Peter

This blog is many things, but one of them is a kind of commonplace book where I can jot things I want to find later, but done in a public blog because the things I want to find later may help others too.

So often, when you read a commentary on part of the Bible you're studying, you have pages and pages of material but the commentator doesn't seem to be puzzling over the same details of the passage as you are.

How refreshing when the commentator asks exactly the questions you were asking, and has some very sensible things to say.

Ed Clowney again:

Peter does not ask us to view suffering as inevitable in the world under the curse. He does not ask for stoic resignation. A life of suffering is our calling, not our fate. It is our calling just because we are God’s people. It is our calling because it was Christ’s calling. He calls his disciples to follow him. (Page 117, Clowney, The Message of 1 Peter)

Ed Clowney makes a brilliant comment on 1 Peter 2:18-20. Peter is teaching slaves how to react when they are punished, or suffer, for no fault of their own. Indeed, they may be suffering because they have done something good. Clowney says this:

I've long found 1 Peter 3:19-22 really hard to understand. Much attention gets given to questions like who the spirits in prison are and so on. However my concern is to understand Peter's flow of thought throughout 1 Peter 3:18-22. 3:18 would flow nicely into 4:1 (“For Christ also suffered once for sins… made alive in the Spirit. Since therefore Christ suffered in the flesh, arm yourselves also with the same attitude.”), so why does Peter insert 3:19-22 in between here?

I’m looking again at sermon I gave a little while ago on 2 Peter 1:12-21.

What I’m noticing was the careful precision with which Peter describes the inspiration of the OT (prophets) in verse 20.

Thanks to Chris Green and Dick Lucas in their BST commentary on 2 Peter for the following paragraph. 2 Peter 2 really is frighteningly contemporary in the scenario it describes.

Having flow charted 2 Peter, the main points stand out quite clearly from the subordinate ones.

Again – just in case this is helpful for anyone, here are two summaries of 2 Peter.

Summary

I’m doing some study of 2 Peter, and have prepared for myself a flow diagram of the English text. For those not familiar with flow diagrams, the idea is that the text is laid out to show the grammatical structure. Main clauses are placed against the left hand margin, and all dependent clauses are indented. Where it makes sense to do so, those dependent clauses are indented so as to place them directly beneath the word they depend on.