Chosen Exiles

 Peter, apostle of Jesus Christ, to the chosen sojourners of the dispersion of Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia, according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, in the sanctification of the Spirit, unto obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ: May grace and peace be multiplied to you. (1 Peter 1:1-2, my translation)

Many translations, including the King James and the New King James, take the word “chosen” (or “elect”) and move it down to vs. 2, right before the word “according”. But it doesn’t appear there in the Greek, and there is no justifiable reason for doing this. The notion of “chosen exiles” (or “sojourners”), seemingly inherently contradictory, is meant by Peter to highlight the counterintuitive nature of God’s salvation and the place of His chosen people in this world and age. These are people who have been alienated from their own earthly homeplaces - which would include being alienated from one’s family, one’s land, one’s culture, one’s history, and one’s inheritance (see vs. 4). Their faith in Christ had made them foreigners in relation to their pagan fellow countrymen. And yet, counterintuitively, they are chosen and set apart to God, chosen to better versions of all these things, however it might seem to outsiders, or even to them in the moment, to the contrary. These people are the New Israel, wandering in the desert of this life as God carries them on the road to salvation, moving toward the land He will give them in eternity. 

We are then met in vs. 2 with a series of three prepositional phrases, delineating the Trinitarian salvation God has accomplished for these chosen exiles.  

While the desire to place the word “elect” before this first prepositional phrase is understandable, the complete phrase “chosen sojourners” (or “elect exiles”) is what all three of these prepositional phrases refer back to. Beyond that, the word for “foreknowledge” actually conveys the idea of an unchangeable salvation all on its own, and needs no supplementation. The Greek word “prognosin” carries the idea that the thing foreknown is also determined and fixed. Just as Christ, with His work yet to be accomplished, was foreknown by God in a definitive way before the world was established (vs. 20), so was the salvation of these exiles. God was going to save them, and nothing could change that fact.

The flow of thought here is: foreknowledge->sanctification->obedience and sprinkling of blood. In vs. 3, we find this is meant by Peter to lead to the fact of the resurrection of Christ. And so rather than Peter here speaking of progressive sanctification, he is referring to definitive sanctification, the act of God setting a person apart to Himself at the initial moment of that man’s salvation, when He is regenerated, and justified, and first accepted by the blood of Christ. But it isn’t just the individual’s salvation that is in view here, but also the flow of Jesus’s life in accomplishing salvation, which is then applied to the individual. Our salvation follows the path of Jesus’s ministry. He was foreknown, He was set apart in His baptism when the Spirit descended upon Him, He was perfect in His obedience to His Father, and He shed His blood on our behalf. This then explains why obedience appears before the sprinkling of blood as it does.

The Greek word “eis”, which I have translated as “unto” here, carries a notion of causality - the Spirit’s act of sanctifying us or ceremonially consecrating us to God then inevitably leads to and brings about our obedience and the application of Christ’s blood to us. Though some translations place the phrase “of (or “to”) Jesus Christ” after the word “obedience”, it actually appears in the Greek following the word “blood”. And as with the word “chosen” above, there is no reason to move it. It is the blood of Christ, sprinkled as in the Old Testament offerings, that Peter is speaking of. But is it our obedience or Christ’s obedience that is in view here? Given that you can’t have one without the other, trying to limit it to either seems unnecessary. Peter left it indefinite, and there is no reason why we should feel the need to do otherwise. God’s work of salvation is an indivisible, unified whole. A person cannot be set apart in salvation without obedience to God being an unavoidable result. We walk in the same obedience as that of Jesus Himself. He obeyed the Father, and, like Him and in Him, so do we.

Peter ends his opening with an apostolic granting of grace and peace to the recipients of his letter. That this directly follows a reference to the blood of Christ is deliberate on his part, as it is the blood of Christ that makes these things possible. And while talking about the work of Christ on the Cross always brings with it a reference to the Jewish sacrificial system, the mention of peace makes one wonder if it wasn’t specifically the Peace Offering he had in mind (Lev. 3). These sojourners were chosen for a specific purpose - to be an acceptable offering to God, to bring glory to Him, and to conduct themselves in peace before the watching world, that the world might come to know that the salvation that was spoken of in ages past had finally been brought to bear upon the world in Jesus Christ.