In 1925 T. S. Eliot gave the world his poem "The Hollow Men." In it he forces us to face down the angst and despair that so often accompanies human existence. His poem begins:
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass.
Eliot's metaphor for humanity is especially haunting -- "as wind in dry grass." We are spoken of as being arid and hot; our voices are dried up, and we merely whisper. We are incapable of great usefulness, except perhaps as kindling for starting a fire. He wants us to see ourselves as being without water -- incapable of bringing refreshment, let alone life to anything. Like scarecrows we are hollow men without life or hope or connection to the source of blessing.
Eliot's image is a good one to describe Peter's readers before they had ever heard the gospel preaching that filled their lives with good news. After all, before coming to faith in Christ their circumstances were as dry as their souls. By and large they were a people who lived far off the beaten path. Together they shared the unhappy distinction of being dispersed in arid and out-of-the-way places. For the most part, his readers spent their lives away from the refreshing centers of culture [remind anyone of life in Tallahassee?].
Spiritually they had been dry too. Souls parched and longing for life. But then, through Peter or perhaps someone else, we are simply not told, they got wind of the source of all life. They heard about Jesus and His gospel. And as their faith attests, they drank deeply and were born again. They had gone from being hollow men to holy saints -- "born again to a living hope" and an eternal "inheritance" [1:3, 4].
In coming to Christ, they exchanged Eliot's lines for the verse of another poet -- one named Isaiah who Peter quotes in 1:23-25:
" ... since you have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God; for
'All flesh is like grass
and all its glory like the flower of the grass.
The grass withers,
and the flower fall,
but the word of the Lord remains forever.'
And this word is the good news that was preached to you."
These are the words of the poetic prophet at his best. For they remind us that it is the word of the Lord that make all the difference in this world of hollow men. And yet by the time Peter picked up his pen to write, it appears that the sagebrush of the soul had swept through their towns. Their rising life in Christ had been eclipsed by difficulties. Trials had been their lot. Some were despairing. Most were feeling as if they had lost their way in the world. Collectively, the elect of God were again succumbing to exilic homesickness. Simply put, they were discouraged. And so Peter writes to them.
He opens by reminding them of salvation's future reward in vv. 3-5 as he speaks of "a salvation to be revealed at the last time." He then elaborates on salvation's present adversity in vv. 6-9 as he refers to a salvation only won by present trials. And then he closes his introduction by describing salvation's past glories in vv. 10-12 when he speaks of a salvation with a rich prophetic past.
For the first time, in vv. 10-12, Peter formally introduces us to past Hebrew prophets. He writes of "prophets who prophesied." The prophets were some of Israel's ancient officeholders, beginning with Moses. The institution of the prophetic office can be found in Deuteronomy 18 where at that point in the narrative of God's grace, the writer is recounting the period when God's people had reached Mt. Sinai after the exodus from Egypt. Initially God spoke to them in the hearing of all the people which they largely found terrifying. So they, instead, asked if God would speak them through the voice of Moses. God condescended to their request and in doing so instituted the prophetic office.
All of Israel's prophets, from Moses onward, stood in the presence of God in order to receive God's word and then spoke that word in the presence of all the people. What Peter is telling his readers in v. 10 [Concerning this salvation, the prophets who prophesied about the grace that was to be yours searched and inquired carefully] is that the prophets' best days were spent searching out salvation's fulfillment. They were men who studied long and hard. They literally pored over God's word even as He was giving it to them. As v. 11 continues [inquiring what person or time the Spirit of Christ in them was indicating when He predicted the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glories].
In essence, these words show us that the prophets were given a particular insight into salvation's mystery -- that Christ would be a suffering Christ -- and that only after suffering would He be given subsequent glories. For the typical first century religious Jew, this thought was simply unacceptable. They wanted a Christ of glory and they had no time for a Messiah given over to suffering. Yet Peter's early readers had been saved by just such a gospel. For the discouraged believer this reminder would likely have been greatly encouraging. The life they were living, filled as it was with trials and sufferings, mirrored the life of the Messiah, in whom they had put their trust.
The encouragement Peter had already given them would only continue to swell when they read his words in the opening line of v. 12: "It was revealed to them that they were serving not themselves but you." These words likely did more for Peter's early readers than we can possibly imagine. Did he really say that the prophets knew that they were not serving their own generation but ours??? Did he just imply that they were aware that God had put them to work on our behalf? Any thoughts that God didn't care about them or that they had never been a part of anything great were now quieted. For Peter had shown them that the prophets were the true outsiders, not themselves. The prophets of the past were the ones kept from seeing salvation's fullness. In fact, for the most part the prophets outdid them all in having to endure rejection and loss.
Such is the reward of the prophet. They were largely rejected in their own day. They served another time. They couldn't understand salvation as clearly as they would have liked and they were often physically impaired as a result of their work. Peter's first readers no doubt were deeply humbled by this fresh consideration of salvation's past glories. The extent to which God went to secure both their and our salvation was borne with a cost, not only to Himself, not only to His Son, but it also cost the prophets greatly as well. This should humble us as well. We know nothing of this kind of suffering.
We might be right to ask or wonder what enabled God's prophets to go on? But v. 11 reveals the answer to be "the Spirit of Christ in them" who kept them going. Christ Himself is depicted as a wind blowing gently through the prophets as they told about the coming Christ. It was the Spirit of Christ who enabled the prophets to pore over their sermons and visions. It was Christ in them who kept them reading the scrolls of other prophets who had gone before. Ultimately, we could say that in this first chapter Peter has moved his readers from Eliot's wind as through dry grass to the Word and the Spirit's breath and finally then to Christ who brings life to all.
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