Teaching Tuesday: 2nd Peter

Series: Through the Storm
Sermon: 2nd Peter (8.25.24)

Happy Tuesday, all.

God’s promises have been given to us - we’ve been saved - so we can “participate” in his “divine nature,” Peter says in this letter.

Here’s the full verse: Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature, having escaped the corruption in the world caused by evil desires. (2nd Peter 1:4)

And here’s the verse right before it: His divine power has given us everything we need for a godly life through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. (2nd Peter 1:3)

Some translations say we “share” in his divine nature.

So, through God’s divine power - his glory and his goodness - we have been saved so we can participate or share in his divine nature. What does it mean that saved believers are part of God’s nature?

As we come to know Christ, believers inherit God’s promises - we experience his moral excellence and glorious radiance. And his promises include our “participation in his divine nature,” our increasing likeness to God will be a gift we receive in full when Jesus returns and the world is fully remade.

As a result of our conversion to the faith - our belief and our acceptance of God’s saving grace - we have already been made righteous and are called to grow in discipleship of Jesus; that is, we are called to know him more and more fully, to become more and more like him. This process is called “sanctification.” The Christian life should never be in neutral gear, we should always be driving forward to the goal of Christlikeness.

But, it will not be until Jesus returns that we will be conformed fully and perfectly to the likeness of Christ. This truth is presented in 1 John 3:2:

Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. All who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.

We who are living the Jesus-filled life are being formed and will be formed.

Importantly, while Peter is saying believers will become like God, he does not say believers will become God. We will not become divine ourselves or share in the divine nature in every respect. The separation in nature and essence between God and humans will remain even after Christ’s return and the establishment of the “new heaven and new earth” (2nd Peter 3:13).

Members of God’s family will share in his divine nature in the sense that we will be morally perfected; we will know no sin, and therefore no death or sickness or sorrow.

What we must grasp is that while this coming full perfection will only be realized after the Parousia (Jesus’s second coming), we are even now being changed and bettered by God.

When we believed in Christ and were saved by his grace, we received the gift of the Holy Spirit and his work in our hearts empowers us to turn away from sin, to embrace and internalize the truths of scripture, and to navigate the narrow road of Christ-likeness.

We as Christians are becoming like God and will become like God because we have escaped “the corruption that is in the world caused by evil desires.”

This is similar to our understanding of our salvation and our place in God’s kingdom: it is both “already” and “not yet.” As saved believers, we are already participating in the Kingdom of God, but we await its full consummation at the end of history. Similarly, we have already escaped the world’s corruption because we belong to God, but the full realization of liberation will be ours when Jesus comes back.

As I said in Sunday’s sermon, the world we’re in right now is not the world we were made for.

Our happy moments are only a glimpse of the ceaseless happiness to come; our relational love, our romantic and brotherly loves are only a glimpse of the relational completeness God has in store for us; our church is only a glimpse of the full, majestic, glorious worship of millions of voices of believers singing praise to the one who saved us and made things perfectly, finally, fully, right.

I cannot wait for that choir. How about you?  

Know Him and make Him known!
- Pastor Brady