and precious, and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame.”  7 So the honor is for you who believe, but for those who do not believe, “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone,”  8 and “A stone of stumbling, and a rock of offense.” They stumble because they disobey the word, as they were destined to do.

(Advance Slide #4)

But for a first-century Jew who knew the scriptures, the very word ‘stone’ carried a double promise.

• First, the great hope of Israel was that the true God who would return to live for ever in the Temple...of course it would have to be properly rebuilt.
• What’s that got to do with a ‘stone’ or a ‘rock’?
• Well, there was a long tradition of speaking about the Temple being built on the ‘rock’, on the ‘cornerstone’.
• Find the right ‘stone’, and you may be on the way to building the new Temple, ready for God to return.
• Second, the word ‘stone’ in ancient Hebrew is like the word for ‘son’.

(Advance Slide #5)

How do the ‘stone’ and the ‘son’ join up?

• God promised David that his son would build the Temple in Jerusalem, and that this son of David would actually be the son of God Himself.
• The royal son of God will build the Temple, and he will do so on the proper stone.
• The ‘chosen, precious cornerstone’ is no longer a physical stone itself, but a human being.

God’s promise to send his son, and his promise to build a house where he will come to live for ever.

Lesson

If this seems complicated, it’s because it is.

• But once you get the picture firmly in mind—God’s promise to send his son, and his promise to build a house where he will come to live forever...the rest of the passage is plain sailing.

(Advance Slide #6)

Jesus the Stone

For Peter, obviously, Jesus himself is the ‘stone’, and the new Temple is already being built up on him.

• He is the ‘living stone’ (verse 4).
• In that passage, the builders discard one particular stone because it doesn’t seem to fit.
• Yet when they get to the very top of the wall, right in the corner, they need a stone of exactly that shape...what?
• Jesus was rejected by his own people, because he didn’t fit with the plans they had at the time.
• But God has shown him to be the most important stone in the whole building, the one who wouldn’t fit anywhere else because only the most exalted place would do.

If you’re going to suggest such a scenario, it helps to be able to find in scripture a passage or two which say exactly that.

• Peter, like Paul, uses these texts from Isaiah and the Psalms to this effect.

(Advance Slide #7)

The Crucial Point

What he says about Jesus is crucial for all Christian life and devotion.

• The scattered communities to which he is writing get it firmly in their minds that they, too, are part of this new Temple.
• God is no longer to live in a Temple in Jerusalem, but in the ‘spiritual house’ which, made up of ‘living stones.’
• This ‘temple’ is being ‘built’ all over the world.

God wants, after all, to fill the whole world with his glory

(Advance Slide #8)

Nothing to Something

This all means that Peter can address this scattered group of Jesus-followers in terms which, that at least in scripture, belong to the nation of Israel itself.

• The early church was mostly Jewish.
• But Peter knew that God had brought non-Jews into this family, to share in the blessings and the inheritance.

They were the ‘holy priesthood’ offering ‘spiritual sacrifices’.

• They were the ‘chosen race, the royal priesthood’ spoken of in Exodus 19:3–6.

3 while Moses went up to God. The Lord called to him out of the mountain, saying, “Thus you shall say to the house of Jacob, and tell the people of Israel: 4 You yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. 5 Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine; 6 and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. These are the words that you shall speak to the people of Israel.”

• They were to show the world what the true God had done.

To stress the point, Peter picks up in verse 10 a famous passage from Hosea 2:23.

• The people who before were ‘not a people’ are now ‘God’s people’.
• The people who had not received mercy now have received mercy.

Conclusion

Peter believed that all God’s promises to Israel had been fulfilled in Jesus himself.

• He also believed that all who belonged to Jesus had now been brought into that ‘people of God’, that true Temple.
• The one true God was now living in them!
• The ‘Temple’ had been rebuilt—not in Jerusalem but all round the world!
• That is the great truth on which everything else in the letter will depend.

(Advance Slide #9)

Think what a responsibility we have, privileged as we are, to stretch our minds to understand these enormous truths, and to teach tomorrow’s church to do so too.

• Only by being firmly anchored in the truth of who Jesus is, and who we ourselves are as his followers, will we be able to live in the way the rest of this letter urges us to.