1 Peter 1:17-21, The Necessity of Holiness

Can you be a Christian, be saved for eternity, and live a life of disobedience to God? That has been a debate for centuries. While I was in Seminary two of my professors took opposing views on this subject. Zane Hodges taught that one can be saved but live a life of disobedience, and S. Lewis Johnson taught that a true believer cannot continue in sin. John MacArthur supported Johnson’s view. Peter, of course, was not embroiled in this controversy, but he gives his readers a strong statement of the necessity of holiness in the life of the believer.

¹⁷ And if you call upon a Father who judges impartially based on each person’s work, then conduct yourselves in fear during your time of exile. ¹⁸ Because you know you were not redeemed from your former futile life, handed down from your ancestors, with perishable things like silver or gold, ¹⁹ but with precious blood as from a spotless lamb without defect, the blood of Christ. ²⁰ He was predetermined for this, before the foundation of the world, but revealed in these last times on your behalf, ²¹ who, through him have believed in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope might be in God.

“Be holy, because I am holy,” God tells His people (Leviticus 11:45; 1 Peter 1:16). We are obligated to be like our heavenly Father. And so Peter reasons that if the Father we call upon for salvation is of such a character and judges impartially the work of every person based on that holy character, we must live in fear. Not, as Meyer,1 says, “the slavish fear which cannot co-exist with love (see 1 John 4:18); no more is it the reverence which an inferior feels for a superior (Grotius, Bolten, etc.); but it is the holy awe of a judge who condemns the evil; the opposite of thoughtless security.”

Peter isn’t saying that our redemption is dependent on a positive judgment of our works. He says clearly in the next couple of statements that we have already been redeemed by Christ’s blood. But our works will be judged, as Paul says, “we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each of us may receive what is due us for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad” (2 Corinthians 5:10). But it is not a judgment to determine whether we get into heaven or not, but to determine our reward in heaven. “There is no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). Nevertheless, God “judges impartially based on each person’s work” (v.17). And we must, therefore, conduct ourselves in fear as we sojourn in a world of which we are no longer citizens, meaning we must conduct ourselves in holiness.

And a second necessity for holiness lies in the cost expended to ransom us from our slavery to sin. Perishable things, even things as valuable as silver and gold, were not enough to redeem us. Our purchase price was the precious blood of Jesus Christ, a sinless sacrifice, the spotless lamb required to satisfy the just requirements of a holy God. Because he was sinless he could pay the penalty for our sin with his own death. His sacrifice was foreordained (known and determined beforehand), but played out in history, was revealed, in the time of Peter and his readers. Such an expensive redemption deserves and necessitates our living in holiness.

And a third reason for the necessity of living holy lives, Peter says, is that Christ enabled us to believe in God. God raised him from the dead and exalted him so that we might find faith and hope in God. Faith speaks to our relationship of trust and hope speaks to the promise of that future salvation Peter teaches that we have in Christ.