3:18
Suffering when we don’t deserve it seems a ridiculous thing to do. So what is Peter’s answer to this? It is to look at Jesus and what He achieved. This is how God’s plans work. There is an enormous difference between any suffering we go through and what Christ endured, but there are also enormous similarities. We need to understand the differences and the similarities. The fundamental difference is that Christ died for our sins, He took our sins upon Himself and paid the price, suffered the punishments, that we should have paid. He did this for our justification, to open the way for us to come to God. This was done once, it only needed to be done once, it never needs to be done again. Yet the kingdom still advances when God’s people are prepared to pay a price. Jesus and the New Testament talks about us sharing in His sufferings.
Although Christ died in the body, He was raised from the dead. Made alive in the Spirit. Peter most definitely does not mean that the resurrection was a spiritual resurrection in the sense that it wasn’t physical. What he does mean is that while Christ suffered death the Spirit gave Him life. In the same way, if we suffer for Christ we will find that the Spirit gives new life to us, a far deeper and richer life than we ever knew before.
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