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1 Peter 1:21-23  Through [Christ] you believe in God, who raised him from the dead and glorified him, and so your faith and hope are in God.  Now that you have purified yourselves by obeying the truth so that you have sincere love for each other, love one another deeply, from the heart.  For you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God.

It is good for us to just pause for a moment and reflect on the profound depth of what Peter is writing here.  He is writing to people for whom the ministry and crucifixion of Jesus were relatively recent events and they would have been well aware of the historical facts associated with this mysterious ‘man’ from Nazareth who had caused such a stir in Jerusalem and among the culture of Judaism generally.  Many of them would have been Jews themselves who had been dispersed throughout Caesar’s Empire through Roman persecution, but who had come to believe that this Jesus was, in fact, the Promised Messiah God had sent to ‘rescue’ them.

But the historical situation they were witnessing and living through was not exactly what they had been expecting would happen when Messiah came!  So, what was going on?  Jesus has probably had a greater and more widespread and enduring impact on the human race than any other historical figure, and for 2,000 years historians have been analysing the data available to them and trying to fathom its meaning.  So, into this situation, Peter is taking them behind the outward ‘observable’ facts from a human perspective, and in reality pointing them to what God is doing in his world, his story!

From God’s perspective there is nothing enigmatic or mysterious about the events in Judea.  Through his long succession of (OT) Prophets (see 1 Peter 1:10-12) God had been revealing his Eternal Plan of Salvation centred on his Christ (Messiah), Jesus. The facts that had happened before their very eyes in Jerusalem were not just random, ‘chance’ events, but were the carefully planned outworking of a sovereign all-powerful God’s purposes in saving us.

It was God who raised Jesus bodily from the dead, and who took him bodily up into the clouds at his Ascension – and all this was in fulfilment of what his enduring Written Word foretold.  There is a mind-blowing difference between looking at the history as a string of reportable random events and seeing it as the Sovereign Creator carrying out his loving Rescue Plan.  Peter refers to becoming aware of this mind-blowing difference as being “born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable”.  As he writes immediately after this (verses 24-25), physical ‘seed’ that we plant grows ‘grass that withers and dies’, but this ‘imperishable seed’ from which comes ‘new birth’ is the “living and enduring word of God”!  It is no wonder Jesus said to Nicodemus in John 3, “‘You must be born again.”

– Bruce Christian