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Steve DeWitt Spiritual Exiles - Part B Study Guide for Spiritual Exiles, I Peter 1:1-2 Scripture Reference: 1 Peter 1:1-2 Visit the series page: Exiles: A study in 1 Peter Donate to Support The Journey Sermon Transcript for Spiritual Exiles, I Peter 1:1-2 Message: Spiritual ExilesAirdate: 9/4 & 9/7/26, Programs 2350 & 2351Studying through books of the Bible has been, has really been the bread and butter of our church over the years. And, today, we begin a new series as you've seen on the screen in the, the book or the letter of First Peter. And you might ask, well, why First Peter? I mean, because from one perspective, we really could open the Bible anywhere and have things that would be profitable to us. That's what, Scripture says about itself, that all Scripture is God breathed, that is profitable.So we really could go. We could go to Leviticus. We could go to Psalms. We could go to Revelation, and there would be a quality word that God would have for us. But why First Peter?Well, I've chosen First Peter because it is so wonderfully relevant to, life as we are living it increasingly here in our culture and our society where we find ourselves as Christians and particularly as evangelical Christians increasingly on the margins of society. More and more it seems that to actually believe in Jesus is a, you know, small s scandalous sort of thing. And by that, I mean, not nominal Christianity. Nominal Christianity will fit in anywhere. Nominal Christians are accepted.But if you actually believe it, like you're one of those crazy people that actually believe the gospel, and you really believe in, the resurrection, and you really believe in that the world was created and things like that, more and more, people are looking down their nose at that and pushing us to the fringe of the culture. And First Peter is written for the church in exile. First Peter is written for a church on the margins. It is written for the persecuted church. It's written, for the ostracized church.It is written for the hated church. I read somebody that basically said, the more irrelevant Christianity becomes, the more relevant First Peter becomes because it's written for that church that is in exile in its culture. The title of the series comes from the first words in, Peter's letter where he addresses it and says, to those who are elect exiles. Exiles where and exiles why we're going to, get into. And I dare say that by the time we're done with this series, I'll bet First Peter might be in the running for your favorite book in all the Bible.Luther himself said about First Peter that it is, quote, “one of the noblest books in the New Testament,” and he put it on par with Romans and the Gospel of John, which is saying something, isn't it? So, it's a wonderful letter, and I think it's gonna be a real blessing to all of us. We're going to work through it in a style of teaching, known as expository preaching. And what that means is that week in and week out, we're going to look at the text as Peter, inspired by the Holy Spirit, wrote it. We're gonna ask the question, what did Peter and the Holy Spirit mean when they wrote that particular text?And then we are going to draw out of that meaning as it was originally intended and apply it to our lives today. What does that mean for us today? I wanna encourage you to come each week, every week with expository preaching is a fresh text, which means that it is a fresh word from God for us. And I think that it will be, it will be a blessing. So with that, let me just pray and ask God's blessing on this entire teaching series.Father, we ask that you would please, as you have done down through the centuries, that you would take your holy word, that you would enlighten it to our understanding, and that you would powerfully apply it to our lives and to our church and through us to the culture around us. We pray that this series would be just uniquely blessed by you, and all the good that can be done from it has little to do with, me or any of our teachers and pastors, but it depends on your Holy Spirit's blessing, and we seek that and we ask for it. Bless even now in in in in this day as we begin in in our study. We pray that this would be a great launch, and we pray it in Jesus' name. Amen.Now as we always do when we begin a a book study, we spend time talking about the background to the letter. Now you might say, well, why is that so important? Can't we just get going in this? Here's why it's important. It's important for the same reason that if you were walking along the street and the wind blew a letter into your to your path and you picked it up and you read it, on one level, you could understand the letter, couldn't you?Because you can read English, you can read the words, etcetera. But to know who wrote it, who they wrote it to, and why they wrote it would fill in all of those things that you can read with all kinds of meaning, wouldn't it? And so that's why we spend time figuring out who wrote this thing and why he wrote it and who he was writing it to. So let's begin by asking that question. Who wrote this letter?And you might say, well, that's simple. The top of my page, it says it says Peter wrote this letter. Right? And indeed, the first verse says, “Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ.” So you could say, well, it must be it must be Peter.But realize that just because it says that Peter wrote it is not undeniable proof that Peter wrote it. This could have been written by somebody else who claimed to have been Peter. And, there are always scholars that wanna argue against these people actually being the authors of these letters, whether that be Paul or John or or here Peter. And so there are some scholars that try to stir up controversy, but to me, it's really, difficult seeing it not be Peter because later in the letter, he's going to say that he was an eyewitness to the sufferings of Christ. Well, how many Peters are there that were eyewitnesses to the sufferings of Christ?And the early church fathers, and by that, I mean, the leaders of the church in the post apostolic age. So after John and Peter and others had died, you have certain church leaders, and they all attribute this letter to being written by the Peter of the gospels, the disciple, the apostle Peter. So I think that there is little reason to doubt that Peter actually wrote this letter. And this Peter is the Peter of the gospels. This is the Peter who had a brother named Andrew who brought him to Jesus, and Jesus met him and changed his name.Do you remember? His name had been Simon. And he said, from this point on, your name is Peter or which is the Greek word, by the way, for rock, which is like a cruel joke, I think, on Peter if you read the story because perhaps he should have been named Feather because he sees the blows in the wind. But what happens in the story of Peter is that he becomes the rock at the end of the story as he assumes leadership of the disciples after Jesus' resurrection as he is a leader in the early church, and history tells us that he was crucified upside down in Rome and and refused to be crucified upright like his savior Jesus. He didn't feel he was worthy to die the same way that Jesus died.Part of the importance of First Peter and Second Peter is that given the prominence of Peter in the church, we have very little that he wrote, actually, as compared to, like, Luke, John, or Paul. Luke wrote Luke and Acts. John wrote the Gospel of John, First, Second, Third John, and Revelation. And Paul obviously wrote a bunch of letters in the New Testament. So we got lots from those guys.But Peter, in his stature, we have very little. We have First Peter and Second Peter. And so it's like the smallness of what we have actually makes it more valuable as we can see the the teaching and the emphases of this key leader in the early church. Now to who did Paul Peter write this and why did he write? And just look at verse one with me a moment.It says, “Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, to those who are elect exiles of the dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia.” Now I'll bet that in your private devotional reading, you get to a verse like that and you sort of skip ahead, don't you? You're like, there's gotta be some more applicable thing here than ancient geography. Right? I didn't get up this morning to read my Bible, to read ancient geography.Isn't there something a little bit more helpful to me than that? And so we easily skip over those things and uniquely, I think in First Peter, probably true of all of them, but this is actually one of the keys to understanding the entire letter. Is that verse right there? Who are these people? What is it talking about?Again, those who are elect exiles of the dispersion. Now what is that all about? Alright. Quick history lesson. Hang with me.Some of you hated it your sophomore year. This will be short. Okay? But a very quick history lesson. We go back to the Roman Empire, and most of us probably heard of the Roman Empire, one of the great human empires in in history, ruled the known world for, like, five hundred years.And they were able to pull that off because they were really smart. They had policies and things that they did that allowed them to remain in power for, like, five centuries. And one of the things that they did is actually what Peter is referring to here, and and that is what is called colonization. K? Colonization.Here's the way that it worked. The Romans had the great armies. Maybe you've seen movies that portray the Roman armies and the eagle and all of that. They would go into an area that they wanted to conquer. And largely, they would conquer.They were really good at warfare. And after they had conquered this region, they would move on to go, you know, do battle in other places. But they needed to maintain power in that region that their army had already conquered. So the strategy for them was that they would colonize that area by sending, people from Rome or who at least were Roman into that community where they would establish their lives. They would establish business.They would establish some of the things that Roman culture was known for, like the theater or the auditorium or whatever. And by doing that, essentially, they would integrate into the cult actually, the culture, the indigenous culture, would integrate into the Roman culture. And by doing that, they were able to exert Roman influence and thought and power into those, particular areas. K? So these were known as dispersions.K? Sometimes these were, political friends who wanted if it was a nice area, like if suddenly we conquered Hawaii and said, wants to go live? Well, I think I'd like to so all the friends, you know, the friends of the people in charge, they would go and they would colonize Hawaii. Sometimes these were political enemies that they wanted out of Rome. Alright.Take that family and those people and get them over in Galatia. We don't wanna see them ever again. And so off they would go. And and sometimes it was just people that were like, you know what? We think we can have a better life there.Like, you can think about even the story of The United States and the colonies on the East Coast and how people came across on the boats because they wanted a better life in the new the new world. So Rome would do that. And by doing that, they essentially would, retain a kind of control over that area by repopulating and integrating. It was essentially colonization by deportation for the purpose of domination. And that's how you retain control for five hundred years.So these people that would leave Rome or a Roman, community to go into some of these new areas, they essentially lived as exiles there. They were foreigners there. They were Romans there. And, the people that were from there knew that they were these people that had come. And this was not always a comfortable thing.Realize the Roman armies would come and conquer. They would wipe out, you know, how how many people's husbands and fathers in in, in winning the war. And now you've got representatives from there coming and living amongst us. The people from that land did not look favorably necessarily on them, especially initially. They were always from somewhere else.Right? It's kind of like living up here in the North when we hear somebody with a thick southern accent. What do you do? You look at them and you think to yourself or maybe you even say it, you're not from here are you? Right?And they're like, no I'm not. I'm from Georgia or Mississippi. Right? And you're like, what are you doing up here? Why don't you go home where you belong?Explain some people we have on staff even. But as awkward as that might be for Southerners to live up here amongst the Yankees, It was much more uncomfortable back in this day. And so they lived in a kind of ostracized way, and there was social awkwardness representing the ideology of the conquering army. So Peter here is writing then to colonists who were also Christians, who for political, social, who knows what reason had gone into Asia Minor and are now living there as representatives of the Roman Empire. Now to give you an idea of where we're talking, here's a map.And it's essentially modern day Turkey. And some of you maybe are not up on your you know, Turkey to you is a, November celebration. But it's actually a country as well. And so you see some of you see the Black Sea, and you see these communities that are being referred to, Bithynia, Galatia, Cappadocia, these would have been well known in that time and would have been places of influence, cultural influence. Essentially, what Peter does in the letter is he takes these Christians' social political situation and he draws spiritual meaning from it.He says, yes, you're exiles politically and geographically, but I wanna talk to you about what it means to be a spiritual exile. What does it mean to live in an area where you it's not your homeland. What does it mean to live in an area where people look at you a little cross eyed and they say to themselves, that person isn't they're not really of us. Their values are not our values. Their priorities are not our part.They're like those Christian people. They're those marginalized people. What is it like, and how do we live when we are the ones that are in exile, when we are the weird ones? So Peter writes to these political exiles, but he wants them to see that they are really spiritual exiles and to learn what it means to live amongst people that are very, very different. K?Very different. And so what he's gonna say in this letter is he's gonna encourage them to stand strong, to remain faithful, to live obedient to Jesus in spite of the immoral culture around them, to remain faithful even though people look at them like we look at Amish people. Kinda like, man, what's your problem? What's get with the program here. Right?Why aren't you kind of along with what we're doing? That's how they felt. And here's where I think First Peter is so helpful to us is is and I don't know if you feel this or not. I certainly do. If you talk to some of the old timers around here who remember what it was like to be a Christian, like in the nineteen forties or the nineteen fifties and maybe the early nineteen sixties, it's a much different feel back then to be a Christian in America than it is in 2015.Right? Where even to pronounce Christian faith in public media in some way is to be scorned or to have the plug pulled. Right? Get him off of there immediately. We don't want any of that kind of stuff going…
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