The meaningless lifestyle of heritage.

1 Peter 1.17-21.

One of the odd things about Christianity is we’re meant to follow Jesus… but nearly every Christian, and nearly all our churches, act like we’re meant to follow Christian tradition.

I’m not knocking Christian tradition… well okay, I’m not knocking certain Christian traditions. There’s a whole lot of good stuff we’ve been given by previous generations of devout followers of Jesus. They made an effort to get to know our Lord, taught a lot of useful lessons, and gave us a lot of practical stuff we can use so we can get to know our Lord. Why reinvent the wheel when we pretty much have a forest of wheels available?

But of course too many Christians would have us fixate on the stuff instead of Jesus himself. Because we can manipulate the stuff. But Jesus doesn’t bend.

The ancients had a similar problem: Lots of traditions they inherited from their forebears. You had Pharisees, the devout Jews who established synagogues wherever they could throughout the Roman Empire—which the apostles regularly visited so they could tell the Jews about their Messiah, Jesus, and how his kingdom has come near. You also had Greco-Roman pagans (or in Africa, Greco-Egyptian pagans) who had their own national myths, which claimed they were a great people with great gods, and you’d better follow those gods lest they be displeased.

You have all these people-groups with all these great heritages. And Jesus disrupts all of that, and tells us nope; now we’re his people. Ditch that ethnic pride; his kingdom is multiethnic and excludes no one. Ditch that “noble history” …which, let’s be honest, consists of a lot of fabrications, mythology, and whitewashing. (True, the Old Testament tells ancient Israel’s story, warts ’n all, but if you ever read Flavius Josephus’s Antiquities, you can see a bunch of that whitewashing right there. Every ancient culture did that. And if you read any grade-school American history textbook, you’ll see we totally do it too.)

Simon Peter calls all that stuff ματαίας/mataías, “empty, profitless, meaningless.” That’s what the ancient Christians left behind. Rightly so! We’re not trying to establish a new great people, a mighty Christian nation, which needs its own traditions and myths and heritage. We point to Jesus. We just live out our lives as best we can, scattered throughout the kingdoms of this world like Diaspora Jews, and let him worry about empire-building. We just follow him.

And we beware anyone who tries to establish any “Christian kingdom” in which Jesus is not physically standing upon the earth to rule it himself.

1 Peter 1.17-21 KWL

17And if you call upon the Father,

who impartially judges each person by their work,

behave yourselves with reverent fear

during the time of your sojourn—

18knowing it’s not the perishable,

not silver nor gold,

by which you were ransomed

from your meaningless lifestyle of “heritage,”

19but precious blood,

like an unblemished lamb;

and spotless Christ.

20Foreknown even before the world’s founding,

and made known in the last times

because of you—

21because of believers in God,

who raised Jesus from the dead

and gives him glory

so your belief and hope are to be in God.

Judged by your work.

Every so often I have to remind Christians we’re saved by God’s grace… but we’re judged by our good works.

Some of ’em don’t wanna hear it, ’cause they think it’s a contradiction, and immediately ignore everything I just said about goodness… and go right back to their usual badness. Likewise they ignore every warning God and his prophets make about behaving ourselves, and how sin is gonna have consequences, both in this age and the age to come.

Peter reminds us of this too: If we call upon the Father—if we pray to him, claim we’re his, and claim to be chosen people—then let’s act it! It’s not enough to call ourselves Christian, then act like every other hypocrite who says they’re one thing but their behavior doesn’t show it. Hypocrisy is a plague in Christendom, and it gives pagans an easy and valid excuse to mock and reject us. It also gives our Lord a valid reason to say this at the End:

Luke 13.27 CSB

“But he will say, ‘I tell you, I don’t know you or where you’re from. Get away from me, all you evildoers!’ ”

Hypocrites ignore this warning, because they figure we’re saved by grace, so Jesus would never. Even though Jesus himself says he will.

It’s not a contradiction to say we don’t merit salvation, don’t merit heaven, don’t merit eternal life; that we’re getting all those things entirely because God is gracious… and to simultaneously say don’t sin, 1Jn 2.1 don’t use our God-given freedom as an opportunity to indulge the flesh, Ga 5.13 don’t sin so that grace may abound, Ro 6.1-2 and abide in Jesus so that he may abide in you. Jn 15.4 By grace we were freed from sin and death; let’s not re-enslave ourselves to sin and death, and call it “freedom” when it’s clearly bondage.

God freed us with something imperishable. Money is most definitely perishable. Jesus’s blood is not. 1Pe 1.18-19 Peter reminds his audience, which now includes us, that Jesus was foreknown before the world was created—not to remind us of how he’s God and became human, but to remind us Jesus’s self-sacrifice was also foreknown before the world was created, and Jesus’s blood pays for all human sin throughout human history. Adam and Eve were saved by grace, same as the very last human born before Judgment Day. Jesus redeemed humanity.

Since we Christians now know this, let’s not be ingrates who take his redemption for granted, and sin like Jesus never did free us; be good! Live like a redeemed people.

Sad to say, plenty of Christians will hear this, or something like it, shrug, and go back to being ingrates. And will be all horrified and offended when Jesus tells them he doesn’t know them, and gnash their teeth at him… but if they truly knew him, and followed him instead of the Christian crowd, or pursued him instead of their vaunted Christian heritage, they’d’ve followed him, and this wouldn’t even be an issue.