2Pe 1:5
Faith and Fortitude.
I. We can understand why courage, the courage of confessorship, is placed in the forefront of these Christian graces. It needed courage in the outset. It needed courage, after the mind was made up, for the mouth to open and say, "I am a Christian." When the Jews regarded a man as a renegade and apostate, at once unpatriotic and profane, and when the Greeks regarded him as a fool and fanatic, it needed courage to say, "I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ."
II. Mere physical daring is a fine and stirring spectacle; but there are few things more magnificent, or which do the world more good, than moral courage. It is this in which Christianity so abounds, and to which it owes its conquests: the fortitude of faith. The first plantation of the Gospel was a great fight; and there never were braver spirits than those valiant saints who came away from the foot of their Master's cross and went into all the world to proclaim the kingdom of the Crucified. Never was there seen aught like their tolerance of pain and their cheerful readiness to die, nor ever did conqueror go forth on his campaign with a bound more exultant than they set forth on each successive pilgrimage of pain and sorrow; and in their great tour of tribulation they strode from strength still onward unto strength. And when the worst was come, when it was not the spirit, but the body, that was bound, and the course was finished, "I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand," or, as Chrysostom wrote in his exile, "If the Empress wishes to banish me, the earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof. If she would saw me in sunder, let her saw me in sunder! I have Isaiah for a pattern. If she would thrust me into the fiery furnace, I see the three children enduring that. If she would stone me, I have before me Stephen the proto-martyr. If I yet pleased her, I should not be the servant of Christ," a firmness of mind which even Gibbon is forced to own is far superior to Cicero in exile.
J. Hamilton, Works, vol. v., p. 341.
2Pe 1:6
Patience.
I. Of most things God has made the beginning easy and inviting, the next stages arduous, but the ulterior progress delightfully rewarding. Of this you have a familiar example in learning a language. So even in the Christian life: there is an alluring outset, followed by an arduous interval; and that once conquered, there comes the platform of even and straightforward discipleship, the life of faith, the walk with God. From their glorious high throne, with a perfect knowledge of the contest and with what we so lack, a full knowledge of the glory yet unrevealed, the King of martyrs and the cloud of witnesses keep cheering the Church still militant, and every several member: "Lay aside every weight, and more especially the sin that besets you, and run with patience the race set before you."
II. If patience be viewed as equanimity, it is near akin to control of temper; and need I say what a field for patience, understood as submission to the will of God, there is in the trials of life? The stoic is not patient, for he is past feeling; and when the pain is not perceived there is no need for patience. But the Christian is a man of feeling, and usually of feeling more acute than other people; and it is often with the tear of desolation in his eye or the sweat of anguish on his brow that he clasps his hands and cries, "Father, Thy will be done!" But this the believer, through grace, can do, and this some time or other in his history almost every believer has actually done. And though most have been so human that they were startled at the first beneath the stroke of bodily affliction, amidst the crash of fallen fortunes, at the edge of the closing grave, they have all sooner or later been enabled to exclaim, "The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord." "We are always thinking we should be better with or without such a thing; but if we do not steal a little content in present circumstances, there is no hope in any other."
J. Hamilton, Works, vol. v., p. 374.
2Pe 1:10
Making Salvation Sure.
I. In order to make sure one's own salvation, our first counsel is, Be sure of the great foundation truths. You believe that there is a God, and that He is the Rewarder of those that diligently seek Him; you believe that He is infinitely wise and good, true and holy; and you believe that you are a sinner, that you entirely lack that holiness without which no man shall see the Lord, and that if you are ever admitted to the abodes of purity, it must be on some other grounds than your own fitness or deserving. The best evidence that you know these things and are persuaded of them is that you are acting on them. As the best evidence that yours is the Christian faith, be sure that yours is the Christian character. If your faith is genuine, then, like good material, it will stand a heavy superstructure. There may be added to it temperance, patience, godliness, and every grace.
II. What is salvation? It is health of soul. It is God's friendship. It is a happy immortality. And how is this salvation to become personally sure? The first thing is to apprehend clearly what God has revealed regarding it, and then do as God directs: believe on Jesus. Rest on His atonement as the basis, at once righteous and gracious, of your reconciliation to a sin-avenging Jehovah; believe on Jesus as the gift of the Father's love and the exponent of the Father's character; hear Him in all His sayings, however plain or paradoxical; and follow Him as fast and as far in His beautiful career as weak and faltering footsteps can: and thus, with no barren nor unfruitful knowledge of the Lord Jesus, but with His own characteristics in you and abounding, your calling and election will be a subject of little anxiety to yourself and no anxiety to others, for thus an entrance shall be ministered to you abundantly into the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
J. Hamilton, Works, vol. vi., p. 326.
References: 2Pe 1:10 . Clergyman's Magazine, vol. ii., p. 159; Preacher's Monthly, vol. iii., p. 370; G. G. Bradley, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxiii., p. 177. 2Pe 1:10 , 2Pe 1:11 . V. Pryce, Ibid., vol. xxxii., p. 392; Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. iii., No. 123; Clergyman's Magazine, vol. iii., p. 291. 2Pe 1:12 . Preacher's Monthly, vol. x., p. 179. 2Pe 1:13 . H. Jones, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xx., p. 321; Bishop Ryle, Ibid., vol. xxv., p. 337. 2Pe 1:16 . W. M. Taylor, The Gospel Miracles, pp. 101, 139; J. H. Hitchens, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xvi., p. 365; Preacher's Monthly, vol. iv., p. 372; Homiletic Quarterly, vol. i., p. 476.
2Pe 1:18
The Transfiguration: the Three Apostles.
I. What was our Saviour's purpose in making the three Apostles His witnesses? There were trials to which the Apostles would be subjected, and against them they wanted strength and a support for their faith. The Transfiguration was to give them this support. There they should see how the glory of the Lord shone forth from under the veil of His humanity; how life in the Resurrection triumphed over death; how joy and rest in the Lord, such as Moses and Elias enjoyed in this vision, surpassed all worldly pleasure and atoned for all earthly pain. This help to faith is free from the notion of a reward. It Was not the sight of a future reward that was held out to them upon the mount, but the sight of the present truth.
II. Consider the conduct of the Apostles. Of them it may be said that at the time they hardly comprehended what they saw, but that in after-life they felt its influence. At the time they were dazed and confused, like men just fallen into heavy sleep and then awaking to a strange sight. They darkly comprehended the Lord's purpose in taking them up with Him if they imagined they were to remain on the mount. Prayer has its luxury. Though it be hard to pray, it is sometimes at the end as hard to leave off praying. The peace of meditation has such a charm to soothe the unquiet mind, and to quell the unruly passions of the heart. To all who are thus inclined to God a voice will soon be heard to speak into the ear, "Descende, Petre; ora et labora" pray and work. The life which the Apostles experienced after that wonderful night upon the mountain with Christ was the same sort of life into which Christians pass out of their quiet chamber into the business of the day, out of the aisles of the church on Sunday into the work of the world on Monday.
C. W. Furse, Sermons at Richmond, p. 198.
Reference: 2Pe 1:19 . Good Words, vol. vi., p. 101.
2Pe 1:21
An Inspired Definition of Inspiration.
It is a definition of inspiration, a definition simple, precise, exhaustive. "Men spoke" spoke without ceasing (even for the moment of speaking) to be men; spoke with all those characteristics of phrase and style, of thought and mind, of position and history, which mark and make the man; yet "spoke from God," with a message and mission, under an influence and an impulse, a control and a suggestion, which gave to the word spoken a force and a fire, a touch and a contact, a sight and an insight, unlike other utterances because of a breath of God in it, the God of the spirits of all flesh.
I. No testimony could be more explicit to the inspiration of the Bible than this. It is the testimony of the New Testament to the Old. And it is the Old Testament which needs the testimony. Christians have no difficulty in accepting the New Testament. They understand that the Saviour spoke the words of God by an inspiration direct and self-evidencing. "We speak," He said, "that we do know, and testify that we have seen." They understand, on the strength of His own promise, that the Apostles were inspired by a direct gift of insight into truth, whether of fact or faith. For the inspiration of the Old Testament they can only look to the New. The treatment of it by our Lord, His constant appeal to it in controversy, His constant reference to it as fulfilled in Himself, the express assertion of its inspiration by St. Paul and St. Peter, are the grounds on which we, who were never under the Law, believe the earlier and larger half of the Bible to be, in some true sense, an integral part of the inspired word of God. "Men spake" in it also "from God."
II. "Men spake." "Human beings," St. Peter says; the "men" is emphatic. Men spake. And does not St. Peter as good as say, And remained men in the speaking? Where is the authority for supposing that the inspiring Spirit levelled the intellects, obliterated the characteristics, overwhelmed the peculiarities, of the several writers, so that St. Paul, St. John, St. James, St. Peter, might be mistaken one for the other in the finished work? These are the glosses, the fancies, the inventions, with which prejudice and fanaticism have overlaid the subject, and given great advantage by doing so to the caviller and the sceptic. Men spake, and in speaking were men still. Even their message, even the thing they were sent to tell, must be expressed in terms of human speech, through a medium therefore of adaptation and accommodation. St. Paul himself expresses this thought when he says, "At present we see by a mirror, in riddle" see but the reflection of the very thing that is, hear but in enigma the absolute truth "then" in "that world" then at last "face to face."
III. The two halves of the text are dependent upon each other. Men spake, not angels; that is one thought: not machines; that is another. Not angels, or they had no sympathetic, no audible, voice for man; not machines, or speech (which is by definition intelligence in communication) had been a contradiction in terms. These human beings spake from God. For He had something to say, and to say to man. There is something which God only can say. There is something which reason cannot say, nor experience, nor discovery, nor the deepest insight, nor the happiest guessing, nor the most sagacious foresight. There is a world of heaven, which flesh and blood cannot penetrate. There is a world of spirit, impervious even to mind. There is a world beyond death, between which and the living there is an impassable gulf fixed. More than this, there is a world of cause and consequence, which no moralist can connect or piece together. There is a world of providence, which gives no account of itself to the observer. There is a world of Divine dealing with lives, with souls, with nations, with ages of which even the inspired man must say, "Such knowledge is too wonderful and excellent for me; it is high; I cannot attain to it."
C. J. Vaughan, Restful Thoughts in Restless Times, p. 315.