1 Peter, 1:10-12
Vern Peterman · Oct 22, 2006
1 & 2 Peter (2006-07), No. 04
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://www.hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/492605367472

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

OK, I want to say a few things, cover a few things before we get to the printed handout here. And one of those is Marilyn, who I know isn't here, so I'll have to catch up with her. Marilyn asked the question, how many in a legion? And I wasn't quite sure exactly what number to give her, although I knew it numbered well into the thousands. And one of the reasons why it's a difficult figure to give exactly is because it varied.

In my reading through some of the Roman military historians and that kind of thing, 5,500 by one Roman military historians count. 5,500. I've seen also numbers up to 7,000. So a variety of numbers. But anyway, 5,500 to 7,000 is the range. Quite a few soldiers in one legion. Now that was one. The other thing, I'll go through a set of slides here.

We've been going through first Cappadocia. Remember those were the houses that were carved out of rock. And then we had Asia here and a question that Doug brought up is, you got a little bit of a confusion because Asia is the west end region of what is now Turkey. And the name was also used for that whole large peninsula.

So a bit of a confusion there, but oh well. One of the other questions that came up, Marilyn, this is addressing some of your questions last week. You had a question about Legion and we said about 5,500 to 7,000 soldiers in the Legion. This is a geologic plate map. How many of you heard of the idea of plate tectonics or the idea that there's these big plates? Yeah, Norm? You've heard of them, okay, all right. On the earth, right. Plate tectonics, you'll have different land masses that are on plates with contact lines between them.

It turns out that what is now Turkey is a meeting point between several different plates. That's why it's all chewed up. We'll take a look at that in a little bit here. The Arabian plate for example is where Saudi Arabia is. That's one of the reasons why it has the oil that it does because it's got this rolling, topography underneath the ground and each of those high points catches oil. At any rate, so you've got these different plates.

Turkey you see is squished and crunched between those and hence a lot of it is mountainous. It's a little harder to see than I had expected but anyway, what you see is there's a grassy slope and all of a sudden a vertical jump a few feet tall. That vertical jump was just one earthquake movement, just boom, like this. And so it gives you an idea. Turkey is a place where once those earthquake movements happen, it can create huge dislocations vertically and horizontally all at once. And this is one where it had moved with a vertical movement and left a few feet of raw earth on one side.

To give you some comparison, here's California laid on its side in the San Andreas Fault. Basically runs the length of California up along the coast up till close to the northern end there near Eureka. Turkey has a fault that has the same, it's called strike-slip movement, and even in the same direction and about the same length. So they get their share of jitters as well.

Here is showing some of the mountains. I couldn't find one, Maryland, that actually just marked the mountain ranges. So I wasn't able to find that. I'll keep an eye out for it. But this shows where some of the mountains are located and except for some of the central areas that you'll see there, mountains are in view pretty close to everywhere.

Here is a satellite photo at a time when clouds are minimal and you can see a lot of the coastal areas and some of the mountain ranges and then islands where it breaks off between Turkey and Greece. You can see a lot of the broken up topography. Tom. Yes, yes. That's a reflection off the ocean waters.

This is another one that shows mountains and of course it's bigger scale, but you can see here's the Middle East and Turkey is on one end of just a long chain of mountains that runs through that area and it's part of the continental crunch. Some of the mountains, the highest ones you'll see around in Ararat, where you're looking at elevations upwards of what we have here. Pardon? Oh yeah, that's up there. I think my recollection is 16 to 17,000 feet. So it's up there. It's higher than anything we've got here. However, that's not typical, but they get as high as that.

Here is Roman roads, AD 14. So this would have been during the time when Christ walked the earth, but before he started his ministry. Now, this is AD 14. You see him crossing Turkey. The Romans, if the soldiers were not fighting, they had them building roads. And I mean, they really had them building roads. So this is fairly early in the Roman empire. and there were Roman roads crisscrossing areas through what is now Turkey.

By the time the Roman Empire was finally falling apart, they had enough roads built by the Romans by hand, no earth-moving machinery, by hand to go two times around the globe. Over 50,000 miles of hand-built Roman roads. Their design was you dig down several feet, You fill in with sand and then coarser rock and then slabs of rock up at the top. And that's where you build over 50,000 miles of roadway by hand. So they worked hard.

Tom. Sure, and what would happen is you'd find some of them that would head off and the Romans would not hold the territory, but they would build the road for military purposes. In other words, they'd say, we'll build a road in here and have this in here for military purposes, but we're not going to try to hold the territory. So real interesting. From time to time they would do that. You can see it would make some kind of sense there near the Rock of Gibraltar, right at the western mouth of the sea.

Even if they didn't hold the territory to be able to move troops and then go across the strait, was something valuable to them from a military standpoint. One other thing about the military. There was no division, Army, Navy, you know, especially not Air Force, but there wasn't a division. So someone who was a soldier may well just go transition from a land troop right into the ship warfare.

Yeah, Doug? Oh yes, some of the roads are still there today, still used. Some of them are used as they were done by the Romans. Some of them were used and just simply paved over. Here's an example off to the side there. I think that one, I'm not sure, I think that one is the one that heads into Rome that Paul would have taken. I know I've got a picture of it, I'm just not quite sure if that's the right one. that Paul would have taken when he landed at the coast and then they took him into Rome, as you find towards the end of Acts, Acts chapter 28. So fascinating, by the century right after the New Testament era, the Romans had gone up into Britain and all the way down to what is now Kuwait, the Persian Gulf. So that was their furthest extent of capture.

Yeah, chariots, they'd have troop carriers. Another reason for having these roads is some of their military machinery. The things designed for battering, you know, battering rams, catapults, things of that sort. Oh yeah, obviously the public used it for various personal and commercial purposes. And it also served a good way to get things back and forth in terms of spreading the gospel. But the roads were primarily, in Rome's mind, military.

Here is one of the things typical of the area all around, in the area that Peter was writing to, and that is lots of sheep herding. And the sheep, unlike ours, which are typically just all white and selected, these are various colors. And they would have certain ones of them that would be even famous for, you know, this one is an area where they raise a lot of black sheep or something of that sort. Yeah.

The Roman soldiers themselves did the road building work. What's real interesting is slave labor was a secondary thing in the Roman military. They did use it in some places. Paul talked about, for example, clearing the way for the gospel. The word that he used there was a word where they did hire slaves for clearing things out for military approaches. So there were places where the military uses slaves and they captured slaves, but had slaves handed off. Basically, it was an interesting thing. There were certainly lots of slaves in the empire, but the soldiers were the ones who did the hard work of putting in the roads.

Really kind of astounding. Here's another piece of roadway, and by the way, this one, you'll notice in the middle on the lower left, notice the wheel ruts. They actually had wheels going up and down them, hard wheels on the roadways, enough to create ruts in stone. Kind of astounding. It also tells you the length of time that they did it.

Yeah, Tom? Yeah, pretty close. Pretty close. Here's another shot here with a little bit of cloud cover. But similar idea. You get some of the mountain perspective. The other thing you'll see is more moisture along the coastal areas. Greener along the coastal areas. Pretty in some of that stuff. Here's one of the mountain areas. Beautiful scenery there. Rivers coming out, creeks. Here's a little village up in one of the mountain areas. Some really beautiful areas. Here's an area where again the sheep herding going on. This one I don't believe is a Roman road. I see some dirt or something on it so this is just another rural area.

There's all kinds of different mining and including the material that they, you've heard of these Meerschaum pipes, you know, and of course they use it for carving all kinds of things in those days. And there's lots of other metal type minerals, you know, iron, gold, lead, copper. And so what you find a lot in that area during biblical times, was smelting operations right near the mines.

You asked earlier about the slave labor and the roads. Interestingly, the Roman soldiers did that work. The mine work was often done by slaves and the slaves who worked in the mines had the toughest jobs, generally speaking, of any of the slaves. Hard work, not much in the way of machinery, very dangerous, die young.

That's quite often the pattern. But they did the smelting right there because hauling ore some long distance was not anything that made any sense in those days. So smelting was frequently done right near the mine openings. What they would do is they'd have this charcoal oven down in the ground there with a clay lining. Then they would have, you see these goatskin bellows. They'd take goatskin and tie up the the feet on it and use that as a bellows. You'd have several guys sitting there pumping these bellows in order to blow on there and get the heat up on these charcoal ovens. That's how they do their smelting. You have the ore and charcoal mixture there and then you could drop out the various ores and metals out of those ores. So here's what one looked like built up, and they just take a goatskin and tie various ends up so that they could do that.

And when you would pump it, it would make a sound. Okay. So when Paul talked about being puffed up, because that was the sound that it made. So that was, you're talking about somebody being puffed up. That was the word. It was also used for making butter. They'd use it for churns. So, real interesting. They're creative and resourceful people. So, anyway, it gives you some idea of what the lifestyle was there.

All right, let's grab this. Grab your paper. Before we turn to it, one item to bring to your attention. Not in here. As we go into this passage, keep this in mind. The people of the time, with rare exception, the people of the time looked to and valued things that were old and traditional. Something that had longevity was respected. more than something that was new. An exception to that would be like in Athens where they were looking for some new philosophy or something of that sort. But the general pattern among the cultures was something old and traditional.

Another thing of course was people had their various kinds of pagan religions. And so people expected to be able to appeal to different gods and special angels and all sorts of spiritual creatures and make various spiritual appeals. So think of what it's like for people who then become Christians.

What, you've got this new thing that you're talking about? How well does that go over? Not so good, right? Now, here's something else. He says, you don't believe in all these gods and you don't appeal to the angels. What's the matter with you? And so the people, you're a Christian. I mean, you must be nuts.

Here's the other problem, is everybody in the society was expected to conform to kind of within the societal range. And that if you didn't do what everybody else was doing, kind of within the range of what everybody else was expected to do, that then the gods would get mad. And then you'd have earthquakes and bad storms and lack of rain and things like that. And so you can imagine if anything bad happened, what would they think about the Christians? Not the Christians' fault, because the Christians made the gods mad.

That's why we've got a problem. So it's Christians. So Peter is not writing in a vacuum. He's writing to people who are in the midst of this kind of culture tension. So take note of the things he talks to them about. Let's take a look at the first portion there.

I call it, Prophets, the Messiah, the Holy Spirit, angels and you. The prophets Peter wrote about were the Old Testament prophets. These are not the New Testament prophets that you find mentioned in, for example, Ephesians spoke three times of apostles and prophets. These prophets are the ones that talked about Christ's first and second coming. The next thing is we have mention of the Messiah. The prophets foretold repeatedly about the coming of the Messiah.

We say Messiah, the Hebrew would be Hamashiach. And it just means anointed. And then of course the Greek is Christos and it means anointed. And what is not always brought out in our English translations, I would say frequently it's dropped out, is that the definite article to the Jewish ear The definite article focuses not just on Christ as, you know, that's kind of almost his name, but the Christ means the Messiah, the Messiah, the specific one. And so we're going to find places where that shows up here, and we'll try to make note of it.

Ephesians 1.10. For example, it's the first time out of 23 times in the book of Ephesians where there's a definite article in front of Christ. THE Christ. And so the Jewish person would hear that and they're thinking THE Messiah. It's specific to this is the Messiah foretold. This is the one promise to us. Here's Matthew 16, 15 through 17 and 20.

Jesus said to them, that's the disciples, who do you say that I am? Simon Peter answered, you are the Christ. Definite article. You are the Messiah. You are the Anointed One. In Hebrew it would have been, you are the Hamashiach, who proceeds from the Father. The Son of the Living God. Then He, Jesus, this is verse 20, warned the disciples they should tell no one that He was the Christ. The Messiah.

The next thing we point out is Peter is going to talk about the Holy Spirit. Peter made it clear in both 1 and 2 Peter that the Holy Spirit was instrumental in conveying the Gospel and producing Scripture. It's interesting, Peter, for writing a couple of relatively short letters, He makes a point of this. He brings out, and we'll even see it in the passage here this morning, the Holy Spirit is the one who inspires Scripture. The Holy Spirit is the one who speaks through the authors of Scripture.

In John 15, 26 and 27, when the Helper comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, that is the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father. He will testify about me. It is the Holy Spirit's role to testify about Jesus Christ. Right below that, John 16, 13-15, but when He, the Spirit of truth comes, He will guide you into all the truth. In the beginning of verse 14, He will glorify Me. Notice the repeated emphasis. The Holy Spirit keeps pointing to Christ. Second page. Angels.

Now why would Peter talk about angels? Remember what we just talked about in the culture? Why would he bring up angels? People tend to put the angels in a position that they don't have, they tend to give them powers or roles. The scripture doesn't. And it was very common in the culture in which Peter was writing. It was very common in the culture for people to appeal to angels, even among the Jews, to appeal to angels and even have special angel amulets. They'd buy special little writings in the marketplaces that had some magic ability to call the angels to help. They had names for angels that you and I never heard of. Othniel, you know, is an example one of them that they had. Who ever heard of Othniel? But that's one of them.

So David would appeal to angels. So what's Peter doing? Peter is now going to talk about angels, and so he's going to make spiritual connection with them, but he's not going to just simply bring in the pagan and cultural understanding, he's going to bring in the biblical understanding. Yes? No, and it's interesting.

The angels are often figured as female, and it seems more of a kind of a cultural syncopation. During New Testament times, they were more looked upon as male. And again, there's no biblical basis for it. It is more kind of, what are people thinking? Is there a gender orientation? Biblically, what does the Lord say? He's responding to questions about the resurrection and divorce and things like that. He says, we'll be as the angels in heaven, genderless.

They do have names like Michael. The only two angels in scripture that are given a name are Michael and Gabriel. And those are names we typically associate with masculine. I would say one other thing, and that is that angels where they are recognized as angels are not recognized as wimps. that angels where they are seen as angels are quite often looked upon as powerful.

They go through Revelation, strong angels is a repeated word pair. So, real interesting. Not given a gender, but strength and power seem to be something that comes across pretty consistently. Do you think they look like Atlas as well? Well, as far as how they look, that's a tougher thing because I'm not sure we have that. What we do have is we have repeated pictures of people overwhelmed when they see an angel. What was the response of the shepherds when the angels showed up? This is scary. At two times in Revelation, John mistakenly began worshiping an angel. And in each instance the angel said, nope, not me.

So the overwhelming power is what hits the human beings who see them and recognize them as angels. That's the way it comes across. some kind of meek, you know, sort of a cherub, little fat baby kind of appearance, or some feminine appearance. It doesn't appear to be the picture, although gender is definitely something that the Lord designed into who they are.

The last thing here, we have these angels. God made angels to be a different category of spiritual being. What's interesting, is angels, and at one point in time we're given an opportunity to choose against the Lord, that opportunity, that window seems to be closed from anything we can tell, and there doesn't appear to be any opportunity for salvation.

We mentioned when we went through Ephesians chapter 3, in verse 10 here, so that the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known through the church to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. God's wisdom is being revealed to these angelic beings through us. Isn't that wild? So you are angel college this morning. You are the ones that the angels look to, to learn about God's wisdom, God's character. Isn't that something?

That is phenomenal. What is interesting is they have personal contact with God, but it is only through us that they get to see, for example, about God's grace. Because they don't have a plan of salvation. So God's grace is seen, even though they're right in heaven's throne room, God's grace is seen through us. Really amazing. Yeah.

It does not appear, let's put it this way, it does not appear that angels are now in a place of making a choice to follow the Lord or not. And the reason I say that is because any reference to their making a contrary choice seems to be in the past from anything that's recorded. There's a reference in Revelation 12 indicating that a third of the angels chose to be with Satan, on Satan's side. So it appears to be angels were created a fixed number. It appears to be that the number who have fallen away is now a fixed number.

There was apparently a window of contrary choice that included the reason for Satan having a presence in the garden. That window appears to be closed. We don't have lots of information on it. Pardon? Yeah, Bud's saying the angels have an eternal nature and basically these angels, those who choose to be with the Lord, will be with the Lord.

Those who have chosen against the Lord appear to be now in two places. One in what is called in Revelation the Abyssos, the Abyss. Tartarus is another name that we'll see as we go through here. And the other is of course those who are here on earth and the name often applied to them is demons. So fallen angels having the form of demons here on earth and those that are in the abyss.

And we'll look later on as we go through this, there is a reason why the difference. And we'll take a look at why the difference in two different categories. Okay, now the next one is you. Peter will write to you, but you, to you and to you. So he is very definitely including them in the loop on this. Okay.

Verses 10 and 11, as to this salvation, the prophets who prophesied of the grace that would come to you made careful searches and inquiries, seeking to know what person or time the Spirit of Christ within them was indicating as he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the glories to follow. So Peter had written earlier about the salvation of the believers. That's as to this salvation that he described before. That's what he's referring to here. And what about them?

The Old Testament era prophets included the authors of the books by each of their names. This is Isaiah, like we're studying in the main service, Jeremiah, all the way to Malachi. There are also other Old Testament prophets who don't have books named after them. And those would include, for example, Elijah, Elisha, Nathan, who was a court prophet for David. So there are other prophets aside those that have a book named after them. But all these prophets had a part in not only ministering in their own time, but foretelling into future events. Now, think back now of what the people would think when these people became believers, Christians. Now you've come up with something new.

What, you're rejecting all of our old stuff? So what's Peter telling them? Hey, the prophets of old that talked about Christ, the one you believe in, they spoke of Him long ago. So He's telling them, you've got some history too here. There's some longevity here.

Don't think that you're coming up with just some upstart new thing. This is something the prophets told about centuries ago, many centuries ago. So it isn't just some new invention. This isn't some fly-by-night religion. Then, it appears that these prophets, even though acting as spokesmen for God, did not understand all of what they were saying and writing.

How about that? Wouldn't that be interesting? Writing something down. Okay, what did I just write? What does that mean? Isn't that amazing to ponder? It was clear enough that we can see where things are fulfilled, and yet, Oftentimes, until it's fulfilled, it's not absolutely clear what it's all about. Here is Isaiah writing about, here's a virgin shall bear a child. Did he have in mind that there would be some young woman in this little town of Nazareth and that'd be some centuries later? He may not have had all that much clarity, but in retrospect, oh, OK, well, that makes good sense, doesn't it?

It's our hindsight that allows us to be able to look at it and see that it's clear. But the prophets often writing didn't understand. Here's an example I give out of Daniel 12. As for me, I heard but could not understand. So I said, my Lord, what will be the outcome of these events? So he's asking, what's this mean? How's this going to turn out? Did he get an answer? No. He didn't get to find out during his lifetime.

So oftentimes these prophets wrote things down, they wrote what the Lord said to write, remember the frequent phrase, thus says the Lord, and yet no understanding. Here's Hebrews 11, which of course is his New Testament times, and written about the same time as Peter was writing. All these died, these prophets in this hall of faith, if you will, without receiving the promises, but having seen them and having welcomed them from a distance, and having confessed that they were strangers and exiles on the earth, and all these, having gained approval through their faith, did not receive what was promised because God had provided something better for us. It was from a distance, they wrote it down, they prophesied and did as the Lord told them, but they didn't always understand it. They didn't know exactly what it was about. They accepted on faith. This is what the Lord told me. I believe him. I don't understand all the details, but I trust the Lord. I believe him. What's interesting is Peter said these prophets made careful searches and inquiries.

These Greek words are kind of overlapping. The first one appears to shade a little bit more towards a general Overview kind of investigation. The second word appears to be a little more specific. Other than that, they're kind of overlapping terms. The idea is that they both imply some digging into this, trying to find out, just like Daniel's question.

What is this? No, it's not for you to know. Not the right time. Think about, though, even the disciples. Did they get it when here was the Lord walking right in front of them? Did they get it? No! Not so much, right? Not so much. Here was the Lord walking right in front of them, and they often are said not to have understood.

Here's the Old Testament. There's the prophecy. There's the Lord right there in front of them. They're seeing it with their eyes. They're reading the words. They still don't get it. It is until later that they understood. Isn't it interesting, we're often the same way. We don't always take advantage of the insights that are right in front of us.

Yeah, that's a good point. Peter wrote in such a way that it was clear that the authors of the Old Testament prophecies were not simply religious men writing down words. They weren't just guys making some nice religious guesses. well-trained theologians. Instead, as he spells this out, they were spokesmen of the Holy Spirit, seeking to know what person or time the Spirit of Christ within them was indicating. How about that? The Lord told me to write this. Now, what does it mean? What does it mean?

Even with the number and, in retrospect, the clarity of prophecies about Christ's first and second comings, you've got a handout here that has, at the back here, it's a supplement. It's got about three pages of different prophecies about Christ. Neither the exact person nor the timing of everything was clear to those who spoke and wrote the prophecies. They didn't necessarily have all the specifics. Was Mary surprised when she was told you're going to bear the Messiah? Yeah. She, matter of fact, had some questions. Now, wait a minute. I'm a virgin. How does this work? Right. The whole thing was a bit of a puzzle to her. So this would be quite a shock.

The phrase Spirit of Christ is used here. Interestingly, and I continue to be fascinated by the crossover in terminology between Peter and Paul. This is one of them. Peter uses Spirit of Christ here. It's also used in Romans. And what it appears to be is this. It is the Holy Spirit sent by Christ. That's out of John 16, 7. We've quoted here.

He also testifies about Christ, which is also in this quote. So it is the Holy Spirit from Christ testifying about Christ. So that's why both Peter and Paul would use that Spirit of Christ. It is the Holy Spirit who is sent by Christ. It is the Holy Spirit who is speaking of Christ.

And think about it, he talks about the the glories here, and that's after his what? Well, the ascension is certainly at the early part of it. What I was looking at here is he talked about the sufferings of Christ and then the glories to follow. The sufferings of Christ refers to which things? Yeah, basically all of his time from the mistreatment by the Jews up to his crucifixion and burial. And then, the glories start from the time of the resurrection.

Resurrection, ascension, seating in the heavenlies, seating at the right hand of the Father, being the high priest in the heavenlies, Coming for the church, the rapture, the second coming, his righteous reign on the earth for a thousand years, all those are the glories. These are things foretold by the Old Testament prophets. Except for the rapture, the church.

Next page, 1 Peter 1.12. It was revealed to them that they were not serving themselves, but you in these things which now have been announced to you through those who preach the gospel to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven, things into which the angels long to look." Here, Peter did as the other apostles did, excuse me, other apostles and Christ and the Old Testament prophets.

He talked about what God revealed. What's interesting is, and I put it this way, nobody pries truth out of God's fingers. God deliberately reveals, and this is the way from the Old Testament all the way into the New Testament. You find this word revealed as God deliberately reveals truth. It doesn't come because somebody forces God's hand and says, well, okay, I guess I'll tell you. Nobody puts his arm behind his back and twists it, right? God deliberately reveals truth.

And so Peter writes that same way. In making these longer-term prophecies about the comings of Christ, they were serving the believers Peter wrote to, and ourselves. That's why he keeps talking about to you, you, you, you. He keeps bringing that forward. He says, these people wrote, they didn't understand, but guess what? You get to. You get to. You're privileged to do this. Peter wrote that the things of the gospel were, in our present tense here, things the angels longed to look into.

Isn't that curious? The angels longed to look into, and what's interesting is the word he has there for longing, has a prefix that's epi. It means their longing is intense. It's an intensifier prefix. They really, really want to know. Isn't that something?

They are highly motivated to understand the things that you and I are living out day by day. They are highly, intensively motivated to see God's grace and wisdom and action in our lives. They look at it and go, wow! Isn't that astounding to think about? They are amazed by the way the Lord works in us. They just think, this is amazing stuff.

And so the things, even our meeting here this morning, you know, they're looking, boy, this is astounding. Look, those are people who were fallen and the Lord saved them. They're gathering together because of his grace. Man, this is wild. To them, this is something fascinating to look into.

It draws their attention, not just a little bit. They aren't just mildly curious. Ever had something that you really wanted to look at real closely? Ever had that happen where you just really want to see about this or that? That's what he describes here. This definitely has their attention. and they're not going to bed at night to go to sleep about it. They're looking at it constantly. They are amazed.

Look at this. Here are some insights out of the Scriptures there. Luke 15, 10. In the same way, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents. Wow, look! Do the angels get to repent? No. They say, look, repentance.

Wow, that's amazing. We've never seen that. They're astounded. This idea of the angels longing, standing outside of salvation and looking in from the outside with intense interest. 1 Corinthians 4, 9, For I think God has exhibited us apostles last of all, as men condemned to death, because we have become a spectacle to the world, both to angels and to men. A spectacle. The angels are looking at this. Lord, here are your appointed apostles, and you're putting them through these persecutions. Wow! Yes, Steve? Well, you know they may be. Here's what's interesting.

We think of angels, and people oftentimes think of angels as someone to appeal to for power, for the angels to do this or that. But what's real interesting is that position of us judging the angels is one that Scripture lays out. The angels, I would have to think, are quite aware of that. And yet, real interestingly here, there are things that they don't know and understand firsthand. They look at this salvation to them. That's just fascinating stuff. They can't get over it. Heavenly angels. Right. Heavenly angels.

Fascinating. In terms of the judgment, we're not told a whole lot about what that means. I assume that we'll have sufficient competence and insight to be able to do that, you know, come the time. So we're not given lots of detail, but real interesting that they have a continuing interest. and what's going on, and are fascinated by it, and Peter brings out with the most intense word that could be used, how drawn they are to what's going on with you and me. Fascinating.

Here's Hebrews 2.16, For assuredly he does not give help to angels, but he gives help to the descendants of Abraham, the ones who believe. The angels don't get salvation, but we do. That draws their attention. Man! I think the biggest thing is that we have a position with God that is unparalleled. It's unparalleled. And it's not based on our physical birth. It's not based on being a descendant of Adam. It's based on being in Christ and a spiritual birth, which is something they do not have. Not as a salvation. No, and so it's quite different.

They have to look to us to learn things about God's character. I think that's just fascinating to me. It's fascinating to them. But you said that angels are created to serve God, basically. Oh, the angels are certainly servants. They have several different names in Scripture. And one of the more common ones in the New Testament is one that otherwise translates messenger.

Yeah, you also have different categories. There's seraphim. Seraphim and the cherubim are a couple of primary categories that are laid out in scripture. So, real interesting. The four living creatures showing up in Revelation seem to be a specific category or description.

So, amazing stuff. We're not told everything, certainly on our part, but what we do have here is these angels are fascinated by what's going on with us. The grace and the mercy that the Lord has shown to us, that the Lord would say, hey, I'll volunteer to go down and be one of them to save them. That just blows their circuits. But they like to look into it. They long. Not mildly, but intensely, to look into that and to understand it. Yeah, Bud? They have specific assignments.

The angels were involved in bringing the law. That's made clear. They were involved in bringing the law to the Jews. The angels, you can see them at different places throughout the New Testament where they have an involvement. Sometimes, you know, informing, for example, telling the shepherds, you know, next to you here in Bethlehem is where the Messiah is going to be born. Gabriel, by name, going to Mary and giving information. So they have specific assignments like that. There are cautions about, you know, just because an angel tells you something, you know, don't just sit there and believe it. Check it out. So there's that as well.

Now, why does Peter bring forward that both the Old Testament prophets and the angels didn't or don't understand the depth and fullness of the awesome salvation that is grace given to those who believe in Christ? Why would he bring that forward? Why would that be important?

Because in this passage, the prophets tell you something, but they don't know it all. The angels, to address Bud's question, do bring information, but they don't understand everything. Isn't that interesting? It is amazing. I think if you look at this, a part of what Peter is trying to get across to these people, remember the issues we said before? Are you worried about longevity?

The prophets told about Christ coming long ago. If you need an old tradition for people to respect it, you got it. You may be rejecting the pagan religions out there and all the different spiritual strings that they try to pull, but you've got a basis in spiritual things that is better than that, because the angels that these people appeal to, They're just really, really curious about how the Lord has saved you. So He's giving them answers and insights that will help them, not only because it directly gives them truth, but because it helps assure them against the accusations that the culture around them is thrusting at them.

The accusations, oh, you have this newfangled religion and you don't have anything ancient about this. Peter says, bull feathers, right? Or you're rejecting the access to these spiritual beings and you're going to make the gods mad at you. He says, no, no, God loves you very much. You're not going to make the gods mad at you. And by the way, these angels, they don't know as much as you think. but they're tremendously fascinated with the salvation that you have, a wondrous salvation. Yeah, Jack?

Oh, can you imagine that? And think of this, did God ever become an angel in order to save them? The whole thought was just completely foreign to them. So, an amazing thing for them to look at and to ponder. Here is Christ on the cross. Mind-blowing. Mind-blowing. Here is the God that we worship, and He is there, and some Romans just put nails through His hands and His feet. He was made sin. They are just absolutely drawn to try to get some insight and understanding here. Okay, let's pray.

Lord, as we look at your Word, what marvelous depth, what tremendous truth. And Lord, what comfort in the midst of an accusing culture, a culture even our own. that throws accusations at us. And we thank you for the deep insights that we can know that this is not just man's best guess or somebody who is particularly good at throwing a dart into the future. But instead, these are things that you had designed from the very beginning. You were revealed to us because you love us and care for us. We thank you for these truths. In Jesus' name, Amen.