1 Peter 1:1–2 (NLT)
This letter is from Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ. I am writing to God’s chosen people who are living as foreigners in the provinces of Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia. God the Father knew you and chose you long ago, and his Spirit has made you holy. As a result, you have obeyed him and have been cleansed by the blood of Jesus Christ. May God give you more and more grace and peace. (1 Pet 1:1–2, NLT)
1) Who are the “foreigners”?
Peter addresses “God’s chosen people… living as foreigners” scattered across five Roman provinces in Asia Minor. The phrase behind “foreigners” (Greek: parepidēmoi) evokes resident-aliens — people away from home, with a different loyalty and a different future. Another word echoes in the background: diaspora (“dispersion”), the term many translations use. It originally described Jewish communities living outside the land; Peter deliberately draws on that exile vocabulary. Yet the letter itself shows he is writing to a mixed family of believers — both Jews and Gentiles. He calls them to turn from “former ignorance” and pagan practices (1:14; 4:3), language that fits Gentile converts; and then he clothes them in Israel’s titles — “a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation” (2:9). The point is not ethnicity but identity: in Christ, the scattered church inherits Israel’s pilgrim calling. We are resident-aliens everywhere, at home only in the Kingdom.
2) Chosen by the Father: foreknown love, without displacing Israel
“God the Father knew you and chose you long ago.” Peter’s words reach back beyond our first breath into the eternal counsel of the Triune God, where the Father set His love upon a people who would belong to His Son. This is the same horizon Paul opens when he says God “chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world” (Eph 1:4), and prepared “good works… that we should walk in them” (Eph 2:10). Yet this choosing is never to be read as God turning away from Israel or discarding His firstborn nation. Scripture allows no such fickleness in the character of God. When He says through Amos, “You only have I known of all the families of the earth” (Amos 3:2), He is not making a temporary election that will later be revoked; He is declaring a covenantal intimacy that continues to unfold through redemptive history.
The key mystery — and one the New Testament unveils with great reverence — is that the Church was hidden both in Christ and within Israel. It was hidden in Christ because every blessing the Church receives flows through union with the crucified and risen Son (Eph 1:3–4). And it was hidden in Israel because Israel’s life, institutions, worship, and sanctuary all contained the seed-pattern of what the Church would become when the veil was torn and the mystery revealed. The Holy Place — enclosed, sanctified, filled with light, bread, and incense — foreshadowed the inner life of the redeemed community that would one day stand openly in the presence of God through the blood of Christ. The Church was not an afterthought, nor a replacement, but a reality carried in the womb of Israel’s story until its birth at the death of Christ, when the curtain was torn and the hidden life came forth.
Thus, when Peter speaks of believers as foreknown and chosen, he is not describing a new or rival people but the widening of Israel’s own calling to embrace both Jew and Gentile in one Messiah. He is not replacing Israel with the Church; he is revealing the Church as the long-hidden inheritance that Israel’s Scriptures had always held. The Gentiles who believe are grafted into Israel’s cultivated olive tree, not planted in a separate field (Rom 11:17–24). And the Jewish believers who first trusted in Christ do not lose their identity; they discover its true horizon. In this way, election remains consistent, faithful, covenantal, and utterly devoid of the cold logic of replacement theology.
Peter’s emphasis, then, is not on displacement but on revelation. Before there was a sinner to save or a saint to sanctify, there was the Father’s covenantal decision to call a people for His Son — a people drawn from Israel and the nations, but never severed from Israel’s story. Election is not a wall that excludes; it is the doorway by which wandering exiles from every family of the earth are brought into the household of God, without undoing the promises made to Abraham or erasing the identity of Israel. It is the fulfilment of their story, not the cancellation of it.
3) Sanctified by the Spirit: holiness as gift and journey
“His Spirit has made you holy.” Peter starts with grace before he calls us to growth. The Spirit’s sanctifying work first marks us off as belonging to God (definitive sanctification), and then continues to transform us in daily life (progressive sanctification). We do still have what I call our “Romans 7 moments” — those honest collisions with weakness and wandering desire — but our failures are not the truest thing about us. The truest thing is Christ in us by the Spirit. Holiness is not a badge we polish to impress heaven; it is a life God breathes into us and then fans into flame, day by day, word by word, trial by trial.
4) Cleansed and bound by the blood of Jesus
“As a result, you have obeyed him and have been cleansed by the blood of Jesus Christ.” The grammar carries a lovely purpose-flow: the Father elects, the Spirit sanctifies, unto obedience and sprinkling with Jesus’ blood. Two resonances meet here. Obedience in 1 Peter often means the obedient response of faith (cf. 1:22), the bowing of the heart to Jesus’ lordship. Sprinkling with blood recalls Sinai (Exod 24:3–8), when Moses sprinkled the people with sacrificial blood to seal the covenant, and the priestly purifications of Numbers 19, all anticipated in “the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot” (1 Pet 1:19; cf. Heb 9:11–22; 10:22). Christ’s blood does not simply wipe a slate; it opens a sanctuary. It grants access (Heb 10:19), quiets accusation (Heb 12:24), and plants us within the sphere of God’s holiness so that, even while the flesh falters, the worship of the heart may be pure.
5) Worship in Spirit and in truth — even while we groan
Jesus promises that the Father seeks those who worship “in spirit and truth” (John 4:23–24). In Christ, this promise is already fulfilled. The Spirit unites us to the risen Lord so that our earthly worship is carried into the perfect worship of heaven (Rev 4–5). Our experience may feel fragmentary; our participation is real. We worship “in the Spirit of holiness” (Rom 1:4; Phil 3:3), and our imperfect offering is gathered into the perfect praise of the Lamb.
6) A Trinitarian greeting — and a pilgrim benediction
Peter’s salutation is quietly Trinitarian: chosen by the Father, sanctified by the Spirit, sprinkled by the blood of Jesus. And then this benediction: “May God give you more and more grace and peace.” Grace for the road; peace for the storm; multiplied, not rationed. In Scripture, peace (shalom) is wholeness in God’s favour; grace is the river by which that favour reaches us. Peter prays not for a sip but for a rising tide.
A moment for the heart
If you feel far from home, you are reading the right letter.
If you feel unclean, you are addressed by the right blood.
If you feel weak, you are indwelt by the right Spirit.
If you feel overlooked, you are known and chosen by the right Father.
Receive Peter’s greeting as God’s hand upon your shoulder at the threshold: “Grace and peace — more and more.”