The Grace They Leaned Toward

Watch what people do with their bodies when something is just out of reach. They rise onto their toes at the back of a crowd; a child presses her face to a shop window, hands cupped against the glass. The whole body leans.

Peter says the prophets leaned like that for centuries. "Concerning this salvation, the prophets who prophesied about the grace that was to be yours searched and inquired carefully" (1 Peter 1:10). They were readers of their own pages, poring over promises plainly enormous and plainly not yet here, "inquiring what person or time the Spirit of Christ in them was indicating when he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glories" (1 Peter 1:11). Who, and when — and in that order. Sufferings first, then glories: the grace they craned to see turned out to be a man who bore our griefs and carried our sorrows on a Roman beam, and that order is now the shape of our own lives. Isaiah sang that servant centuries before anyone could point to him, and it is fair to suspect the church simply read Jesus back into those pages.

Then Peter says: "It was revealed to them that they were serving not themselves but you" (1 Peter 1:12). The prophets were leaning toward us — toward ordinary believers with a Bible open on an ordinary morning. And these are things "into which angels long to look" (1 Peter 1:12). Peter's verb is the one John uses of the disciple stooping to look into the empty tomb (John 20:5). Heaven's own creatures bend down to see the gospel.

The person the prophets strained toward walked the road to Emmaus after his resurrection, and "beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself" (Luke 24:27; see Moses and all the Prophets). It was not the church that read Jesus into the Prophets first; it was Jesus who read himself out of them. Tim Keller once preached that this makes the basics of the faith anything but elementary: they are where all earlier revelation was heading.¹

So why does it go flat for us? Is it because we came looking for a story about ourselves and found one about Christ — ourselves the astonishing afterthought the prophets were serving? Trying harder to be amazed will not fix that. Peter's next line asks us instead to "set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ" (1 Peter 1:13). The angels are still stooping to look. The prophets never held what we hold this morning, and that is true whether or not we feel a flicker of it when we open the book.