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12 Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that is taking place among you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. 13 But rejoice insofar as you are sharing Christ's sufferings, so that you may also be glad and shout for joy when his glory is revealed. 14 If you are reviled for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the spirit of glory, which is the Spirit of God, is resting on you. 5 But they will have to give an accounting to him who stands ready to judge the living and the dead. 6 Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, so that he may exalt you in due time. 7 Cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you. 8 Discipline yourselves, keep alert. Like a roaring lion your adversary the devil prowls around, looking for someone to devour. 9 Resist him, steadfast in your faith, for you know that your brothers and sisters in all the world are undergoing the same kinds of suffering. 10 And after you have suffered for a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, support, strengthen, and establish you. 11 To him be the power forever and ever. Amen. (1 Peter 4:12-14, 5:6-11 NRSV)
In the movie I recommended a few days ago, the true story it was based on was about a group of Christian missionaries, these of the Catholic Church, who went into Japan during a time they put to death those who did not adhere to their faith and the methods of torture were quite cruel and severe. The priests, just like their converts, had to refute Christ by either stomping on a mat that had the image of Jesus on it, or to spit on the crucifix. Many were the times the Japanese converts were killed by the refusal of the priests to deny Jesus. There were two young priests who went in search of one of their mentors and teachers in the faith, who had disappeared and was feared murdered by the regime. While it seemed easy for me to sit in front of my television on my favorite couch and say that I would never refute Jesus, I still wondered how reality would pose that to me?
Peter writes the sort of letter one never hopes to write to a people who are in the middle of something genuinely hard — not the ordinary friction of daily life, but the kind of difficulty that makes you question everything you thought you knew about how God works and whether he is paying attention.
First Peter is that kind of letter. It was written to communities of Christians scattered across the ancient world who were experiencing what Peter calls a “fiery ordeal” — social hostility, public shaming, the daily cost of belonging to a movement that the surrounding culture regarded with suspicion or contempt. These were not people facing abstract theological questions. They were people wondering, in the most practical and immediate terms, whether their faith was going to hold.
And Peter writes to them not with easy comfort or tidy answers, but with something more durable: an honest, unflinching, resurrection-anchored word about what suffering means when you belong to the risen Christ.
We are in the season of Easter. The alleluias are still echoing. And yet the passage before us today does not let us stay in the pleasant warmth of Easter morning. It pushes us out into the Monday-morning world — the world where the fiery ordeal is still happening, the roaring lion is still prowling, and the God of all grace is still, always, at work.
This is not the devotional we always want. It may be the one we most need.
Do Not Be Surprised
Peter opens with a word that cuts against everything our instincts tell us about how life with God ought to go: “Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that is taking place among you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you.”
Do not be surprised. It is a remarkable instruction, because surprise is precisely what most of us feel when difficulty arrives. We are surprised because, somewhere beneath the surface of our faith, we carry an assumption that has never quite been examined: that following Jesus should make life smoother, that God’s blessing should look like comfort and ease, that the fiery ordeal is a sign that something has gone wrong.
Peter says: it is not strange. Do not treat it as strange. The fiery ordeal is not evidence of God’s absence or his displeasure. It is, in some sense, the expected terrain of the life that belongs to Christ.
This should not surprise us when we remember who we are following. The one we call Lord was himself no stranger to the fiery ordeal. He was misunderstood by his family, opposed by the religious establishment, betrayed by a friend, abandoned by his closest companions, and executed as a criminal. The path of the master ran through the valley of suffering, and Peter is telling us plainly that the path of the disciple does not automatically bypass what the master endured.
But Peter does not stop at do not be surprised. He takes the next step, which is even more astonishing: “Rejoice insofar as you are sharing in Christ’s sufferings.”
Sharing in Christ’s sufferings. The language of participation, of solidarity, of a suffering that is not endured alone but is somehow connected to the suffering of the one who has already gone through the worst and come out the other side. This is the Eastertide reframe that changes everything. The suffering of the believer is not a random affliction with no meaning. It is taken up into the larger story of a crucified and risen Lord — and that means it has a destination. The cross did not end at the cross. It ended at the empty tomb. And suffering that shares in Christ’s suffering shares, also, in the trajectory that leads from the cross to the resurrection.
Peter promises: “so that you may also be glad and shout for joy when his glory is revealed.” The joy is coming. The glory is coming. The fiery ordeal is not the final chapter. It is, for those who belong to the risen Christ, the chapter before the last one.
And until then, Peter adds something quietly extraordinary: “the Spirit of glory and of God is resting on you.” Even now, in the middle of the ordeal, the Spirit is not absent. The Spirit is present — resting, dwelling, sustaining the one who is suffering for the name of Christ. The fire does not burn unaccompanied. The same Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead is resting on the one who is walking through the flame.
The Mighty Hand and the Anxious Heart
Peter shifts now from the community to the individual, and the shift is pastoral and tender. He has spoken about the fiery ordeal as a shared experience. Now he speaks to what that ordeal does to the interior life of the person who is living through it.
“Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, so that he may exalt you in due time.”
Humbling yourself under the mighty hand of God is not a passive resignation to whatever comes. It is a deliberate act of trust — a choice to stop fighting against the circumstances God has allowed, to stop demanding that the story go differently than it is going, and to place yourself, consciously and willingly, under the authority and care of the one who holds the outcome. It is the posture of a person who has decided, against all the evidence that fear presents, that the hand that holds them is mighty and good.
And then, immediately, Peter makes one of the most practically important statements in the entire letter: “Cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you.”
All your anxiety. Not the manageable anxieties, not the ones that seem spiritual enough to bring to God. All of them. The 3 a.m. ones. The ones about money and health and children and the future and the thing you cannot stop turning over in your mind. Peter uses the language of casting — the same word used for throwing a net or hurling a stone. It is not a gentle handing-over. It is an act of force. You take the weight of your anxiety and you throw it, deliberately and completely, onto the one who is strong enough to carry what you cannot.
The reason Peter gives is as simple as it is profound: because he cares for you. Not because it is his duty. Not because you have earned his attention. Because he cares. The God of all grace, the God who called you to his eternal glory, the God whose mighty hand is the very hand you are resting under — that God is not indifferent to your anxiety. He is not too large to notice your fear. He cares for you. The word in Greek suggests a warm, active, personal concern — the kind of caring that leans in rather than standing back.
In Eastertide, this word carries the full weight of the resurrection behind it. The God who cared enough to raise Jesus from the dead cares for you in your sleepless nights and your unresolved fears and your hard seasons. The same power that broke open the tomb is available to the person who is casting their anxiety on him right now. These are not separate categories of divine activity. They are the same God, caring with the same inexhaustible love.
The Lion and the God Who Restores
Peter then introduces an image that is arresting in its vividness: “Like a roaring lion your adversary the devil prowls around, looking for someone to devour.”
We are not accustomed, in much of contemporary Christian life, to speaking plainly about spiritual opposition. It can feel unsophisticated, or dramatic, or the province of a kind of Christianity we find uncomfortable. But Peter, writing to people who are in the middle of a genuine fiery ordeal, does not soften the picture. There is an adversary. He is active. He is looking for vulnerability. And his preferred targets are the isolated, the exhausted, the anxious, and the surprised — which is precisely why Peter has spent the earlier part of this passage addressing all four of those conditions.
The instruction is direct: “Resist him, steadfast in your faith.” Not by spiritual heroics, not by a triumphalist confidence in your own strength, but by steadfastness — the quiet, stubborn, day-after-day refusal to let go of the faith that has hold of you. Steadfastness is not dramatic. It is the person who shows up again, who prays again, who opens the Scripture again, who returns to the community of faith again, even when the fiery ordeal has made all of it feel dry and distant.
And Peter adds a word of solidarity that is easy to miss: “for you know that your brothers and sisters throughout the world are undergoing the same kinds of suffering.” You are not alone. Your suffering is not unique to you, not evidence that your particular life has been singled out for misfortune. The community of faith, scattered across the world and across the centuries, has been walking this same road. The fiery ordeal is the shared experience of the people of God. And there is a strange, deep comfort in knowing that you are not the first, and not the only, and not abandoned in it.
And then — and this is the word that the whole passage has been building toward — Peter gives us the promise that anchors everything:
“And after you have suffered for a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, support, strengthen, and establish you.”
Four verbs. Four promises. Each one worth sitting with.
He will restore you — the word suggests mending what has been broken, setting right what has been dislocated, repairing what the ordeal has damaged. He will support you — the word carries the sense of being placed on a firm foundation after being shaken. He will strengthen you — the infusion of power into what has grown weak. He will establish you — the permanent fixing of something that has been unsteady, so that it will not be moved again.
And notice who does this: not a principle, not a process, not the passage of time. God himself. “Will himself restore.” The God of all grace — grace that is not rationed, not exhausted, not contingent on your performance in the hard season — is personally, actively, purposefully at work in the life of the one who has been suffering for a little while.
The phrase “a little while” is not dismissive of the real weight of what Peter’s readers are carrying. It is an eternal perspective — the perspective of the one who has already seen the end of the story and knows that the fiery ordeal, however long and hot it burns, is not the final word. The God of all grace has called you to his eternal glory. That is where the story is going. The suffering is real, but it is not ultimate. The glory is coming, and it is ultimate.
Peter closes with a doxology that is also a declaration: “To him be the power forever and ever. Amen.” Power — not to the ordeal, not to the adversary, not to the anxiety, not to the suffering. To him. The power belongs to the God of all grace. The lion prowls, but it does not reign. The fire burns, but it does not win. The God who raised Jesus from the dead holds the power forever and ever, and that power is being exercised, right now, on behalf of his people.
For Reflection
This passage does not let us stay in Easter morning indefinitely. It follows us into the week, into the month, into the season when the resurrection feels more like a memory than a present reality and the fiery ordeal feels very much like the present reality.
And what it says to us there — in that harder, quieter, more demanding place — is this: do not be surprised. Do not treat the difficulty as evidence that something has gone wrong with your faith or with God’s plan. The path runs through the valley. The master walked it first. The Spirit is resting on you in it. And the God of all grace — the same God who raised Jesus, who holds eternal glory as your destination, whose mighty hand is the hand you are resting under — will himself restore you.
PRAYER: God of all grace, we cast every anxiety and every fiery ordeal at your feet, trusting that the power that raised Jesus from the dead is the same power at work right now to restore, support, strengthen, and establish us. Amen.
Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: Name one anxiety you have been carrying alone, and this week deliberately cast it on God — speak it aloud, write it down and release it, or tell it to a trusted brother or sister in faith — and let the act be an Easter declaration that the power belongs to him, not to your fear.
I love you and I thank God for you! You matter to God and you matter to me! We have seen the Lord! Alleluia, He is risen!
Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.
