1 Peter 1:3-5 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ… The complete future salvation is both negative and positive. There is a grand indefiniteness which means comprehensiveness in the word. In its narrowest literal sense it means being made whole; in its wider signification it means being delivered from threatening perils, discomforts, and the like. On the positive side the word implies the bestowal of all true good. So what is ready to be revealed is, on the one hand, absolute emancipation from everything, be it sorrow, be it sin, be it ignorance, which is of the nature of darkness, and is to any part of the human sensibility a pain or evil. And on the other side, what waits to be revealed in us is the absolute fulness of all good of every sort which fits any part of a man's nature, and makes it feel blessed and at rest. For heart, and mind, and will, and taste, and intellect, and imagination, and the desire for society, and the desire for love, and the desire for progress, and the desire for change, and the desire for enterprise, and the desire for service, and all else that makes up human nature, the full salvation of the heavens has a corresponding gift. And, says Peter, it is all lying just on the other side of the curtain there. A curtain is a very thin thing, very easy to push aside; a finger's touch and it goes. And, as at some great civic pageant the preparations for tomorrow's show are carried on behind some interposing thin veil of canvas or the like, where we can hear the hammers at work, and catch a light now and then that tells of preparing glories, so, on the other side of the thin partition, through which there come furtive gleams and sounds that tell what is going on, the inheritance is being prepared for the great unveiling. It is ready to be revealed, but the universe is not ready for the revelation. That unseen order of things has present existence. All that is "future" about it is its manifestation. Unseen, it lies around this little visible life. A touch, a crumb of bread in your windpipe, a clot of blood as big as a pin's head on your brain, and the future, as we call it foolishly, proves itself the present, the all-encircling. There is but a thin veil between us and it. It is ready to be revealed when He puts out His hand and draws back the curtain for us one by one, as He will at the last for a universe. (A. Maclaren, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which according to his abundant mercy hath begotten us again unto a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, |
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