While we live in this broken life, we need to acknowledge that we are strangers, exiles, persons out of step with the patterns of thinking, speaking, and acting that characterize the people around us. People around us recognize Satan as the god of this world (2 Corinthians 4:4) while we confess the ascended Christ as King and Lord. That is why Paul can say that our citizenship is in heaven (Philippians 3:20). By decree of God the Father (election) and by the operation of the Holy Spirit (sanctification) and by instruction of the Son (obedience, sprinkling) Christians are fundamentally different people and so we need to see ourselves as different from those around us and dare to be different. Everything Peter writes further in this letter is built in some way on this divinely ordained difference between the people of God and the people of the world.

In this broken life Christians have continuing need for growth. Much as we would love to enjoy to the maximum the joy that comes with God’s grace and peace, we need these gifts multiplied to us over the passage of time. That growth occurs through Christians internalizing the promises and instructions of God’s word in the concrete circumstances that make up our exile in this life.