2Peter 1:3-4 - Divine Power in Dumb Pots

2Peter 1:3-4

3-4 His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, 4 by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, that through these you may escape from the corruption that is in the world because of passion, and become partakers of the divine nature.

Let us hark back right here to the clear addresses of this letter and consider what Peter means when he says that "His divine power has granted us all things..." Who is the "us?" Is it everyone in the whole world? Or is it everyone who has believed in Jesus Christ? To as many as believed on Him - to all that received Him - He gave the power (Greek - exousia - the right - not the dynamic power) to become the children of God, who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. (John 1:12-13)

Believing on Jesus Christ means receiving Him. Receiving Him means being born again by receiving the Holy Spirit - the Spirit of Christ - so that the very nature of God’s Son is within us. It isn’t that we regard Him as being in us. It isn’t a "trick" of the mind- a technique for practical spirituality. It is the actual receiving of the Son through the work of the Holy Spirit. And receiving Him means receiving all that He is. It means He is both our Saviour and our Lord. One without the other is not only meaningless, but absolutely impossible. If Jesus isn’t your Lord then He isn’t your Saviour. Period.

So, there is a remnant in this age of grace which is chosen by God, and to whom God has granted all things pertaining to life and godliness (in His Son, Jesus Christ) through promises that are to be received and acted upon through faith. These promises apply only to those who are in Jesus Christ. God commands all men everywhere to repent ("commands" - not "begs") and He calls upon His people to preach the gospel to all men, extending to all the promise than any who believe will be saved, and are inheritors of the promises in Christ. We never know who will believe. We are not to prejudge. We are to obey.

Note that the children of God live (ongoing - not just a one-shot thing) by faith in Jesus Christ, and that purpose of their salvation is that through the knowledge of Christ they will become godly, or holy. I repeat, the purpose of our salvation is that we become experientially godly. Peter is careful to contrast the upstream nature of the life of the child of God with the lives of a downstream world. The world is corrupt. All of it, and everyone in it. We have been given royal right in Christ to escape that corruption through faith in Him. We have been saved (justified) and we are being saved (sanctified). If we claim to be in Christ and we still live like the world, then we need to ask ourselves whether Christ is truly in us. He may be - but we need to ask. (2Corinthians 13:5)

The Christian life is non-stop warfare. It is warfare first against our own nature. Our old man is full of corruption - much of which we were sublimely unaware of while we walked in the world. Now, it is a deadly poison to us, dragging and clawing at us, providing "handles" to our enemy to turn us out of the Way and from looking upon Christ, our Life.

Then there is the world. The world of corrupt and fallen people, like us. We are tempted to think that they are like we used to be before we found Christ. That is dangerous thinking. They are like what we are since we found Christ, except for the sweet, holy influences of the Spirit of God ministering the life of Christ to, and manifesting Him in, our being. If God but for an instant were to cease drawing us heavenward, we should instantly revert to what our carnal nature knows, loves and does - just like the rest of the world. The carnal nature is lust. (Galatians 5:16-17) It serves the creature rather than the creator. It is death. Every person in the whole world is like this, and we who are in Christ are being saved out of it all solely by the grace of God, through faith in Jesus Christ.

When Peter speaks of the corruption in the world he is not speaking of a mindless, impersonal principle at work in the physical world as a whole. He is speaking of the world of men - individual men who are all individually corrupt. The world doesn’t lust, but the people of the world do. The world is not governed by passion, but the people of the world are.

The meaning of becoming partakers in the divine nature is in the sense of fellowship. We may become partakers of the Divine fellowship. We will know God, even as we are known. The tense is future, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t have fellowship with God in Christ by the Spirit, right now. We do. But the fullness is yet to come. We desire to be filled with all the fullness of God. We are exhorted to it. But we will not attain to the glorious reality of its fullness as long as we dwell in mortal and sinful flesh. We await that final stage of our redemption - our glorified bodies, and with them, the burning off of all the chaff of our old nature.

Returning to the phrase "partakers of the divine nature" I think it behooves us to understand what divine fellowship (deias koinonoi) truly is. To do this we need first to understand what it is not. It is not that we are made like God and therefore able to relate to Him on some sort of equal footing. It is not like a club in which all members are individuals of equal status and of utterly independent spirit. That is carnal fellowship. It is the world’s concept of fellowship. It is making God in our image to regard fellowship with Him in that way. No Christian would think of himself taking such a meaning from the words "fellowship with God," but I am afraid that many are so influenced by the world and so starving for spiritual truth properly explained that they do think this way, even though they would deny it.

Our fellowship with God is in Christ. We are in Christ and He in us in the same way the Father is in Christ and Christ is in the Father. These are spiritual truths and realities that can be apprehended only through the ministry of God’s Spirit. We are joined to Christ eternally and inextricably through fellowship of the Spirit. We are His body. We are one in the Spirit in the same way that man and wife are one in body. We are not the same persons, but we are nevertheless one in will. This is an intimacy that we can only begin to imagine. But we must always remember that our fellowship with God is only by reason of our being in Christ. We can only come before the Father in Christ. We can never come in and of our own right. We are accepted only in the Beloved.

Being in the beloved is not something we bring about or sustain by dint of our own effort. Can you imagine having to do that for eternity based on your own strength and understanding? God has placed us in Christ by an act of His elective and redeeming will. He has purposed to marry us to Christ by the Spirit of holiness, in which fellowship we live eternally due exclusively to God’s grace and mercy towards His people in Christ.

That is about as far into the hidden things as we are permitted to delve. We need to know and understand it, otherwise God would not have revealed it in His word. But this is an understanding to which we refer while we are working out our salvation in fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12-13). That is why it all comes to us in the form of exceeding great and precious promises, to be received and acted upon through faith.