Above all, keep loving one another earnestly, since love covers a multitude of sins. Show hospitality to one another without grumbling. As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another, as good stewards of God's varied grace: whoever speaks, as one who speaks oracles of God; whoever serves, as one who serves by the strength that God supplies—in order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ.
To him belong glory and dominion forever and ever. We need to do some work on a tricky phrase in verse 7 that is apt to trip up the modern reader, who is likely to miss what Peter is saying due to our perspective from where we stand in history versus where his original audience stood.
One of the biggest mistakes that you can make in interpreting the Bible is to misunderstand a reference relative to time. This is one of those texts where our first instinct as modern readers with all of the assumptions that go with that perspective probably misleads us. Woods writes,. It should be remembered that these words of the apostle were written on the eve of the destruction of the Jewish State.
Already terminated as a system of acceptable worship, its form and ceremonies had persisted through the efforts of unbelieving Jews who had desperately resisted the march of Christianity. Peter deliberately put a time indicator in his prophecy.
There is going to be upheaval and death—the end of one age and the beginning of another. In light of that, let me teach you how to live. The way that Peters sets it up in this section, verse 7 and verse 11 function like bookends on the text, holding up the practical instruction in the middle. That aim is the master key to the whole text, and it reads like this, verse 11,. Ok, now listen, friends: There is nothing that could be more cosmically significant, more massive, and of greater import than this goal.
