Peter wrote, “Having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth for a sincere brotherly love, love one another earnestly from a pure heart, since you have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding Word of God; for ‘All flesh is like grass and all its glory like the flower of grass. The grass withers and the flower falls, but the Word of the Lord remains forever.’ And this Word is the Good News that was preached to you” (1 Peter 1:22-25).
Dedication of oneself to Christ by obedience to the truth is beyond repentance. Repentance is a crucial part of coming to obedience to the truth, it is not obedience in itself. Many heretical teachings will teach this, saying that all you must do is to give your heart to Christ, but Peter speaks about something more.
A few sentences later, in 1 Peter 2:1, he tells them to “put away all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander.” In our focused passage, the addressees have already purified their souls by obedience to the truth, so if they still need to turn away, or repent from these sinful practices, how can they be saved? Romans 6:1-4 gives us the answer: “What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? We were buried therefore with Him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in the newness of life.”
Acts 2:38 reveals that the command of baptism is what saves us. Yes, repentance is necessary to be baptized, but in living life, repentance is something we must always be prepared to do so that we guard our own salvation, which can be lost as Peter’s was in Galatians 2:11.
“Having purified our souls” is speaking of baptism and through that dedication to a life in Christ, we reap the benefits of a sincere brotherly love. No longer do we seek the things of this world and this life, but we seek the imperishable. A Christian is identified by their character. The baptism itself without the resolve of the heart is nothing but a poor excuse for a bath. Hence children, who cannot understand, are not baptized as they do not understand.
In Matthew 6:19-21, Jesus explains: “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasures is, there your heart will be also.”
Peter uses this same idea when speaking of the grass from Isaiah 40:6, 8. Our treasure is elsewhere and we are laying it up. In heaven, nothing of this life will matter except how our spirit acted because the body will be gone, dead like the flower of the grass, only here for a fleeting time.
Children pluck the flower, they sniff the aroma, and then discard it because it withers, and is truly meaningless outside the moment. The children do not comprehend, but they seek to fulfill themselves in the moment, and to grow into adulthood. Peter uses this imagery summoned by these ideas in the next verses in 2:2: “Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up into salvation — if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.”
We, like children seeking to fulfill themselves and grow, should be doing just that spiritually through that sincere brotherly love, having a pure heart and having been born again in Christ Jesus. When we have tasted that goodness of the Lord, we then understand and want nothing of this world. And this word is the Good News that was preached to you (1 Peter 1:25b).
Lance Byers