Here’s another section of Saving the Saved: An Exposition of 1 Peter. It helps remind us of the importance of taking time to be holy.
Take Time to Be Holy
1 Peter 1: 13-17
By: Dr. Dave Anderson
In many ways life on earth is like climbing a mountain of sorts. It is arduous, difficult, but rewarding. And with steady, persistent effort we get to a point where we can see the top. We can almost smell the victory. We sense the flush of success. And then it happens. Completely out of the blue–the unexpected knocks us down just before we reach the top.
That’s what happened to Jay Rathman.[1] He was hunting deer in the Thehema Wildlife Reserve near Red Bluff in northern California. He had climbed to a ledge on the slope of a rocky gorge. As he raised his head to look over the ledge above, he sensed movement to the right of his face. A coiled rattler struck with lightning speed, just missing Rathman’s right ear. The four-foot snake’s fangs got snagged in the neck of Rathman’s wool turtle neck sweater, and the force of the strike caused it to land on his left shoulder. It then coiled around his neck.
Rathman grabbed the snake behind the head with his left-hand and could feel the warm venom running down the skin of his neck, the rattles making a furious racket. He fell backward and slid headfirst down the steep slope through brush and lava rocks, his rifle and binoculars bouncing beside him. “As luck would have it,” he said in describing the incident to a Department of Fish and Game official, “I ended up wedged between some rocks with my feet caught uphill from my head. I could barely move.”
Rathman got his right hand on his rifle and used it to disengage the fangs from his sweater, but the snake had enough leverage to strike again. It made about eight attempts and managed to hit Rathman with its nose just below his eye about four times. He kept his face turned so it couldn’t get a good angle with its fangs, but it was very close. Rathman and the snake were eyeball to eyeball, and the hunter found out that snakes don’t blink. It had fangs like darning needles . . . Rathman choked the snake to death. It was the only way out.
When he tried to toss the dead snake aside, Rathman couldn’t let it go—he had to pry his fingers one by one from its neck. Rathman, who works for the Defense Department in San Jose, guesses his encounter with the snake lasted twenty minutes.
How much like life, Rathman’s encounter with this snake. At the most unsuspecting moment life pounces. With treacherous strength its snakelike assaults have a way of knocking us off-balance as they wrap themselves around us. Exposed and vulnerable, we can easily succumb to the attacks. They come in the form of physical pain, emotional trauma, marital conflicts, carnal temptations, financial setbacks, demonic assaults, . . . whap, whap, whap, whap, WHAP!
And we struggle, all the while knowing that if the poison of these attacks reaches our heart, we are spiritually doomed. We can go into a spiritual death that leaves us looking like spiritual zombies. At the very least, a spiritual stupor coming as an aftershock from these bites can render us ineffective for the Lord. It can keep us from redeeming the time for his kingdom. This spiritual stupor can even cause us to lose the significance of our lives forever. But let’s be clear. We are not talking about losing our justification. We are talking about the spiritual death of defeat in our Christian walk, despair over having any hope for victory over our private vice, discouragement to the point of walking out on even trying to live a life that would glorify our Savior. Such a life is “lost” in the sense of finding meaning and purpose for living. 1 Peter was written to avoid such a tragedy. Peter wants to “save the saved,” to make their lives have an impact on eternity.
Ironically, we have seen in the introduction to this letter that the very trials of life that would rob us of our spiritual vitality can make us more spiritually alive if we react properly to them. The Body of this letter tells us how to make our lives count for eternity in three ways, specifically when we are suffering undeservedly: through our Character, our Conduct, and our Courage. The first section deals with our Personal Sanctification (our Character): be holy, because I am holy.
[1] Charles R. Swindoll, The Quest for Character (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1982), 17.
This book will be available in Amazon soon.
Serving Him with you until He comes for us,
Fred Chay, PhD
Managing Editor, Grace Theology Press
