1 Peter

While it is easy to think that the Bible is old and outdated, the truth is that since God doesn’t change, and people don’t change, the Bible is timeless and therefore timely for everyone everywhere. In Peter’s day, like our own, the average person’s commitment to their version of spirituality was very shallow and nowhere … Read more

Christianity has never really been cool. The unpopularity of Christians in Peter’s day was due to the fact that their devotion to Jesus above everyone and everything else caused them to be viewed as subversives overturning long-held familial and cultural norms. Simply, once people became Christians, their lifestyle changed and they stopped worshiping the gods … Read more

Peter’s underlying concern was about what we today call tolerance, diversity, and religious pluralism that discriminates against Christianity in a way that is intolerant, not diverse, and religious persecution. Subsequently, 1-2 Peter, although a few thousand years old, are incredibly timely to our current culture in which Christians are welcome to love Jesus so long … Read more

Imagine you lived a few thousand years ago, hundreds of miles away from someone, and the only way to communicate with them was to sit down and write a letter, and then find someone to hand deliver it to them by walking or riding on the back of a beast for many days through rough … Read more

Peter’s two letters are a mere 166 verses. Although rather brief, they are power packed. The people he wrote to were living in a pagan city which meant that to live as a Christian made them the oddballs. Making matters worse, they were facing a host of troubles, trials, and temptations among uncertain days filled … Read more

“This epistle of Peter is one of the grandest of the New Testament, and it is the true, pure gospel. For Peter…inculcates the true doctrine of faith—how Christ has been given to us, who takes away our sins and saves us.” — Martin Luther In our day of short texts, spam emails, and social media … Read more

In argumentation, there is something called the burden of proof. Practically, this means that if someone presents a clear case, then the critic of that case has the burden of disproving it and dislodging it with a better case for another outcome. It is easy to criticize someone’s position, but unless you’ve got a better … Read more

At some point, every Christian is told that Jesus’ twelve disciples were uneducated simpletons, basically bumbling country bumpkins. It has been said so many times that hardly anyone seems to even question it anymore. The entire charge that Peter was uneducated hangs precariously on one verse of Scripture. It is helpful to note that the … Read more

For the average Bible reader, the authorship of 1 Peter seems easy enough. The letter opens saying it’s from “Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ”. However, some critics have said that it was impossible that Peter actually wrote 1-2 Peter and that this error of authorship undermines the credibility of these books of the Bible. … Read more

When I was a kid, we lived in a neighborhood that had some mean dogs. If you rode your bike near their house, the mean dogs would sprint at you barking loudly and bite your leg in hopes of pulling you off your bike. In the religious world, there are some very mean, nasty, scary … Read more