1 Peter 1:5, ‘…who, *by God’s power*, are being guarded *through faith* for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.’
Note that in this verse, Peter tells us that it is *God’s power* that guards the believer, but the means by which His power guards them is *their own faith.* The power of the living God, the divine, creative energy of the Almighty guards His people, preserves them for Himself, keeps them from final loss….How? Through faith…and whose faith? It must be the faith of the believers themselves…Thus universe-upholding power of God manifests itself within us in the form of our own—often alarmingly frail—faith.
Faith…this motion of my our soul to hope in that which is unseen, to cast itself upon that which is imperceptible to the senses, to lay fast hold of that which must remain finally un-comprehended, this ‘faith,’ which—precisely as a motion of our own souls is all too often feeble, tenuous, quivering as a gossamer thread—this faith is the locus and means of the power of the galaxy-making God to keep us for Himself through every trial in this life.
This line of thinking would be utterly unbelievable were it not for the echoes we immediately begin to recognize between statements like this and other statements with which we are familiar, such as the whole fullness of God choosing to dwell in the excruciating frailty of human flesh…or the cosmos-reconciling power of God working within the arch-powerlessness of the crucified man, Jesus of Nazareth…..Indeed, the reality of the person and work of Jesus Christ has already conditioned us to expect precisely the logic of 1 Peter 1:5….this is the logic of God, *theo*logic—because it is the logic of the cross…..Power is made perfect in weakness (2 Cor. 12:9).
And so, even as our faith sometimes seems as weak as the One who hangs on the cross, it is nevertheless, the means by which the almighty power of God is preserving us for Himself such that—just as the Crucified One is revealed to be the Power of God in light of His Resurrection—so too our oft-flickering faith will finally be revealed to have been the divine means of God’s sovereign power to keep us until the end.
