📖 1 Peter Intensive — Unit 6: Christ, the Suffering Example

Text: 1 Peter 2:18-25

Submission Even Under Unjust Suffering

Peter now turns to those in the hardest place of all — the household servants. "Servants, be submissive to your masters with all fear, not only to the good and gentle, but also to the harsh" (1 Peter 2:18). He goes on to say that there is no credit in being beaten for doing wrong; "but when you do good and suffer, if you take it patiently, this is commendable before God" (1 Peter 2:20). What is pleasing to God is not the suffering of the guilty, but the patient endurance of one who suffers unjustly while doing good.

We should pause here, because the command to slaves troubles modern readers. Why did Christianity not at once abolish slavery? In the days of the New Testament there were some sixty million slaves — many of them doctors, teachers, and musicians — yet they had no rights at all and were counted as part of the master's property. Many early Christians were themselves slaves. Had the church called for armed revolt, the young Christian movement would have been crushed, as every earlier slave revolt had been. So the gospel did not begin with rebellion; it began by planting a seed that would in time destroy slavery from within. Paul wrote that in Christ "there is neither slave nor free... for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28). When he met the runaway slave Onesimus, he sent him back to his master Philemon — but asked that he be received no longer as a slave but as a beloved brother. Christianity did not overturn slavery overnight; it ordered a new relationship that eventually undid it, and Christians stood at the forefront of the abolition movement in England and America. But the immediate lesson for these believers is the principle that will fill the rest of the passage: how to suffer unjustly, and well. And for that, Peter lifts their eyes to Christ.

Christ Suffered, Leaving Us an Example

"For to this you were called, because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that you should follow His steps" (1 Peter 2:21). The question "why did Christ have to suffer?" is one Peter answers in this passage, and his first answer is this: Christ suffered to leave us an example. The word translated "example" is a vivid one; it literally means "something written underneath." It pictures the copybook a child uses to learn to write, with the perfect letters at the top of the page for the pupil to trace. Christ is that perfect copy. We are called to trace our lives over His — to the imitation of Christ. If He were living your life, with your talents and your opportunities, what would He do? Because Jesus was a real man, God can rightly call us to follow the pattern He set, and that pattern was flawless: He sought first the kingdom, obeyed the Father exactly, and lived without sin. The lesson lifts up two examples in particular.

The first is an example of humility. In the Upper Room, on the very night before His death, the disciples were quarreling over which of them would be greatest. And the Son of God, with the cross before Him, rose, wrapped a towel around His waist, and washed their feet. Dr. Henry Sloane Coffin once asked a group of Chinese Christians what had won them to Christ from their old religions. Not the miracles, they said, for their old religions had miracles; not the teaching, for they had teachers who said fine things. At last an old man said, "It was Jesus washing His disciples' feet." They had nothing like that — God stooping with a basin and towel. So much division in the world and in the church comes from a refusal to take the lower place: the player who quits because he does not play enough, the singer who will not sing without the solo, the man who is angry because he did not get his way. When we are tempted to think of our dignity and our rights, let us see again the Son of God kneeling at His disciples' feet.

The second, and greatest, is an example of obedience to the Father's will. After the supper Jesus went to Gethsemane, knowing what lay ahead — agony, the cross, and separation from the Father — until His struggle pressed drops of blood from Him. And at the end He prayed, "Take this cup from Me. Nevertheless, not My will, but Thine, be done." He was obedient even in drinking the bitter cup. Scripture presses this on us: "He who says he abides in Him ought himself also to walk just as He walked" (1 John 2:6). It is not enough to say you believe, or to claim the name of Christian, or to know about the gospel; the proof of salvation is that you are striving to walk as Jesus walked. As the old book In His Steps taught a generation to ask before every decision, "What would Jesus do?"

He Committed No Sin

Peter now fixes on the perfection of this example: "Who committed no sin, nor was deceit found in His mouth" (1 Peter 2:22). Christ was tempted in every way as we are, yet without sin (Hebrews 4:15); "in Him is no sin" (1 John 3:5). He lived among sinners and did it without sinning. We usually speak of His perfection in the negative — He committed no sin — but there is a positive side as well. He did not merely avoid breaking God's rules; He perfectly did the will of God in everything, and loved the Father with all His heart, soul, and mind. No mere man could ever claim this, for "all have sinned"; only Christ fulfilled every expectation of God.

Believers have sometimes asked a deeper question: not only that Christ did not sin, but whether He could have. Godly Christians have answered in different ways. Some hold that because He is fully God, and God cannot sin, He was unable to sin. Others, equally sure that He is the eternal Son, hold that as a true man He was genuinely tested, with a real freedom of choice. Both sides agree on the one essential fact: Christ did not sin. The lesson leans toward the second view, and its reasons are worth weighing because they protect precious truths. The possibility of sin, it argues, is what makes His humanity real — a true man makes choices, and where Adam chose disobedience, Jesus chose obedience. It is what makes His temptation real — set real apples and wax fruit before hungry boys, and only the real fruit tempts; a test with no possibility of yielding is no test at all. It is what makes His identification with us real — we have a High Priest who can be touched with the feeling of our weaknesses, who can say, "I know, for I have been there." And it is what makes His obedience real — He was not a machine moved by a lever, but a Son who freely chose to do His Father's will.

Reviled, He Did Not Revile Back

Now Peter shows how the sinless Christ behaved under cruelty: "who, when He was reviled, did not revile in return; when He suffered, He did not threaten, but committed Himself to Him who judges righteously" (1 Peter 2:23). When men cursed Him, He did not curse back. When they made Him suffer, He uttered no threats. Instead He handed His whole case over to God, the righteous Judge, trusting Him to set all things right in the end. Here is the heart of how a Christian suffers well. The believer under attack is not to repay insult with insult or to plot revenge, but, like his Lord, to entrust himself to the God who judges justly. The slave being treated harshly, the church being slandered, the believer being wronged — all are called to this same quiet committal of themselves into God's hands.

He Bore Our Sins on the Tree

But Christ's suffering was more than an example; here is Peter's second great answer to "why did He suffer?" — He suffered to bring us to God. "Who Himself bore our sins in His own body on the tree, that we, having died to sins, might live for righteousness — by whose stripes you were healed" (1 Peter 2:24). He took our sins upon Himself; He bore them in His own body; and He did it so that we might be done with sin and alive to righteousness. The great barrier between us and God is sin, and because God is holy He must deal with it. He could have simply condemned us all, which is what we deserve. He could have set aside His own law of righteousness — but that would deny His own character and plunge the world into chaos. Or He could pay the debt Himself. And that is exactly what He did in Christ. In the cross, justice and love were combined.

The lesson tells of a disobedient boy sent to spend the night alone in the attic as his punishment. But the father, knowing the boy was afraid of the dark, could not rest. He took bedding and climbed up to lie beside him, saying, "Son, you have been disobedient, and I cannot take away the punishment, but I have decided to bear it with you." When the two came down together, it was justice and love. Something like that, Peter says, is what God did for us. Yet this salvation is not automatic. It is offered freely to all, but not all receive it. There is a true story of George Wilson, sentenced to hang, whom the President pardoned — but Wilson refused the pardon. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, and the Chief Justice ruled that a pardon is only a piece of paper unless it is accepted; "if it is refused, it is no pardon." George Wilson was hanged. So it is with Christ's pardon. He bore our sins; a full and free forgiveness is held out to every one of us — but a pardon refused is no pardon at all. Peter will say the same thing again a chapter later: "Christ also suffered once for sins, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God" (1 Peter 3:18).

Straying Sheep, Returned to the Shepherd

Peter closes the chapter with a tender image: "For you were like sheep going astray, but have now returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls" (1 Peter 2:25). Sheep do not look after themselves; they wander. As Isaiah said, "All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned, every one, to his own way" (Isaiah 53:6). Philip Keller, who kept sheep, told of one of his finest ewes who was forever restless and discontented — a "fence-crawler" who would push out through the fence onto barren ground, and worse, would teach the other sheep to follow her. We are much like that wandering sheep. But the wonder of the gospel is that the straying have come home: we have returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of our souls, the Good Shepherd, Jesus Christ, who proved His love in this, that "while we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8). The chapter that began with suffering ends in safety — the lost sheep gathered back to the Shepherd who bore their sins.

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