1 Peter 5:7-10

Friends of Christ,

This evening’s Bible passage is 1 Peter 5:7-10 (NRSV):

⁷ Cast all your anxiety on God, because he cares for you. ⁸ Discipline yourselves, keep alert. Like a roaring lion your adversary the devil prowls around, looking for someone to devour. ⁹ Resist him, steadfast in your faith, for you know that your brothers and sisters in all the world are undergoing the same kinds of suffering. ¹⁰ And after you have suffered for a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, support, strengthen, and establish you.

This is not, on the face of it, an immediately cheerful passage. The warning that our “adversary the devil prowls around, looking for someone to devour” might add to our fear if we’re not careful. So, please take a good look at how much encouragement here surrounds and overwhelms that warning. And remember, too, that there is a lion who roars more gently and more powerfully than any devil. Think of Aslan. Think of the Lion of Judah (Rev. 5:5). Both of these point to Christ, both Lion and Lamb, who has already soundly defeated the devil.

Peter here invites us, first, to cast all our anxiety on God “because he cares” for us. Many of us are prone to cling on to our worries, to indulge them, and to feed them. But, to the degree that we are able to cast all—yes, all!—our fears on God, knowing that we can do so with full confidence because he loves and cares for us, we will find ourselves that much less burdened by them. It may not make the objects of our fear fade away, but it will strengthen our capacity to deal with them calmly, wisely, and well.

Perhaps we’re inclined to cling to our fears because they’re our fears. No one else, I might be tempted to think, knows how I feel. Peter reminds us that we’re not alone, that our brothers and sisters in all the world are undergoing the same kinds of suffering. In Peter’s day, this referred primarily to persecution. For us, right now, it applies to COVID-19. Lake Trails folk are caring for one another well. Christians all over the world are doing the same. Moreover, all who are suffering because of COVID-19, whatever their faith or lack of it, are my brothers and sisters in the sense that they are made in the image of God. We are not alone.

Finally, Peter assures us that all suffering has an end. Indeed, in the scale of eternity, it lasts only “a little while.” In the meantime, the God of all grace, supports and strengthens us, and when it’s all over, he will restore and establish us. In Christ, too, we are all on our way to enjoy God’s “eternal glory.” Whether or not we emerge from the pandemic unscathed, we all face, sooner or later, a welcome into glory, where “death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things [will] have passed away” (Rev. 21:4).

Our “adversary the devil” would have us forget all this. He wants to “devour” us not so much by harming us physically, but by undermining our faith in the God who loves us, by making us bear the burden of our anxieties alone because we fail to let God handle them, and by closing our eyes to God’s promise that his grace is with us even (perhaps especially) now and will still be with us when whatever suffering we may (or may not) face now is over.

Our adversary attacks our faith. Peter enjoins us to “resist” those attacks with a firm and steadfast faith. We need to stand firm precisely where the attacks are aimed. I know some can find this very hard. If you don’t feel up to it and the call to stand firm in your faith just makes you more anxious, then the place to start is with casting all your anxiety—even that one—on the God who cares for you. The God who loves you enough to share your suffering even to the extent of dying for you on the cross will, I am confident, “restore, support, strengthen, and establish you.”

So, don’t allow the devil’s paltry imitation of a roaring lion to close your ears to the true and faithful roar of the lion who is Christ, the lamb who fights on your behalf, and whois infinitely more powerful than any adversary you may face.

Grace and peace be with you all,

Max