Last time we looked at 1 Peter 1:9 where we discovered that as we love and rejoice in a Savior we have never seen, we are receiving the purpose and goal of faith, the salvation of our souls. Today we are going to begin thinking about verses 10-12. Here is verse 10 of that section:

“Concerning this salvation, the prophets who prophesied about the grace that was to be yours searched and inquired carefully…”

In order to really grasp what Peter is saying here, you should read verses 10-12 several times. I don’t want to go too deeply into this, but I do want to draw several important truths from it. Since I don’t want to make this too long, I’ll give you the gist this week and draw the lessons from it next time.

What Peter is saying here is that the prophets of the Old Testament – people like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea, etc. – these prophets tried really hard to figure out what kind of salvation they were prophesying about. The Spirit of Christ was inspiring them to write, but they didn’t understand what they were writing about, and so they took out their imaginary magnifying glass and tried to dig deep to understand.

What God revealed to them was that they were not writing about something related to them, but they were writing about the things you and I would be taught centuries later. And at the end of verse 12 we find out that even the angels really wanted to look into this as well to figure out what this teaching about the suffering of Christ was all about.

Lord willing, next week I’ll share a few things that I took away from thinking about this. In the meantime, you read this section many times over the next week and see what thoughts you come up with.