The New Community The New Testament draws attention to the importance of the Christian community, an emphasis that sometimes gets lost in individualistic cultures. Though believers in Christ are individually converted and born again to a new life (John 3:3; 1 Pet 1:23), we are not intended to remain in isolation. God’s purpose is to build us together as “living stones” in his “spiritual temple” (1 Pet 2:5). God no longer inhabits a building on Mount Zion in Jerusalem; he now lives in and among his people by the Holy Spirit. The promise that God would rebuild his temple (see Ezek 40–48) has been fulfilled as God dwells among his people (see John 1:14), who themselves constitute the “temple” under the new covenant. Only as we join together in worship, praise, and service will we function in the way God intended. Christians enjoy together the wonderful blessing of being the people God has chosen to carry out his mission to the world. As 1 Peter 2:9 makes clear, the church is now what Israel was originally, a “chosen people” (see Deut 7:6), “royal priests,” “a holy nation” (see Exod 19:6), and God’s “very own possession” (see Exod 19:5). With that privileged status comes the r...

The Holiness of God’s People God called on the people of Israel to be holy because he had ransomed them from their slavery in Egypt (see Lev 11:45). He has also ransomed us through Jesus Christ, who paid the price to release us from slavery to sin and death (1 Pet 1:18). God has paid the ultimate price to set us free: He has given “the precious blood of Christ, the sinless, spotless Lamb of God” (1:19). He has purchased our freedom from the empty way of life that people experience before coming to Christ. At the heart of the lifestyle that God demanded of his people under the old covenant was the requirement that they be holy as God is holy (see Lev 19:2). God had rescued them from the domination of a cruel, foreign nation who served other gods; now they were to live as God’s people in the new land to which he was bringing them. Peter applies the same requirement to God’s people of the new covenant, those who have come to God through faith in Jesus Christ: “You must be holy in everything you do, just as God who chose you is holy” (1 Pet 1:15). This holiness has both a negative and a positive side. Negatively, to be holy is to separate from this world, to avoid the ways of...