Grace and Peace
This is the first of a two-part introduction to 1 Peter, taken up under the title “Grace and Peace.” Peter’s letter, roughly A.D. 64, was scribed by Silvanus — that is, Silas, under his fuller name — and was written to give comfort to suffering saints on the eve of more particular and regional persecution than the church had yet known. Persecution itself was nothing new; it had belonged to the church’s testimony from the very beginning, seen already in Stephen’s martyrdom and the beating of Peter and John for preaching in Christ’s name. But as Peter writes, the darkening clouds of a fiercer persecution — the horrific days of Nero, centered on Rome but felt throughout the empire — are visibly mounting on the horizon.
Yet before Peter ever calls believers to stand firm in a hostile world, which he does throughout this letter, he first assures them that they already stand secure in the sovereign grace of the triune God. Verses 1 and 2 are the opening salutation — who is writing, and to whom — and in it Peter anchors his suffering audience not in the fact that they are persecuted, but in their God-given identity. This is not incidental to the letter; it is its very starting point, and it carries a pastoral wisdom drawn from Peter’s own experience of Christ’s teaching and correction.
“Master, Carest Thou Not That We Perish?”
That cry — “Master, carest thou not that we perish?” (Mark 4:38) — came from the disciples themselves, fishermen by trade, driven by the storm past the limit of their own skill and experience, until even they were forced to cry out from the ship while the Lord slept in the stern. It is very likely, from the internal evidence of Mark’s Gospel, that this account is substantially Peter’s own. What stands out is that the disciples were brought, not to a place of calm reflection, but to a faithless, horrified cry — and Christ’s rebuke exposed that they had a prescription and a protocol of faith they had set aside in the hour that mattered most.
Suffering and trial are not first and primarily a time for emotional processing, but a time to receive command and remember what has already been given. In any emergency, the reasonable course is to execute the instruction that has been given beforehand, not to fall to pieces and act on impulse; a ship’s crew that abandons its prescribed protocol in a casualty event can cost the lives of everyone aboard. Scripture calls believers to exactly that kind of discipline — a heart convinced, when the soul gives way and we are brought to the end of ourselves, that Christ alone is our hope and stay, and that there is sufficient grace within the boat, so to speak, to relieve what the storm outside cannot.
This is precisely where 1 Peter is headed. The very first imperative of the letter comes in chapter 1, verse 13: “Wherefore gird up the loins of your mind, be sober, and hope to the end for the grace that is to be brought unto you at the revelation of Jesus Christ.” Throughout the letter, believers are taught how to think, how to respond, and how to have their attitude renewed by the expectations of Scripture, so that in the day of trial they do not react as blind creatures ignorant of the light shed upon their circumstances, but as those who, like Peter looking up from the water, fix their eyes on the One who has power both to stand upon the waves Himself and to give grace that His people may stand upon them too.
The alternative is Israel in the wilderness: those bitten by fiery serpents who trusted their own eyesight to navigate away from danger died, while those who looked in faith to the brazen serpent God provided were healed (Numbers 21:8–9) — a picture Christ Himself would later apply to His own being lifted up (John 3:14–15). Left to ourselves, we would sink beneath the waves; but grace has snatched us up by a mighty arm beyond ourselves, so that our life need not be a continual sinking, but a continuous treading of the enemy underfoot — for “the God of peace shall bruise Satan under your feet shortly” (Romans 16:20). The remedy for the stings of this life is not found by staring at the sting; it is found by looking up.
Grace Before Command
As this letter is studied, one thing deserves particular attention: Peter, writing to persecuted saints, does not begin with persecution. He begins with God. And before he addresses what believers are facing, he anchors their reality not in their circumstances but in who they are by grace — because who a man is by grace matters infinitely more to the reality he lives than the circumstances he walks through. A soldier can walk across the same battlefield as raw cannon fodder, or as one standing behind a commander who has already won the war; a new recruit and the academy’s own commandant walk the same halls very differently. If believers have been made, in Christ, a people upheld by the word of God’s power, given exceeding great and precious promises that are all “yea, and Amen” in Him (2 Corinthians 1:20), never left nor forsaken (Hebrews 13:5), and assured that “all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28), then identity itself changes the reality of the trial — even though the trial itself does not disappear. Going through the flood is a different thing for an antediluvian villager than for Noah; going through the fire is a different thing for Nebuchadnezzar’s other prisoners than for Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.
An Apostle Chosen, Not Self-Appointed
“Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ” — the office itself carries the weight of one sent by Christ. Peter did not march himself into the Twelve; he was chosen, as Christ told all the apostles: “Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye should go and bring forth fruit… that whatsoever ye shall ask of the Father in my name, he may give it you” (John 15:16), and, in the high priestly prayer, “As thou hast sent me into the world, even so have I also sent them into the world” (John 17:18). The apostles’ defining mark, as Peter himself would say when a replacement for Judas was sought, was to have companied with the Lord “beginning from the baptism of John, unto that same day that he was taken up” and to be “a witness with us of his resurrection” (Acts 1:21–22). Paul, writing later of his own apostleship, could say the same signs had been wrought among his hearers “in all patience, in signs, and wonders, and mighty deeds” (2 Corinthians 12:12) — signs that authenticated the apostles’ unique work of laying the church’s foundation, “built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone” (Ephesians 2:19–21). Peter himself would later acknowledge that even in Paul’s writings there were things hard to understand, which the unlearned and unstable would wrest, “as they do also the other scriptures” (2 Peter 3:16) — Peter’s own testimony that Paul’s letters already stood as Scripture alongside the rest.
Among the Twelve, Peter is consistently named first in every listing of the apostles (Matthew 10, Mark 3, Luke 6, Acts 1), given a place as something of a first among equals, with a particular summons to strengthen the others. Within the Twelve, a further three — Peter, James, and John — were drawn into a closer communion still, alone present at the Mount of Transfiguration. This is not favoritism in the sense of unfairness; it is the sovereign wisdom of a God who gives greater communion, and greater burdens, to those He will use in a particular way, and withholds neither the sweetness nor the suffering that comes with it. Paul’s own thorn in the flesh, given “lest he should be exalted above measure” after his revelations (2 Corinthians 12:7), and the wildly different paths of Peter, James, and John — leadership and denial for Peter, an early martyrdom for James, and a long, lonely exile on Patmos for John, “the disciple whom Jesus loved” — are all the unraveling, hour by hour, of the same sovereign wisdom, not coincidence.
Elect Exiles: Strangers Scattered
Peter addresses his letter “to the strangers scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia” — a phrase better rendered, and often translated, “elect exiles.” The word for “elect” stands, in the Greek text, at the very front of the sentence in verse 1, tied directly to the scattered strangers, before Peter ever unfolds its meaning further in verse 2. It is a word meaning chosen, picked out — God’s own selection, by which these particular believers, in this particular hour, under this particular persecution, were brought to salvation through Christ. They are not here by accident. Peter opens without hesitation or qualification into the doctrine of sovereign election as a truth already taught by the apostles who laid the foundation of the church — a doctrine that did not begin with Calvin, nor even with Augustine in the fifth century, but stands plainly in Paul’s own writing in Romans 9, Romans 10, Ephesians 1, and John 6, and here, just as plainly, in Peter’s own hand. The choice of God upon a believer’s life does not end with Christ’s choosing of His apostles as disciples; it is the same sovereign grace and mercy that reaches every one of His people, without which their own feet would have carried them into rebellion against God all their days.
The word rendered “strangers” describes one who comes from a foreign country to reside alongside the natives of another land — a sojourner, a foreigner dwelling in the midst of a people not his own. Believers scattered through Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia are, in exactly that sense, Israelites in exile in Babylon all over again — earthly in their present residence, but heavenly in their origin and citizenship, pilgrims and strangers seeking a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God, homesick for the day when they shall see Christ as He is.
Scattered by Providence, Not by Accident
There is a quiet beauty in Peter simply naming the regions. From the far north to the west, sweeping across the whole of Asia Minor — hundreds of miles from Judea — there stood, by roughly the 60s A.D., churches of the Lord Jesus Christ scattered across the entire region, only some three decades removed from the cross. That itself is a quiet testimony to the triumph of the gospel: persecution did not halt its advance, because Christ reigns regardless of who sits as Caesar. What looked, from the ground, like the church being scattered was in fact the wisdom of God’s providence, not His absence — the same pattern seen at Pentecost, when thousands were added to the church in Jerusalem, and then, when persecution came upon the death of Stephen and Saul’s threatenings, the church was driven outward like embers scattered from a fire, catching and spreading exactly where God had appointed His witnesses to go.
Each of the named regions carries its own thread of the larger pattern. Pontus and Cappadocia are named among those present at Pentecost itself, hearing the gospel “in our own tongue, wherein we were born” (Acts 2:8–10); Aquila, a Jew of Pontus, and his wife Priscilla later labored alongside Paul in Corinth and Ephesus (Acts 18:1–2, 18–19). Galatia, familiar from Paul’s own epistle to the churches there, was a crossroads of cultures — Celtic tribes settled among the older population — that made it fertile ground for the gospel but also fertile ground for the very error Paul had to confront. Asia, in the west, saw the bulk of Paul’s third missionary journey. Bithynia is mentioned nowhere else in the New Testament except Acts 16:7, where the Holy Spirit expressly forbade Paul from entering it on his second missionary journey — and yet, by the time Peter writes, there is a church there, planted and tended by another hand than Paul’s.
Christ’s enemies may scatter the church at times, and it may feel, from within the trial, like being overwhelmed by a flood. But all the combined enemies of the gospel will always fail to stop its promised advance, because He who promised is faithful — and though the church is geographically scattered, the apostles laid one truth for it all: one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one body, to be seen in full only when the whole church gathers at last around the throne of the Lamb.
Looking Ahead to Part Two
Having established, in these first two verses, that Peter roots his suffering readers’ identity in the sovereign grace of God rather than in their circumstances, the second part of this introduction takes up the Trinitarian shape of that identity in verse 2 itself — election of the Father, sanctification of the Spirit, and the sprinkling of the blood of Christ — a subject that, in its own right, deserves direct and unhurried treatment.