1 Peter 1:13-16 Why gird up the loins of your mind, be sober… What, then, is the sort of holiness to which He who is holy in calling us, does in fact call us? I. Here, negatively, LET US NOTE WHAT IT IS NOT AND CANNOT BE. 1. For one thing, it clearly is not, it cannot be, mere innocence, the innocence of one ignorant of evil, or of one who knows evil only by report, or of one who knows it only as a possibility, by a prohibitory enactment with a penalty attached to it. 2. Neither is it enough that it should be a holiness consisting merely of enforced abstinence from evil, or of such outward compliance with good as a sense of dire necessity and a dread of unpleasant consequences may produce. 3. Nor even can it be such painful discipline of self-restraint, self-denial, self-mortification, as may spring from better and more respectable motives — sometimes from motives of deep religious earnest ness. 4. For, as to its essential character, our holiness, if it is to be like the holiness of God, must, at the very outset, pass out of the region of the merely negative, which implies a continual struggle to dethrone a tyrant, into the region of the positive, which is realised in our acknowledgment of Him who buys us to be His freedmen. 5. For, finally, it is indeed now a new influence, a fresh and new power. II. THE POSITIVE ASPECT OF THE GRACE IN QUESTION — how, in that changed aspect of affairs, with our new mind towards God, as connected with His new mind towards us, may His holiness thus purely and simply bear upon us? How otherwise than by our being made partakers of His holiness, in such a sense and to such an effect that we do now really become "as God, knowing good and evil"? We know evil as God knows it; because we know good as God knows it. For we are partakers of "the Divine nature," through our faith in "God's exceeding great and precious promises" (2 Peter 1:4). We are thus "partakers of His holiness" (Hebrews 12:10). (R. S. Candlish, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: Wherefore gird up the loins of your mind, be sober, and hope to the end for the grace that is to be brought unto you at the revelation of Jesus Christ; |
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