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Armed and Dangerous
Presenter: Larry Kirkpatrick
Location: Mentone Seventh-day Adventist Church, California USA
Delivery: 2006-10-14 23:30Z
Publication: GreatControversy.org 2006-10-14 23:30Z
Type: Sermon
URL: http://www.greatcontroversy.org/gco/ser/kir-xsufferings.php
Back to Jesus, always we go back to Jesus. And that’s just right too, because we’re not Jews, not Muslims, but Christians. A text:
Forasmuch then as Christ hath suffered for us in the flesh, arm yourselves likewise with the same mind: for he that hath suffered in the flesh hath ceased from sin; that he no longer should live the rest of his time in the flesh to the lusts of men, but to the will of God (1 Peter 4:1, 2).
We want to learn how Jesus suffered for us in the flesh, and be armed with the same mind. To that end, let’s explore this Bible book a bit.
Jesus’ Sufferings in 1 Peter
There are seven verses that speak of Christ’s suffering. Go to 1 Peter 1:11. Here we see that the special attention of the prophets, long before the cross, was on salvation. Long before the Scriptures we call the New Testament, the prophets had personal salvation in mind. Many of their prophesies were of the sufferings of Christ and of the glory that would follow them. Notice here that the sufferings or Christ are plural; this helps us understand that they were not limited to any single event, no matter how important any single event, even the cross, must be.
The next verses are in 1 Peter 2:19-24:
This is thankworthy, if a man for conscience toward God endure grief, suffering wrongfully. For what glory is it, if, when ye be buffeted for your faults, ye shall take it patiently? but if, when ye do well, and suffer for it, ye take it patiently, this is acceptable with God. For even hereunto were ye called: because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that ye should follow His steps: Who did no sin, neither was guile found in His mouth: Who, when He was reviled, reviled not again; when He suffered, He threatened not; but committed Himself to Him that judgeth righteously: Who His own self bare our sins in His own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed.
Suffering, in a world impacted by evil, need not be because of wrong. Good people suffer too, even when they have done no wrong. A man is made in God’s image; he is able to tell what is right and what is wrong. He has a conscience. God made us this way. Alone among all the created host, we were made in God’s image. Christ suffered—for us—and with a personal innocence. He did no sin, ever.
Christ suffered for us and that suffering for us is part of His example for us. If we do well, and suffer for it, we are right where Peter expects the Christian to be. The example Jesus left is no mere passive suffering, because “ye should follow in His steps.” Steps are taken while we are active, while we are on the move.
Christ’s suffering here is especially discussed from the standpoint of the cross, the primary model for suffering in this epistle. Peter sees Jesus’ sufferings as occurring over a lifetime of living in purity and culminating at the cross.
The next reference to Jesus’ suffering is found at 1 Peter 3:18. Christ suffered, the just for the unjust, for our sins. He was put to death in the flesh, with the purpose of “bringing us to God.” Verses 3:21 and 22 help us see that this too has focus at the cross and the following resurrection.
In 4:1 we have Jesus’ suffering for us in the flesh, with the remarkable statement that we are to arm ourselves with the same mind because the one who has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin. If we wish to cease from sin, then we want to pass through this suffering in the flesh. How is it that Jesus shows the way?
In 4:13 tells us that it is as we are partakers of the sufferings of Christ that we are to rejoice. When His glory shall be revealed we are to be glad, for then the Spirit and glory of God will rest upon us.
In 5:1 Peter reminds his hearers that he was a witness of the sufferings of Christ. He looks futureward to his being a partaker of that glory connected to the sufferings of Christ.
Thus we have noted all seven places in 1 Peter where the phrase “sufferings of Christ” or similar statements appear. What can we say then? That none of Jesus’ sufferings are on the basis of sin on His part, for He never sinned; that His sufferings are a part of the plan of redemption; that while His suffering climaxes at the cross, it appears to be more than just the the physical suffering surrounding His crucifixion; that, in fact, Christ’s sufferings, and our own, here, are the fruit of decisions made in the conflict between good and evil and the maintenance of a clear conscience; that Jesus suffered for us in the flesh; that we are to be partakers of His sufferings.
We will return to this but first, one other exploration of 1 Peter is in order.
Anticipated Christian Behavior in 1 Peter
We also want to take a careful look at what is the anticipated behavior of the Christian in 1 Peter? Let us go through again.
Our first stop this time is 1:5. We are kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation. Kept what? Kept in a continuous new birth or born-again experience. Our continued active exercise of God-empowered faith is all that keeps us there. But the important point is that we can keep there.
Now to verse 14. Here we find that the believer in Jesus is not fashioning himself according to his former ignorance. And we should make no mistake—the converted Christian is indeed fashioning himself. He is making his own choices, consciously or not emulating one of two patterns: Christ or Satan. He is on the pathway to holiness or to self destruction.
The seeds of destruction are in us; the Fall of Adam brought it. He could choose obedience or disobedience, but we are able to make more difficult problems for ourselves than we are able to correct, and when Adam disobeyed, he initiated a change in man’s very being. When a spacecraft reenters earth’s atmosphere, the speed it is traveling is so great, the friction with the atmosphere so severe, that an incredible amount of heat is generated. So spacecraft like the space shuttle or the soyuz have heat shields to protect against the heat that most of the vehicle is not designed to withstand. Without a heat shield, a spacecraft will burn up on reentry.
In sinning, Adam threw away his heatshield. Man, who is made out of dust, cast aside that which he needed to stand in the sight of God who is a consuming fire. God must either allow Adam to be destroyed or modify His interaction with man so as to accommodate his weakened state. So He sent prophets and angels. The point is that when Adam chose sin he introduced in himself and all his progeny a dramatic change of being; he changed his own ontology. Man, who God had intended from the beginning to cooperate in the classroom of life, now must engage even more intensely in receiving Heaven’s plan of redemption.
The slackers didn’t make it onto Noah’s ark before the flood, and they aren’t likely to find things any better now before the fire. Consequently, Satan’s masterpiece theological spiderwebs of today are finely woven, offering smooth, almost frictionless pathways to a supposed salvation. The raw power of God’s Word is smoothed over in anecdotes and stories so that congregations sleep with their eyes open under skillful tongued preachers. They exit the sanctuary blurrier than when they entered it. We dare not oil the ladder to heaven. We need to listen closely to passages like these and let God speak to us through them.
Look at verse 22. “Seeing ye have purified your souls in obeying the truth through the Spirit...” Here Peter indicates that these folk “have purified” their souls. What was involved? The Holy Spirit. Obedience. Power to obey. Truth to be obeyed. Notice here that the Bible offers us none of this nonsense talk about how we cannot obey. No, according to Peter, here are some who have obeyed, have purified their souls.
Follow me now to chapter 2:11. Peter pleads with his hearers to “abstain from fleshly lusts which war against the soul.” An impossibility? In many theological systems, yes. But in Peter’s? No. Far from it. Peter sees such Christianity as necessary if it would be authentic.
In 2:19 and 20 we see again what? Our experiencing apparently unjustified suffering is expected in God’s plan. Our response to such suffering can be acceptable to God. This does not mean that it earns us our own salvation, but that the gospel provides to those who will embrace it the power needed to live it. Suffering for conscience’s sake is part and parcel of the Christian experience. Without conscience you could have no Christianity. We need to treat our conscience with care. We are only checked out one conscience and it must be trained and last us through a whole life amid many alluring, scintillating baits dangled.
Chapter 3:4. There is a “hidden man of the heart,” inward, chosen character attributes that God highly values. There certainly is such a thing as character, and we certainly are granted an opportunity to grow it, weed it, nurture it, feed it, improve it, or to sell it out on the cheap.
In 3:14 we see that a help in enduring suffering is that we endure with the higher purpose. Suffering “for righteousness’ sake” being a follower “of that which is good” (verse 13) is quite possible.
Let’s look at another item, this one in 5:10: “But the God of all grace, who hath called us unto His eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after that ye have suffered a while, make you perfect, stablish, strengthen, settle you.” Suffering has a purpose, to perfect, establish, strengthen, and settle us. God is building something. The Carpenter is in!
We might have sampled several more texts just in 1 Peter. The point of these though has been to demonstrate that the author of 1 Peter anticipates that the Christian, with His suffering Savior Jesus as example, will be a complete overcomer. No, we are not in the beginning of our experience what we will be “after that ye have suffered a while.” And yet, there is a certain basic experience we want to obtain so that God can take us further.
Let’s return to our text in chapter four:
Same Mind, Same Flesh
Forasmuch then as Christ hath suffered for us in the flesh, arm yourselves likewise with the same mind: for he that hath suffered in the flesh hath ceased from sin; that he no longer should live the rest of his time in the flesh to the lusts of men, but to the will of God (1 Peter 4:1, 2).
We return now to our initial text. Notice that Christ did something for us and He did it in a certain place. His flesh. He suffered for us in His flesh. It does not say that He suffered for Himself in the flesh. Remember, Jesus was never guilty, never condemned on His own account. He never sinned, never came under the condemnation of the law for personal sin on His own behalf. Nor was the humanity He took—a humanity very, very much like our own—any more innately guilty than ours is. No man is born guilty, although we certainly are born impacted by sin. Jesus too, like every child of Adam, was born after humanity had been weakened by 4000 years of sin. The great law of heredity, operative for us, was operative for Him. No exceptions; no exemptions; no free passes.
The text says that Jesus suffered for us in the flesh, and that we therefore should arm ourselves with the same mind as Christ. Jesus’ life here is explicitly held out to us as an example of how to live so that you overcome in the flesh. But it is the next statement that is most difficult. “He that hath suffered in the flesh hath ceased from sin.”
Can this be true? After all, wouldn’t it be accurate to say of each of us here today that we have suffered in the flesh? Have we not, each and every one, in some measure, suffered in the flesh? Certainly, we respond. But then you have to come to the next part of the statement, for it says that if this is what one has done, that he has ceased from sin. So. All of us who have suffered in the flesh, have we ceased from sin? You see where this becomes very difficult.
But let’s get this clear; what mind did Jesus have while He endured suffering for us in the flesh? Because if we want to successfully echo Christ’s example of overcoming in our kind of flesh, we must arm ourselves with the same mind as Christ.
His is a mind that, although it never disobeyed or joined itself to disobedience, “learned obedience by the things which He suffered” (Hebrews 5:8). Here we must point out that all of us like sheep have gone astray, we have turned—all of us at some point—to our own way. We have all chosen to join ourself to, to own, to identify ourselves in character, with the fallen nature we were born into. Jesus never did this. His resistance was lifelong, and every detail of that mystery of His resistance especially as a child, we may never know. But we don’t need to know every detail. Every listener to this message today is responsible to live up to all the light available to us, and our God stands ready to help. Or we could put it this way: we are all invited by the Creator God to experience the joy of a pure conscience today. A clean conscience, or, a tainting by chosen sin and a feeling of guilt and contamination, a knowledge that we have stood with Satan, and but for God’s mercy would have been destroyed.
We see and hear it on the news; the crazed school shooters of innocents, or the young woman who disappears because someone who raped and murderd. We think how vile these people are. But were it not for God’s grace, were it for opportunity, don’t be so sure of yourself that you think that could not be you. Again, the elements of destruction are in us all. If we let it grow luxuriantly, we will all end there. Oh, our deceptions and our manifestations of evil may be more veiled, more elegant. But evil is evil. God is laboring through all His agencies to turn us from what we must become if we were only allowed time to become.
We are all trapped in the flesh of fallen humanity. Thus, we must fight, resist its clamors. It will pull, it will attract, it will scream “indulge me!” But still it remains true:
No man without his own consent can be overcome by Satan. The tempter has no power to control the will or to force the soul to sin. He may distress, but he cannot contaminate. He can cause agony, but not defilement (Ellen G. White, The Great Controversy, p. 510).
Does Satan have power to control your will? No. Does He have power to force you to sin? No. He does have power to distress you. He pushed your buttons for years, and he knows what has worked in the past in your case. That is a great military advantage he has when he tempts you. He knows exactly how to maximize the agony and the seduction that is in the temptation tailor-made for you. But he cannot contaminate, he cannot defile. And your advantage is that because your Jesus has left you an example of overcoming, and has urged you to call upon Him in the moment of need for His power, you can overcome. It is as if Jesus has come to you and put a telephone in your hand and said to you, “When you need help, just press this button and dial me at 911. I will respond with power to help you immediately.”
Yes, our advantage is our connection with Jesus. But we need to fill our minds with all of His will, let Him shape our hearts so that we desire the beauty of holiness all the time. That is when we will see His power most vividly and when we as a people will turn this world upside down again like the church has not turned it in 2000 years.
Jesus suffered for us in the humanity He bore. Included in that human flesh was a human brain, a mind operating in a few pounds of gray matter like our gray matter, one that worked the same way. Inspiration suggests that Jesus’ equipment was in no way different from our own. All that he did He did subject to the same working of brain chemistry, hormones, emotional responses, we are subject to.
There was a difference in the physical structures of the brain, for we have by repetition formed nerve pathways in our minds from having made choices to sin. Jesus never built even one such pathway. This is a difference between Christ and us and we cannot go around it. If this difference did not exist, we would not have a Savior. Jesus never sinned and because He never sinned, never joined Himself to Satan’s rebellion in any way, even momentarily, but always stood on God’s side of the question, He is the Champion of unselfish love.
The choice we must make in order to arm ourself with the same mind as Christ is found in our text. “That he no longer should live the rest of his time in the flesh to the lusts of men, but to the will of God.” You will notice immediately the similarity of this statement in 1 Peter 4:2 to the statement of Paul in romans 7:25: “So then with the mind I myself serve the law of God; but with the flesh the law of sin.” We may follow our lower, fleshly nature, or our higher, where the will, the conscience, the intellect function. With the mind, with the will we must choose to serve God.
Remember the texts we saw in 1 Peter that showed that suffering for doing right is the price for having a clean conscience. We saw that suffering can mean resisting internal pulls. That is what we must do. We must educate ourselves to do it consistently. This is what Jesus did. He resisted, all His life He resisted. All our life we have not resisted. But God delights in renewing us. He delights in changing us. He delights when we put our will on His side of the question. And that is what it takes. That is the suffering we have here, that is the mind of Christ. No matter the cost, resisting every pull to sin. When we have learned to persistently, relentlessly, unbendingly resist, then it will be true of us that we have suffered in the flesh, that we have ceased from sin.
That is the man who is armed with the mind of Christ, for His was a mind that always resisted and never sinned. Then we will be armed and dangerous. Dangerous to Satan, because we will be weapons of God for righteousness, living witnesses, living testimony to the power of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Conclusion
Peter wants you to know that you are arm-able, that a mind, an attitude like Christ’s, is available to you. He wants you to know that Jesus is our example, that he left us an example. The sufferings of Christ culminated at the cross where the Father accepted Him as an offering for us. There Jesus gave as gift His life for us. There His blood was spent for us. His sinless life was offered, a life, a character, equal to the law which was His own character as well. That law had been broken, that character had been charged to be defective and selfish. But Jesus showed this was not the case. He showed otherwise. He showed that the character of God is willing to suffer for righteousness’ sake, that to save a rebel race, the Father was willing to give to man both power and an example. He wants us to cease from sin, to stop hurting ourselves, and go onward to where He wants to take us.
First Peter shows how God wants to heal His people, to make them armed and dangerous to Satan, to use us in the great controversy war. Only people who choose His kingdom and embrace the cross and the life of the man of the cross will experience wholeness. This is what He holds out for me and for you. The precious gift can be ours through Jesus. God is always setting before us life and death, blessing and cursing, good or evil, and pleading that we choose life. Today is no different. Let Jesus be your Savior. Leave behind no opportunity. Train yourself to cease from sin, to in God’s power live up to all the expectation of 1 Peter. This is your blessing today. GCO
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