“Simon Peter, a servant and messenger of Jesus Christ, to those receiving a faith, equally precious to ours, in the righteousness of our God and Saviour Jesus Christ. Grace and peace be increased to you in the fuller knowledge of God, and of Jesus our Lord, on the grounds that His divine power, having bestowed upon us all things for the purpose of life and godliness through the fuller knowledge of the One calling us to His own glory and moral excellence, by means of which He has given to us those priceless and very great promises, that by these you might become partakers of the divine nature, escaping from the corruption that is in this world by lust” (2 Peter 1:1-4).
The supreme purpose of Christ in relation to man is that we become “partakers of the divine nature”; that is, that we may become like God so that we will act like God. True faith is not passive, but active; it must always be leading to moral action so that our lives may be an incarnation of Christ, as Christ was an incarnation of the Father. Jesus could say; “The one having seen Me has seen the Father” (John 14:9), and He calls us to the same degree of oneness with Him as He had with the Father during His life on this earth.
It is not just knowledge, but fuller, deeper knowledge that we are called to; the search for that is never-ending and, as long as we seek and go on seeking, there is open to us the “joy unspeakable” of which Peter wrote in his earlier epistle. Fuller knowledge is concealed in the security system that God has established to guard His Word, so that it can only be accessed and comprehended by those who have met the conditions thereof. Not only does He address His words to those who are able to receive them, He conceals their meaning from those who are not. In the same way, Jesus spoke in parables, or “dark sayings”, so as to give enlightenment to His disciples in a manner that could not be comprehended by those who did not belong to Him, such as the religious parties of the Jews.
The truth is, the natural man must know before he can have faith; but, it is God’s security system over His word that a man must have faith before he can know; faith is the pre-condition for knowing!
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