Verse 16
I. We must not think we have exhausted the subject of righteousness when we have merely taught men the more obvious of the elementary lessons: to maintain an external respectability of conduct and to have a general preference for truth and justice. Christ came to supply a remedy that reaches deeper than this. The term "righteousness" implies that we must endeavour to maintain a more equitable balance than we often witness among the varied rights and interests which contribute to make up our social system. Our righteousness must exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees by founding itself, not on some rigorous definition of abstract right, but on equity inspired by love.
II. But if it were one object of our Saviour's coming to deepen and extend our moral regeneration, a still greater revolution is implied in our restoration to holiness, the character which is so emphatically claimed by God Himself, and which had been still more completely forfeited by sin. It is one of the foremost conditions of our sacramental union with Christ that His grace should cleanse our hearts from evil tendencies and should make and keep them pure and holy.
III. The third of the three great gifts which are to renew us in the image of Christ is that of knowledge, the marvellous extension of that spiritual knowledge which ranges from this world to the next. It is a revelation which appeals to the highest instincts of the spirit, lifting up the cloud which hung with equal mystery over the beginning and the end, showing us how man was created after the image of God and in what way he departed from his fellowship with God, opening out the prospect of that Divine contemplation which will form the highest reward and occupation of the saints hereafter in the eternity wherein the faithful shall be finally made perfect in Christ's image.
Archdeacon Hannah, Cambridge Review, Feb. 17th, 1886.
References: 1 Peter 1:16-20 . Expositor, 1st series, vol. i., p. 69; vol. iv., pp. 372, 496.
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