The Path to Exaltation (1 Peter 5:6–14)

There are times when certain news stories come to one’s attention that so acutely highlight biblical truth or human nature that they must be shared. Consider this headline from a recent Newsweek article: “Toddler Bites Snake to Death after It Sunk Its Fangs into Her Lip.” Intrigued? Let’s continue to the story.

A 2-year-old girl responded to a snake biting her on the lip by biting it back in return, killing the reptile.

 

The toddler, who is from the village of Kantar, near Bingol, Turkey, was bitten on August 10. According to media reports, her neighbors heard her screaming as the snake attacked her in her backyard.

 

When they reached her, they found her with a bite mark on her lip, and a 20-inch snake between her teeth. The snake later died from the toddler’s revenge bite, while the 2-year-old was taken to Bingol Maternity and Children’s Hospital to treat her injuries. After 24 hours under observation, she was recovering well.

If that story doesn’t highlight human nature, I don’t know what does. If you have ever worked with children in any capacity, you will know that a child’s base instinct when someone hurts them—at least, someone they perceive to be on their same level—is to hurt back. If my brother punches me, I punch him back. If my sister insults me, I’m ready to give as good as I get. If a snake bites me, I’ll bite it back. (It sounds like a dad joke, I know, but there you have it!)

One of the recurring themes in 1 Peter has been Peter’s exhortation to his suffering readers not to respond to their persecutors in kind. He closes his letter, as we will see, with something of a reiteration of this theme. They should instead respond to persecution with humility: submitting to God’s will and trusting God’s timing while fighting the devil’s schemes.

In reality, the verses before us in this study (vv. 6–14) form two distinct sections (vv. 6–11 and 12–14), and each deserves to be treated on its own, but we will lump them together for our purposes. The primary thrust of Peter’s closing burden is that humility in suffering is the path to exaltation. Rather than vindicating ourselves by fighting back, we should embrace a posture of humility as we trust God to vindicate us in his own time. We will consider this theme in these closing verses under four broad headings.

Before we launch into these verses, one broad point will be helpful up front: With a single exception, every pronoun in these closing verses is plural. Peter’s instruction is to a community of suffering believers, not to believers in isolation. Community is essential to suffering Christians. Scot McKnight summarises well Peter’s burden in this closing section: “You must remain faithful to Jesus Christ, in spite of your social condition and its potential dangers, by living obediently and in community with one another.” Let’s consider how Peter unpacks this central theme.

The Plea for Humility

As we have seen throughout our studies in this letter, Peter’s readers were suffering. When people suffer injustice and hostility, we are easily tempted to fight back. We are tempted to take matters into our own hands and fight for our own vindication. Knowing this temptation, Peter instead urges his readers to humbly submit to God’s timeline for vindication: “Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you” (v. 6).

A standard dictionary definition of “humility” is something like “the quality of having a modest or low view of one’s importance.” Humility is often envisioned as a willingness to take unresistingly wrong. Humility is understood, in other words, as passivity. While there may be some truth to humility as non-resistance, biblical humility goes far deeper. Biblical humility does include a certain form of resistance. We will consider below what that resistance looks like, but first let’s consider where humility leads.

Peter exhorts humility “so that at the proper time [God] may exalt you.” Humility leads, ultimately, to exaltation. Peter learned the connection between humility and exaltation from Jesus himself (Matthew 23:12; Luke 14:11; 18:14). But it is important to understand the nature of the exaltation to which humility leads. Two things must be observed in this regard.

First, to experience exaltation, the suffering believer must humble him- or herself “under the mighty hand of God.” The concept of God’s “mighty hand” is most frequently linked in Scripture with the exodus (Exodus 3:19; 32:11; Deuteronomy 4:34; 5:15; 6:21; 7:8, 19; 9:26; 11:2; 26:8; Daniel 9:15) and thereby with God delivering his covenant people from unjust hostility and suffering. By calling attention to God’s “mighty hand,” therefore, Peter seeks to encourage his readers in God’s ability to deliver them as surely as he had delivered Israel in the Exodus.

We must be persuaded that God is able to deliver his people from suffering. Rabbi Harold Kushner famously argued that the existence of suffering means God is either unwilling or unable to deliver his people from suffering. Since he wanted to affirm God’s love, he ultimately decided that God must be unable to deliver his people. Peter will not stand for that thinking: God’s “mighty hand” is certainly able to rescue his people from suffering.

But this, of course, begs the question: Why does God permit suffering? While Peter does not enter a theodicy or a full theology of suffering, he does point us in the right direction, which brings us to our second consideration regarding exaltation.

Second, the believer who submits him- or herself “under the mighty hand of God” will be exalted “at the proper time.” Some have interpreted this to mean that believers who humble themselves under God’s mighty hand should expect vindication from time to time in this life. If you endure injustice from the horrible boss, God will eventually reward you with a promotion. If you quietly endure unjust hostility from your unbelieving husband, God will eventually save him. While those might make for very inspirational applications of this text, they miss the point.

“The proper time” seems to hearken back to 1:5, where Peter wrote of the believer’s ultimate inheritance as “ready to be revealed in the last time.” The reference is to the time of ultimate vindication at the final resurrection. As Scot McKnight observes, “what Peter has in mind is final vindication at the end of history, not a present reward.” While Christians mayexperience vindication from time to time in this life, that is not in view here. Peter is rather urging his readers to humble themselves under God’s mighty hand so that they can experience vindication at the final judgement.

The Practice of Humility

As I have already suggested, biblical humility is not characterised by passivity. Biblical humility is not the posture of passively allowing people to walk all over you. To be sure, biblical humility does not respond to hostility with hostility, but humility is proactive in the way it responds. In vv. 7–9, Peter highlights three characteristics of biblical humility in suffering—three ways in which biblical humility is active rather than passive.

Humble Prayer

First, biblical humility in suffering is characterised by active prayer: “casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you” (v. 7). The first way to humble yourself under the mighty hand of God while suffering is by “casting all your anxieties on him.”

When the church suffers, the church needs to pray. In fact, it is often in the times of greatest suffering that we most desperately recognise our need for prayer. I recently listened to an interview with Lanre Williams-Ayedun, the senior vice president for international programs at World Relief. She recalls growing up in parts of North Africa, where Christianity is harshly opposed by militant Islam. When she first attended a prayer meeting in an American context, she found herself bemused that the church, after a thirty-minute prayer meeting, felt that it had spent a good amount of time praying together. She recalls prayer meetings back home that lasted six hours or more. Christians there have nowhere else to turn, she recalls, and so they devote themselves to prayer.

While the immediate context of this verse is prayer in the face of open and violent hostility, the principle can nevertheless be broadened without harming the initial intent. Peter’s readers were anxious for their lives in the face of open hostility. We do not live with the same fear as South African Christians. Nevertheless, we can learn from this that God cares about the burdens of his people. And he invites us to bring those burdens to him in prayer as evidence of humbling ourselves under his mighty hand.

Prayerlessness is a manifestation of pride because it is a display of self-sufficiency. Believer, do you take your burdens to the Lord, or do you rely on your own strength and wisdom to solve your problems? As we observe the plural nature of the pronouns here employed, do you share your burdens with others so that they can pray with and for you? When we ask for prayer requests for Sunday nights, our goal is to pray with one another about our burdens. But that can only be done as we are willing to share.

How did you respond the last time someone asked how they can pray for you? Do you really have nothing to pray for—no burden that the church can help you lift to the Lord? Perhaps the real problem is not lack of burden, but lack of humility. As we humble ourselves under the mighty hand of God, we will cast our burdens on him—together—knowing that he cares for us.

Humble Vigilance

Second, biblical humility in suffering is characterised by active vigilance: “Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour” (v. 8).

Here, Peter employs two adjectives (“sober-minded” and “watchful”) to describe the need for active vigilance as a manifestation of humility. “Sober-minded” describes the attitude of being in control of one’s thinking and therefore not given to irrational thoughts. “Watchful” speaks of readiness to learn.

When we suffer, we are often prone to irrational, unfounded thinking. We are quickly tempted to cast aside everything we know about God simply because we are having a hard time. We struggle to rationalise our theology of a good and loving God with the bad things that happen to us. We are tempted to think unworthy thoughts about God, and even to accuse him of injustice. It is precisely at such times that we need good friends to draw alongside us and challenge our irrational thinking with truth. We need to be exhorted to be “sober-minded.”

Suffering also has a way of casting us into such despair that we are not prepared to hear truth from those who want to help. Peter exhorts us to be “watchful”—to be ready to hear and learn truth that will help us through the difficulties we face.

The reason we must be “sober-minded” and “watchful” is because “your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.” Satan is on the prowl. Peter uses a word that describes someone—in this case, the devil—behaving in a predictable way with particular intent. Satan is not very original—because his devices are so often successful!—and he is single-minded in his goal: to destroy the people of God.

In this direct context, Peter uses the word “devour” to highlight the violent intent of the devil against his readers. As far as the original readers were concerned, his intent was to completely destroy them. The threat was against their very lives. Of course, this is not the only way that the devil attacks God’s church, and the principle of sober-mindedness and watchfulness is necessary even for Christians who do not live in the same violent social climate in which Peter’s readers lived.

There is one more interesting observation to make about this verse. As noted above, the pronouns in this text are universally plural—with a single exception. The word translated “someone” is a singular pronoun, though “your” is once again plural. We see, therefore, that, while the devil is the church’s adversary, he is perfectly content to pick off Christians one at a time. The exhortation here is therefore both corporate and individual. The devil does not give up attacking individual Christians because the church they attend is vigilant to his attacks. Even if he cannot immediately bring down the entire church, he will gladly devour individual members.

The exhortation, then, is for every church member to be vigilant to the attacks of the devil. The devil hates the people of God and wants nothing more than to see churches crumble. We need to be “sober-minded” and “watchful” for his attacks. We need to help one another, and receive the help of others, to be rational (truthful) in our thinking and eager to learn from one another so we can avoid the devouring fangs of the enemy.

As I have said, Satan’s devouring intent in the text before us was to kill the believers in Asia Minor. The threat against them and their churches was one of physical violence. South African Christians don’t face that same threat, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t adopt an attitude of humble vigilance toward the devil in our own context. We should be wise to the predictable tactics that the devil uses against churches in our context so that we don’t fall prey to his devices.

Satan may attack Christians by tempting them to sin, as he did our first parents (Genesis 3:1–6) and Peter himself (Luke 22:31–32). He may tempt us to disbelieve or distort the truth that we receive from God (Matthew 13:19). He may seek to confuse us with half-truths and even outright lies (2 Corinthians 4:4). He may tempt us to idolatry and superstition (Acts 8:9–11; 19:13–16). He will tempt you to bitterness and unforgiveness (2 Corinthians 2:5–11). We need to vigilantly familiarise ourselves with Scripture so that we are aware of the multitude of ways that the devil attacks the people of God to try to devour them.

Before we move on, I must also make the observation that the devil is but one of the enemies we face in our Christian discipleship. This is the only time that Peter explicitly mentions the devil in this letter, though he has spoken a great deal about opposition. We cannot blame the devil for every temptation or sin that we face. The world and our own flesh are as much our enemies as the devil.

Humble Resistance

Third, biblical humility in suffering is characterised by active resistance: “Resist him, firm in your faith, knowing that the same kinds of suffering are being experienced by your brotherhood throughout the world” (v. 9).

It may seem initially contradictory to say that we should “resist” when we have seen throughout the letter that Peter has emphasised the path of least resistance. But we should note here that the resistance exercised is not against the people who persecute by the power that lies behind that persecution. Resistance, in other words—at least in this context—does not look like fighting back against the people who persecute. But it does mean actively resisting the evil forces that inspire the persecution—in a sense, biting back the snake that bites us.

Peter tells us exactly how to resist Satan: by remaining “firm in your faith.” “Faith” here is not a general term but a technical term for the Christian faith. “Firm” describes steadfastness in attitudes or beliefs. The idea, then, is that the way to actively resist the devil is to remain firmly grounded in the Christian faith, which will enable you to remain firmly grounded in your relationship with God, even in suffering.

There is again an emphasis here on knowing and embracing truth. Christianity is more than a set of truth claims, but it is not less than that. Christianity is rooted in truth claims, in which we must remain firmly grounded.

Ligonier recently released the findings from its biannual state of theology survey. The survey took the form of a set of statements. Respondents were asked to strongly agree, agree, neither agree nor disagree, disagree, or strongly disagree with each statement. The findings were fascinating. Consider responses to just two statements from evangelical respondents.

The first statement was this: “Sex outside of traditional marriage is a sin.” A whopping 94% of evangelical respondents agreed or strongly agreed with that statement, which is good. But then consider this statement: “Jesus is the first and greatest being created by God.” Some 73% of evangelical respondents agreed or strongly agreed with that statement. In other words, while 94% of evangelical respondents had a biblical sex ethic, 73% are heretics! And having a good sex ethic is not very helpful if you get it wrong about Jesus Christ.

Peter urges his readers to resist the devil by remaining firm in the faith. A large part of that is knowing and embracing truth about Jesus Christ, which will work its way out into the way you live. It is of the utmost importance to get your belief about Jesus Christ correct. This is one crucial tool in humbly resisting the enemy.

One of the irrational thoughts to which the Asian Christians might be tempted was thinking that they were alone in suffering for their faith. Peter assures them that this was not the same. Indeed, “the same kinds of suffering are being experienced by your brotherhood throughout the world.” The devil hates all Christians and all Christian churches everywhere and will do all he can to destroy as many of them as possible. We all need to be on guard and prepared to resist the enemy.

The Promise of Humility

Peter moves on, in vv. 10–11, to offer a doxology, which at the same time serves as a promise to those who walk the path of humility: “And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you. To him be the dominion forever and ever. Amen” (vv. 10–11).

Having promised up front (v. 6) that the road of humility is the path to exaltation, Peter brings it full circle. He assures his readers that, in light of Christ’s “eternal glory,” their earthly suffering would persist but “a little while.” He is not offering a promised timeline for their suffering but is reiterating the principle of Romans 8:18: “The sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us” (Romans 8:18).

We must develop a healthy eternal perspective if we will navigate the sufferings of this life in a way that is honouring to Christ. Because we have been “called … into his glory” we can be sure that, if we respond to suffering with humility, we will be exalted at the proper time. The promise that Christ will “restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish” us empowers us in our suffering as we maintain an eternal perspective.

Peter ends his brief doxology with an ascription of eternal “dominion” to Christ. Dominion is significant here because his readers needed to be reminded that, even in their suffering, Christ was king. They were not suffering because he had been somehow unsettled from his throne. Even their suffering fell squarely within the pages of his dominion. Christ remains king even when bad things happen to his people.

The Partners in Humility

As already observed, vv. 12–14 properly form a distinct section of this letter, and deserve to be treated on their own, but there is at least a tangential connection to the previous section that is worth highlighting for our purposes:

By Silvanus, a faithful brother as I regard him, I have written briefly to you, exhorting and declaring that this is the true grace of God. Stand firm in it. She who is at Babylon, who is likewise chosen, sends you greetings, and so does Mark, my son. Greet one another with the kiss of love. Peace to all of you who are in Christ.

(1 Peter 5:12–14)

Silvanus (Silas) was either Peter’s scribe as he dictated the letter or one who delivered the letter on Peter’s behalf. Peter reiterates here the intent of his letter: to exhort and declare “that this is the true grace of God.” “This” refers to vv. 10–11. In other words, Peter’s intent was to exhort and declare that their suffering, though intense, was bearable in light of the eternal glory they were promised in Christ. They must “stand firm” in this conviction.

Peter had already told his readers that they were not alone in their suffering. Indeed, their brothers and sisters “throughout the world” were experiencing exactly the same sort of opposition. As if to underscore this claim, Peter sends greeting from “she who is at Babylon, who is likewise chosen” and from “Mark, my son.”

“She who is at Babylon” refers to the church in “Babylon.” Babylon is clearly a metaphorical reference to another city. Most interpreters consider Babylon to refer to Rome, noting that church tradition holds that Peter was ultimately martyred in Rome. Within the biblical text, however, Peter is always seen in Jerusalem or travelling on behalf of the church in Jerusalem. Though he travelled much, Mark was also native to Jerusalem. Furthermore, Revelation refers to “Babylon” as “the great city” (16:19; see also 14:8; 17:5; 18:2) and further identifies “the great city” as the city “that symbolically is called Sodom and Egypt, where their Lord was crucified” (11:8). Since Jesus was crucified in Jerusalem rather than Rome, I take the minority opinion that “she who is at Babylon” here is a reference to the church in Jerusalem.

But regardless of whether Peter was writing from the church in Jerusalem or the church in Rome, his point remains the same: The “Babylonian” church was “likewise chosen.” The “Babylonian” church was experiencing the same suffering and had the same promise of ultimate glory. The Asian Christians were not alone. They had partners in suffering and therefore partners in humility. They should be encouraged to persevere with the knowledge that they were not alone in their suffering.

As Christians, we are called to bear one another’s burdens. We are called to suffer with one another and pray for and encourage one another in suffering. Knowing that we are not alone is a huge help when we are facing hostility for our faith.

The Paragon of Humility

We cannot end our study without considering the ultimate example of humility. It is impossible to reflect on the call to Christian humility without looking to the greatest example—the one who empowers our humility—the Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus walked the path to exaltation by embracing humility.

Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

(Philippians 2:5–11)

What greater example of humility could there possibly be? Jesus Christ laid aside every claim he had to equality with his Father. He emptied himself of his eternal glory by becoming one of us. As a human, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even the most humiliating of all deaths: death on a cross. But because he walked the road of humility, God exalted him by raising him from the dead and receiving him to his right hand, where he reigns today. And he promises to all his people, who embrace Christlike humility, that he will ultimately exalt them “at the proper time.”

Perhaps all this talk of humility and exaltation appears strangely foreign to you. Perhaps you cannot comprehend why someone would possibly want to humble themselves while suffering with a pie-in-the-sky promise of exaltation at some future point. If that describes you, it is only because you don’t have the mind of Christ. The path to exaltation begins with you looking to Christ in humble acknowledgement that he died for your sins. It begins with you repenting of your sins and embracing Christ’s offer of forgiveness and eternal life. Only then can you have the mind of Christ. Only then can you begin walking the road to exaltation by embracing the call to humility, trusting Christ’s own power to empower you with humility in hope of ultimate exaltation.

Christian, hear Christ’s call to humility. Live a life of humble prayer, humble vigilance, and humble resistance, willing to endure suffering in this life because you believe in the promise of exaltation “at the proper time.”

To Christ alone be dominion forever and ever.

AMEN