Watch or read this introduction to 1 Peter, focused on the believer’s hope. There is encouragement here for every follower of Jesus.

Karen and I once watched a Star Trek: Voyager episode in which one of the principal characters awakes to find herself a wrinkled, dying woman, surrounded by a loving family she does not know. She has no memory of a past that led up to this moment. She is a woman without a past, only a present; and in that present, she is dying.

She loses consciousness and when she comes to, she is still an old woman but not as old or as ill. She has gotten younger. This happens repeatedly throughout the show and, each time she regains consciousness, she is younger than she was before. Near the end of the show, she is a child. On this backwards tour through time, she discovers more about her family, herself, and the reason this strange thing is happening to her.

Unlike the rest of the crew, she knows what the future holds, but she does not know what the past held. For the crew, the future is the great unknown. For her, it’s the past. She guides her actions by what she knows of the future; they guide theirs by what they know of the past.

I tell you this story because we are about to begin a delightful exploration of 1 Peter and I want to illustrate a biblical truth that is central to that great letter. The better, richer, fuller life God intends for his people is predicated on a knowledge of the past and the future. Jesus’s people have inside information on both.

To the degree we misunderstand our past – and all of us misunderstand our past to greater or lesser degrees – we cannot be wise in the present. And without a grasp on our future, we cannot be secure. Understanding our past gives us wisdom. Understanding our future gives us confidence.

Many people are imprisoned by their past. The abuse they suffered, the sorrows they endured, and the rejection they experienced have chained them to the kind of person they are but don’t want to be. Others are chained to the past not by its sorrows but by its successes. They’re afraid to let go and become the person God is calling them to be. The first group is filled with regrets. The second is emptied of hope.

For Christians it is different—or it should be. Their past, whether pleasant or tragic, was transformed when they were united to Jesus Christ by faith. In that miraculous moment, their story was fused to his story and what happened to him became more important to their lives than anything that has ever happened to them. Anything.

Not only that, their future was bonded to his future. If you are a Christian – and I’m not talking about the nominal Christian who has a vague belief in God and a positive opinion of Jesus, but about a person who has committed his/her life to God in the belief that Jesus is the savior of the world and the Lord of all – the most important thing in your life happened in someone else’s life. It happened to Jesus. His story is your story. His past is your past, and his future is your future. Once you grasp that, it will change your present.

Our union with Christ is a foundational truth for the New Testament writers. When you were joined to Christ by faith, his past became yours. Because this is true, you can say with the Apostle Paul, “I have been crucified with Christ” (Galatians 2:20). His future became your future: when he comes into his inheritance, you will come into yours (Romans 8:17). Not only is his past your past and his future your future, you can begin to experience his present as your present. Paul did. He could say, “For me to live is Christ” (Phil. 1:21). Again, this is not true of in-name-only Christians; it is true of those who are united to Christ through faith.

Peter’s letter is based on what God has done for us by uniting us to Jesus. His life is the fountain from which our lives spring. The Christian cannot really know himself in the present apart from knowing Christ in his past and his future.

In the past, Christ redeemed us and opened a new way of life to us (1 Peter 1:18). He bore our sins so that we could die to sin and live to righteousness (2:24). He died to bring us to God (1 Peter 3:18).

That is the past. It is writ large on the pages of Peter’s letter, but the future also plays a big role—so big that Peter mentions it on every page of his letter. Now, let me ask you: does the future occupy so large a place in your thinking? If it does not, you will be handicapped in your discipleship to Jesus. And this is true regardless of your age, whether you are 90 or 16.

When I was 16, I was a newish believer. I had been reading the Bible for a while, but I didn’t know much about it. The preaching at our church was not the most inspiring or enlightening. I was just muddling along the best I could. But I believed in Jesus and understood that my future was all wrapped up in him.  

I was willing to endure – or rather, I willed to endure – so that I could experience the future God had for me. Many were the times I said to God, “Whatever it takes” (and by “whatever” I meant the worst things a teenager could imagine), “I want to be all that you can make me.” Do you see what was happening? The future was altering my present. Rather than living out of past hurts and losses, I was choosing to live into my future. You could say I was living backwards. That’s a skill that every believer needs to master.

Peter mentions the future throughout the letter. In chapter 1, he tells us that grace will be given to God’s faithful people when (1:13) Jesus Christ is revealed. This is grace that is going to transform us! In chapter 2 he speaks of the day when God will visit us (2:12). In chapter 4, he hammers home the idea that a day is coming when God will judge the world (4:5). That is not a bad thing, but neither is it an optional thing. Also in chapter 4, he points to the end of all things, which, he says, is already near (4:7), and he tells us that we will be overjoyed when the glory of Christ is revealed (4:13). In chapter 5, we read that those who are faithful in their service to him are going to share in his glory (5:1). They will receive a crown of glory when Christ appears (5:4). The body of the letter ends with Peter encouraging his readers with the reminder that God has called them to his eternal glory (5:10).

It also opens on that note. Let me read for us verses 1-4: “Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, To God’s elect, strangers in the world, scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynia, who have been chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through the sanctifying work of the Spirit, for obedience to Jesus Christ and sprinkling by his blood: Grace and peace be yours in abundance. Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade—kept in heaven for you…”

“…he has given us new birth into a living hope…” A living hope. People around us are afflicted with hopelessness. They have given up on their dreams, their jobs, their government, even their church. They have lost hope for their marriages and their children. But the living hope that is ours doesn’t die. Dr. Johnson was wrong, at least when it comes to Jesus’s people, when he said, “Men live in hope, die in despair.” The new birth allows people to live in hope and die in hope. We don’t despair. Even if our bodies die, our hope does not.

The word translated “has given us new birth” or, better, “has begotten us” (as the King James has it), refers to the conception of new life. The translation, “new birth,” suggests to us the delivery of a baby that has reached full-term but, strictly speaking, the word Peter uses refers to life in utero. Earth is a womb. This is our gestation period, the time of our development. The time of our delivery – or to use the biblical term, our deliverance – is in the glorious future God has planned for us. When Christ returns, we will be delivered.

(Just an aside here. I’ve had people say to me that they want no part of any God who refuses to let people into heaven. How, they ask, can a just – not to mention a decent – God keep someone out of heaven for eternity based on the sins committed during their brief lifetime? But these people misunderstand. Past sins won’t keep people out of heaven. If they did, there would be hope for any of us, for we have all sinned. But thank God, “Christ died for our sins and not only ours, but also for the sins of the whole world” (1 John 2:2).)

If people don’t get into heaven, it’s not because they have sinned. It’s because they have not been begotten again with the kind of life that is capable of existing in the age to come, the life that comes through a connection to Jesus Christ.

God is like a heavenly obstetrician. If a baby comes out of the womb of this age with any life at all, he will help that child enter the larger world and be happy and healthy. But if the child comes out of the womb of this age with no life – tragic as that is (and it is break-your-heart tragic) – God will not put it in the nursery with the other babies. It would do the stillborn child no good and the living ones a disservice.)

Note that this new birth is “through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead…” It is because we are united with Christ in his past – his death and resurrection – that we will be united with him in his future glory. The difference between hope and hopelessness is an empty tomb.

This new life we received when we trusted in Christ comes with hope already installed, like a computer comes with software pre-installed. Peter says that we are begotten into a living hope. Hope is part of the new life’s programming (if you will). It is hopeful in good times and bad, when the body is healthy and when it hurts, in youth and in extreme old age. Hope is inherent in this new life.

The old life – the one that Adam installed in our race – is not like that. Hopelessness is at its core. If I understand this distinction, I will know what to do when I lose hope because I will know what’s happened: I have slipped back into the old hope-deprived life, which Jesus’s people are instructed to decisively put off (Ephesians 4:22).

But how easy it is to slip back into that old life and try to live out of its strengths rather than Christ’s! I’ve done it too many times. When I realize that is what has happened, I must put off that old person once again and live out of the new by trusting in Christ.

We are begotten into hope and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil, or fade. Perish, spoil, or fade are descriptors of this age in the history of the world—but not of the next. This life is a lesson in how to lose. We lose our stuff: it rusts, its luster dims, it fails. We lose our friends: they move, they change, they die. Our own energy, mental acuity, and hearing eventually perish, spoil, and fade, and then we lose ourselves. The heart slows, brainwaves flatten, and the body perishes.  

But those who have received the new birth have an inheritance that will never perish, spoil, or fade. The life energy they now have compared to the life energy they will experience in the age to come is like that of a nine-volt battery compared to a nuclear power plant. We who belong to Christ are destined (this is verse 8) for “joy inexpressible that is full of glory.” St. Augustine said that the “rapture of the saved soul will flow over into the resurrection body.” In that day, we will “drink joy from the fountain of joy” (C.S. Lewis).

Were Darwinian evolutionary theory the whole story and life on earth evolved from a single-cell organism to the advanced beings we are today over untold ages, that change would be dwarfed by the change that will happen instantaneously in the lives of the faithful when the resurrection takes place. No wonder St. Peter tells us to set our hopes fully on the grace to be given us when Jesus Christ is revealed (1:13). That’s what we’re waiting for!

If you have connected to Jesus through faith, all the most important things in your life didn’t happen in your life but in his life, which you now share. So much is this the case that the apostle can say, “Christ … is your life” (Colossians 3:4). His death is your death: He bore our sins in his own body so that we might die to sins (2:24). And his resurrection means you will be raised: “… the one who raised the Lord Jesus from the dead will also raise us with Jesus” (2 Cor. 4:14). Of course he will: we’re connected.

Do you see what this means? We have always thought that the most important thing about us – the determining factor – is that we are tall or short, ugly, or pretty, smart, or dull, married or divorced, wealthy or poor; that our dad left when we were kids, and our mom remarried an abusive guy, or we were in an accident that left us impaired. But what is far more important to us is Jesus. Through Jesus, God has changed everything. And through Jesus, God is changing us!

The Apostle Peter not only wrote about what hope can do for us; he demonstrated it. He had known for a long time that he wasn’t going to die a natural death. By the time he wrote his second letter, he knew he didn’t have long on this earth. But he also knew that his life was so connected to Jesus’s that death wasn’t going to hurt him. He was eager for the day of God. He was looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth – one that is perfect (2 Peter 3:13). The fact that he was going to die soon didn’t depress him because Jesus was his life and Jesus’s future was his future.

We are bound misunderstand ourselves if we think of ourselves apart from Jesus, and that will affect our relationships, our peace of mind, and everything about us. We won’t know why we are here. We won’t know what we are supposed to be doing. We won’t know what will content and fulfill us. Hope will come and go, but mostly go.

We’ll never find ourselves in ourselves because our life isn’t there; it is his with Christ in God (Colossians 3:3). That’s where we should look. Friends tell us to trust ourselves. Jesus tells us to trust God. Motivational speakers tell us to “dig deep,” but we’ll never find all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge there, no matter how deep we dig (Colossians 2:3). We will find them in Christ. Jesus was so right: It is only when we lose ourselves – whether we think ourselves ugly or pretty, smart or stupid, victim or hero – that we find ourselves. We find ourselves in Jesus—more alive, more loving, more joyful than we ever dared hope.

One thing remains to be said: the hopeful life, the life of wisdom, knowledge, and joy, is rarely an easy one. Hopeful, joyous St. Peter was persecuted and eventually crucified. He knew (1:6) that we would “suffer grief in all kinds of trials.” That doesn’t make hope less important but more, just as an anchor becomes more important in turbulent waters. Such trials test and purify our precious, priceless faith and prepare us for praise, glory, and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed (1:7-8). Each time our faith stands the test of such trials, our hope becomes stronger until it is finally unbreakable.

All this – so beautiful, so hopeful, so glorious – is because of Jesus, our life, our living hope.