Add virtue to faith
Key Verses: 1, 3, 8, 13, not done 16, 20, 21
How do we
become pleasing to God? Peter answers this in very plain language. We are
acceptable to God because of His righteousness and not our own. Our
righteousness “is as filthy rags” in God’s sight. Think of the most disgusting,
maggot infested stuff you could ever imagine put on a rag. That is what our own
efforts at obtaining a righteous life look like. They are stinky.
Have you
ever watched the food network when they have the cake designing contests? The
desserts those people come up with are amazing. Now imagine an Easy Bake Oven cake entered right next
to them. Is there any comparison? Is there any chance the judges will pick your
entry rather than the magnificent works of art? Of course not! And yet that is
what we do when we expect our efforts to match up to Jesus’ perfection.
In Jesus
we have every we need to live lives pleasing to God. Notice that we get this
power through our knowledge of Him, not our knowledge about Him. We can have a
personal knowledge of God. His is not a distant watchmaker who wound up
creation and then let it go. He is intimately involved in creating and
sustaining our world. He stays connected so that we can experience His glory
and goodness. And this glory and goodness bring us promises that have His power
and character backing them up. We can count on them coming true.
So if we
know Him, what is our next move? Peter lays out a list of character qualities
that we should add to our faith. And then he says that if we have these
qualities we will be effective and productive in our relationship with Jesus.
To put it another way, God will fulfill His purpose in us, and we will fulfill
our purpose in Him.
One of
the important facts to grasp is that we are all going to die. Peter likens it
to a living in a tent, a temporary dwelling. Someday we will get a permanent
home. And he knows this because he is an eyewitness to the events. He saw Jesus
in His glory. He witnesses the miracles, the Transfiguration, His death, and
His resurrection. The words Jesus spoke came true right before his eyes. That
is how he knows with certainty that this life is temporary, that a permanent
home awaits.
Not only was Peter an eyewitness of the
events, but he also had the writings of the Prophets. He knew he could trust
the Scriptures. The Scriptures were filled with Truth about Jesus that unfolded
over time and came to fulfillment. He came to trust it because the things
written came to pass. That is because Scripture is not an invention of human
beings. God breathed the Scriptures. Man wrote as they received this
inbreathing of God. That is how things written hundreds of years before could
come to pass in statistically impossible detail.
We can
trust the Scriptures.